Merie Earle

            On Wednesday morning I worked out the chords for the third and fourth choruses and part of the last verse of “You’re Under Arrest” by Serge Gainsbourg. I might have the song done tomorrow. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the final session of four. 

            I weighed 85.5 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I used up the rest of the primer to touch up the decorative grooves on the front of the kitchen counter doors and drawers. The very last of it I put onto the usually unseen area where the counter meets the stove. Tomorrow I’ll probably go to the hardware store to buy the dark but warm purple paint that I have in mind. 

            I weighed 85.8 kilos before lunch. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            When I got up from my siesta it looked like it was raining pretty hard but when I went out onto the deck it was actually graupeling and it was slippery. I got ready to take a bike ride but decided not to go because it looked like I’d get wet and might be even slip.

            I weighed 85.6 kilos at 16:00.  

            I was caught up on my journal at 16:45. 

            In the Movie Maker project my September 3 performance of “Time of the Yo-Yo” I had the audio and video totally in synch. But when I tried to evenly cut the beginning of the session to isolate that one song it threw the audio out of line. When I’d undone the cuts and put everything back the way I’d started they were in synch again but if I placed the cursor further down the timeline it played out of synch, even though when I started from the beginning they were in synch when it got to where I’d previously placed the cursor. On top of that the waveform didn’t match the audio. I restarted Movie Maker a few times and even restarted my computer but it still behaved the same way. I suspect it’s because the audio is in MP3 and not WAV but I couldn’t use a WAV format because it distorted the Audacity recording. The only thing I could do is cut the beginning of the video until almost the beginning of “Time of the Yo-Yo” and then work on resynchronizing the audio. I got them almost lined up but then Movie Maker started freezing whenever I tried to cut a small bit of the audio. This last problem has happened before and the next day it was fine and so we’ll see if it’s back tomorrow. 

            I opened the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song Megaphor. I had no problem continuing to remove sections of the clip from the movie Ziegfeld Girl. That may be further evidence that Movie Maker’s problem is with the MP3 audio format, since I had no problem editing the video. 

            I went to scan a set of colour negatives but it turned out they are slides and not ones that I took. They seem to be slides to accompany a presentation on how the dinosaurs went extinct. None of the images were very good and so I threw them in the garbage. I scanned a set of colour negatives with pictures of my ex-girlfriend Brenda and her friend Susanne. There are thirty-two more uncut strips of developed film left to scan. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 3, episodes 6 and 7 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Oliver is still the president of the Hooterville Phone Company. After all these years of her being mentioned on Petticoat Junction and Green Acres we finally meet Sarah the telephone operator. Lisa goes to Sam’s store to buy food for dinner. She wants a meal in a can but Sam suggests Dee Dee’s dehydrated Mason Dixon chicken dinner, which looks like white powder in a plastic bag. Ralph says her mother is making Dee Dee’s New Orleans pompineau and it comes with a dehydrated bottle of wine. Lisa pours the powder into boiling water and later what comes out are a chicken leg, corn on the cob, corn bread, mashed potatoes and a slice of baked apple pie. Oliver hires Alf and Ralph to connect his kitchen phone but in doing so they make a big hole in the ceiling. 

            Sarah was played by Merie Earle, whose first paying job was as a model for a Polaroid ad. She appeared in a series of Dodge commercials as the hot rodding grandmother represented in the Beach Boys song “Little Old Lady From Pasadena”. She played Maude Gormely on The Waltons. At the age of 78 she appeared in her first film, Fitzwilly. She was supposed to make her Broadway debut at the age of 88 in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man In the Moon Marigolds but she broke her hip and had to cancel. She didn’t get another chance before she died. 

            In the second story Oliver still owns the phone company and puts Eb on the switchboard. But it’s too difficult and he quits. Lisa serves hot water soup for lunch and Eb loves it. Hank Kimball accidentally orders thirty tomato pickers for Oliver even though he won’t need them for a week. He asks of the pickers if any of them know how to operate a switchboard. A woman named Carmelita raises her hand. She also has problems figuring out the system and quits. Lisa talks to Carmelita in Hungarian and she answers in Spanish but they understand each other. Oliver says that’s impossible and Lisa accuses him of being against the United Nations. Oliver decides to take out a full page ad offering the phone company for sale. Before he can do so Haney makes him an offer of $500 and Oliver accepts until Haney says Oliver has to pay the $500. Oliver pays him $8. But Haney begins to gouge his customers, charging them for every call and for three minute blocks of time that last ten seconds. Oliver is picking his tomatoes because all the pickers are working elsewhere. Fred comes up with a shotgun at Haney’s back saying he either has to pick Oliver’s tomatoes or get tarred and feathered. Fred and Sam give the phone company back to the reluctant Oliver.