Katharine Bard

            On Monday morning I realized that I’d forgotten to recharge the pickup battery for my Martin guitar. I put it in the charger three hours before I would be starting to record song practice. I hoped that would be enough at least for today and I could finish charging it later. 

            I memorized the fourth verse of “Dis-lui toi que je t'aime” (That I Love You Now Tell Him) by Serge Gainsbourg. There are three verses left to learn. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the last of two sessions. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing the electric and it looks like it’ll be the Gibson since the Kramer is still in the shop. Otherwise I would alternate between the two guitars. Li’l Demon Guitars is closed on Monday but I guess it’s possible that I’ll hear from Gian this week. I haven’t played the Kramer at all in this recording project so far. I made it through “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” but played the same wrong chord near the end as yesterday. The camera shut off to cool down a couple of times so I would give it about three minutes each time before restarting and just ran through the song, which actually helped me play it better once the video was back on. After the memory card was full I was still recording audio but near the end I noticed the computer had shut down. I assume the power had briefly gone off. Unlike a couple of failed attempts last year to recover the sessions after power outages, this time I was able to recover almost everything because I was smart enough to save the session with a name this time. I didn’t lose any audio that was recorded while the camera was on. 

            I weighed 88.95 kilos before breakfast. 

            I’m still trying to find a decent file format to convert my MP4 videos that won’t take up as much space but still shows a high definition image. I’ve been trying to convert my 25 gigabyte September 5 song practice video but every format I’ve spent hours changing it to comes out as about 500 megabytes and shitty looking. 

            I weighed 89.3 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. On Bloor Street a pigeon misjudged its flight and got caught between my arms, flapping against me until it got its bearings and flew free. On the Richmond bike lane a guy on a standing scooter refused to let me pass on the left and insisted that I go by on his right. 

            I weighed 88.95 kilos at 18:00, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening in a long time. When I get off this soft diet I’ll be able to control my weight better. It turns out that a piece of meat is less fattening than a bowl of chili. 

            I still haven’t found a decent conversion format for MP4. I’m trying XVid AVI but it doesn’t look like that will be any good either. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:15.

            I downloaded the clip from the end of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Then since my Total Video Converter was busy and since the file was smaller than a gigabyte I converted it to WMV on Cloud Convert. Then I imported it into Movie Maker and edited everything out but seven seconds of The Tramp and Ellen walking away from the camera and down the long country road. I inserted it into the main video to correspond with the line “take her to the show”. After that I worked on synchronizing the old concert video with the studio audio for my line “Out on the battlefield of dreams”. But since in those old Christian and the Lions concerts I didn’t play guitar, my hands on the microphone often cover my mouth in the video, so I have to synchronize them on the words I can be seen singing.

            I uploaded today’s videos. I reviewed another ten minutes of the September 7 video. I think maybe the action on my Gibson is too low. It sounds a bit rattly. “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” didn’t finish well that day. 

            I had a potato with gravy and the rest of the ground pork chili while watching episode 8 of The Big Valley. 

            It’s Audra’s birthday and it’s a big bash so I assume it’s a landmark birthday, although no one mentions her age. Linda Evans was 23 so maybe this was Audra’s 20th. Among the guests is Audra’s childhood friend Evan Miles who has been away at school. Evan had never seen Audra as a woman before tonight. They dance and he says he wants to kiss her. She lures him out to the garden and they do kiss but then he starts wanting more and won’t stop when she tells him to and so she screams. Heath comes out and punches Evan. Audra blames herself even though Evan was obviously not being a gentleman. From his mother, Jennie Miles’s reaction there is a suggestion there is something wrong with Evan. His father Wally Miles makes excuses for bringing him home from school but apparently there was trouble. Jenny tells Wally she’s lost him and he’s his son now. Later Evan comes home with alkaline dust on his clothes. Meanwhile Nick and Heath are bringing their horses to the only watering hole in the south section but the horses won’t drink. Heath tastes it and finds the water has been poisoned with alkaline. They don’t suspect anyone of doing it deliberately because it could have happened naturally. They have to put a fence around the waterhole because although the horses won’t drink it the cattle might. There’s another waterhole about five kilometers away and the quickest way is along a trail that crosses Walter’s property. When Heath gets to the trail there is a barbed wire fence and a No Trespassing sign where there never was one before. Evan is on the other side but Heath disputes the fence because the trail is actually the property line but Evan says it’s on their property. Evan says to send Audra to reason with him. Heath cuts the fence but Evan fires his rifle in the air and sends Heath’s horses running away. Heath jumps Evan and beats him up. Wally has suddenly fenced his entire property but two of the Barkley cows have jumped over. Nick and Heath come to get their cows but Wally and his hands, plus Evan are lined up on the other side holding rifles. Nick says they’re coming in and as they cross, Wally’s men start shooting the ground in front of them. But Evan shoots Heath’s arm. Wally is shocked because he had no intention of anyone getting shot but he doesn’t know which of his men hit Heath. He suspects it was Evan and suggests to him later that he go away for a while again. That night Evan is on the trail on horseback when he hears another horse. From cover of trees he sees it’s Audra and follows her home and into the stable where he tries to rape her. When she resists, screams and scratches him he begins strangling her. Her mother walks in and tries to stop him but he pushes her away. She grabs a rifle and shoots and kills him. It seems to me she could have shot his leg. At the scene of the shooting Evan’s parents are there and the sheriff, who says there will be an inquest. Wally says it’s murder. Jarrod says that he has information that Evan’s family may not want revealed at a public hearing. He has the documentation of Evan’s very long criminal record short of going to prison. Jenny admits Evan was sick. 

            Jenny was played by Katharine Bard who starred in the second version of the radio series Claudia and David. She did a few movies and TV shows, some of which were produced by her husband Martin Manulis, such as Playhouse 90, Suspense, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and Adventures in Paradise. He also produced the film “Days of Wine and Roses”. She was married to him for 44 years until she died. Her father was undersecretary of the US Navy.