Diahn Williams

            On Wednesday morning I finished working out the chords to "O Canada" and ran through it in French. But when I tried to sing it in English I realized that my translation is missing a line in the final verse. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with something on Thursday. 

            Open Office has suddenly outlined in red every single word in every document so it takes forever to get through a spell check. Also, last night I tried to paste text from my blog into an Open Office document and it would only paste the last text I'd copied from another document. Finally the problem was fixed by closing and reopening the document. 

            I weighed 89.2 kilos before breakfast. I got an email from my pharmacy by way of Book My Shot: "We are receiving shipments of Moderna and will be sending out booking links to you soon." So it looks like I'll be getting stabbed and shot soon. 

            In the late morning I took some African violet coloured acrylic paint and a brush out in the hall to put an outline around the "om" symbol I stenciled on my door. It helped to cover the parts where the black spray paint had bled outside the figure. It's not the finest work but I think it's an improvement. 

            I weighed 89.6 kilos before lunch. I had a toasted Montreal style bagel with sliced tomato and five year old cheddar and a glass of lemonade.

            I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor. There were lots of cyclists on the Bloor bike lane so I had to ride on Bloor street to pass them. While I was riding I tried to rework my version of the fourth verse of "O Canada." When I got home I spent some time on it and came up with something that might work. I'll run through it on Thursday morning to find out for sure before publishing it on my blog. 

            I weighed 89.4 kilos at 18:30. 

            I tried to fix the spell check problem by looking at an Open Office forum where that very problem is discussed. None of the solutions helped other than to turn off spell check. If the problem doesn't correct itself as suddenly as it arrived the only thing I can do is keep spell check off and just highlight individual words that I'm not sure of. I certainly miss having a functional version of Word.

            Fiddling with spell check ate up any time I would have had for poetry or video editing projects.

            I had four samosas and four mini quiches with a beer while watching two episodes of Andy Griffith. 

            In the first story Barney decides to spend his vacation in Mayberry. Suddenly there is a train that goes to Mayberry whereas before people had always come and gone by bus. When Barney arrives in town there is a band playing and a big crowd carrying welcom signs. He doesn't realize until he's left the train and tried to speak to the crowd that they are there to greet Teena Andrews the movie star. She is there to premier her new movie and her agent thinks that having the premier in the town where she grew up is a good publicity stunt. Andy reminds Barney that he used to date Teena when she was the skinny, freckled Irene Flog in high school. They decide to go to her hotel and greet her. Meanwhile her agent is telling Teena that it would be a great touch if she was to go to the premier with an old boyfriend. She says she didn't really get any dates in those days and so when Andy and Barney come to the door and mention she used to date Barney she throws her arms around Andy thinking he's Barney. Barney escorts Teena to the premier and afterwards she gives him a big kiss on the mouth to say goodnight. Barney thinks they've rekindled their romance. He asks her to lunch for the next day but later gets a phone call that Teena went back to California to be with her fiancé. The dejected Barney decides to return to Raleigh. Meanwhile Miss Clark and Renee, the women in his office who'd always turned down Barney's invitations because they thought he was nothing, see his picture in the paper with Teena and when he walks in they are all over him. 

            Teena was played by Diahn Williams, who played Terry in the short lived sitcom "Harry's Girls" about a Vaudeville troupe from the US touring Europe. She was a regular in the soap opera "Somerset." She starred in the movie "Deadly Hero." In 1976 she retired from acting to return to law school and is now a practicing attorney under the name Diahn McGrath. 

            Renee was played by Patty Regan, who played Daphne Parmenter on F Troop and Maxwell Smart's landlady on Get Smart. 

            In the second story Andy's old girlfriend Alice returns to Mayberry. She plans to fix up her family house and become a permanent resident again. Until the renovations are complete Bee insists that she stay in their guest room. While Andy and Alice are talking old times Helen walks in. Andy makes his first mistake when he introduces Helen as Opie's school teacher instead of his girlfriend. Helen leaves abruptly and Andy has to desperately follow her to patch things up. He arranges for a double date with him and Helen and Alice and Howard Sprague. They have a good time and then Alice suggests they spend a weekend together at her family cabin. Helen and Alice share a bedroom and Andy and Howard share another. But Howard snores so loudly that Andy can't sleep and so he goes for a walk in the woods. By coincidence he runs into Alice, who couldn't sleep because it was too quiet. When they try to head back to the cabin they discover that they are lost. Meanwhile both Helen and Howard wake to find Alice and Andy gone so obviously they get ideas. They go back to bed and a few hours later Alice and Andy make it back. They don't realize their absence has been noticed and so they pretend that they seperately got up early to make the others breakfast. Helen packs her things and says she wants to go home. Andy tries to stop her and she goes off into the woods and gets lost. When Andy finds her they make up. There's a bit of a goof because it's said that it's been ten years since Alice left Mayberry and yet she goes to see Aunt Bee, who's only been there for eight years, acting like they know each other well. 

            Alice was played by Canadian actor Evan MacNeil, who made a few guest appearances on TV series before retiring back home in Halifax.