Katherine Ross

            On Sunday morning I memorized the third verse of “Dis-lui toi que je t'aime” (That I Love You Now Tell Him) by Serge Gainsbourg and made some adjustments to my translation. There are four verses left to nail down. 

            I tried to increase my chin-ups from 20 to 21 but couldn’t get past 20. Yesterday for the first time I couldn’t do 20. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. I audio and video recorded the session for the fifteenth day. There’s a month left in the project. I made it through “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” in a couple of takes but I hit the wrong chord near the end. I spent a lot of time on “Le Moribond” (The Dying Man) by Jacques Brel because I recently changed one of the chords. I’d been playing it for a few years with an E flat but now when I hear it on video that chord sounds off and so I’m trying a G instead, but it keeps throwing me off. 

            I weighed 89.5 kilos before breakfast. 

            I weighed 89.95 kilos before lunch. That’s really high! I had a slice of multigrain bread with margarine and five-year-old cheddar.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 88.25 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:00. 

            I reminded myself several times today to buy beer when I got home from my bike ride. I even reminded myself on my way out but when I got home I forgot until they closed at 18:00. I looked online and found that the one in Uppity Village is open until 20:00 so I headed down there. The cashier was very perky and said, “Welcome to your LCBO!” 

            I searched for clips of either Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin that might fit with my line “bring her to the show”. I settled on the end of Modern Times when Chaplin and his leading lady are walking arm in arm down a long road. 

            Since yesterday I’ve been constantly converting the MP4 files of the videos of my daily song practice to AVI. Often I’ve used AVI WMV and that has worked but sometimes a 25 gig video gets made into a low quality video of 500 megabytes in which I can see the pixels. So far AVI MPEG4 seems to work better. But they all seem to fluctuate, sometimes they convert in high definition and sometimes not. 

            I had a bowl of the ground pork chili I made yesterday with a slice of multigrain bread and a beer while watching episode 7 of The Big Valley. 

            Nick and Heath are branding cattle when they hear gunshots. Their neighbour Bert Hadley is stopping a coach because it is about to cross his land. He knows the coach belongs to Don Alfredo with whom he is in a land dispute. The coach is carrying Alfredo’s beautiful daughter Maria and her chaperone Isabella. Both Nick and Heath are charmed by Maria’s beauty. They say they can cross their land. The Barkleys feel bad about Hadley’s behaviour since they sold him the land and so Nick and Heath go over to smooth things over. Heath takes the opportunity to begin courting Maria. He invites her to the Fourth of July celebration in town. But Alfredo does not approve of Maria being with Heath because he is only a half brother of the other Barkeys. Alfredo says Hadley’s land as well as that of seven of his neighbours belongs to him. His lawyers are working to prove this in court but he says he while not drive Hadley or the others out of their homes. Hadley comes to Alfredo with one of his bulls that jumped the fence and mated with Hadley’s two Holsteins. Hadley aims to teach Alfredo a lesson but Alfredo shoots the bull himself and says he understands the need to keep a line pure, and then he looks at Heath. Maria convinces her father to come to the July 4 celebration and she and Heath spend time together there. Alfredo hears from his lawyers who have found the original land grant, which confirms that the land in question belongs to him. Heath and Maria have a regular arrangement to ride together on the north ridge. They fall in love. Alfredo sees them together and comes to see Victoria about a merging of their families through marriage but with Nick and not Heath. Victoria finds this offensive. To keep Heath away from Maria, Alfredo goes back on his word and serves Hadley and his neighbours eviction notices. Hadley is angry when he hears about it and referring to Heath he tells Nick that eight families have to leave because of one mongrel. Nick hits him. Hadley decides that when Alfredo gets his land it will be bare and dry. Heath comes to see Alfredo who tells him that his family has an 800 year old unbroken line to Spanish royalty. Heath and Maria are riding together when they hear that Hadley is about to burn his own home. They try to reason with him but it doesn’t help. At the last minute Alfredo rides up and tells Hadley he won’t evict them. Maria decides to go back east according to her father’s wishes because to be with Heath would destroy him. She says goodbye. 

            Maria was played by Katherine Ross, who started as an understudy in Actors Workshop productions. Most of the work she won at first was in television westerns. Her TV debut was on Sam Benedict in 1962. Her film debut was in Shenandoah in 1965. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her co-starring performance in The Graduate. She co-starred in Mister Budwing, Games, Hellfighters, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, The Betsy, A Climate for Killing, Eye of the Dolphin, and They Only Kill Their Masters. She starred in The Stepford Wives, The Swarm, The Legacy, The Hero, Fools, and La hazard et la violence. She starred as Francesca Colby on the prime time soap opera The Colbys. She won a Golden Globe for her performance in Voyage of the Damned. She married Sam Elliot in 1984 and they are still together. She and Elliot co-wrote, produced and starred in the TV movie Conagher. She played the psychiatrist in Donnie Darko. She wrote the children’s books Little Ballerina and My Favourite Things.