Janet De Gore

            On Wednesday morning although I’d turned the heat on the night before only part of the radiator coils in the living room had warmed up while the south kitchen coil was going full blast and the east kitchen coil was also only partially warm. 

            Last night I started converting that day’s video of my song practice from MP4 to AVI and it would have been done just before I got up. But Windows did an update and a restart without my permission and ruined the conversion, so I’ll have to start over again. 

            I finished revising my translation of “L'amour en soi” (Love in Essence) by Serge Gainsbourg. Tomorrow I’ll run through singing and playing it and then upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog to prepare it for publication. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. I audio and video recorded the session for the 39th of 45 sessions. I think I got not horrible takes of “Vomit of the Star Eater” and “Sixteen Tons of Dogma”. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before lunch. I had a bowl of cheese sticks and a glass of low sugar iced tea. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back I stopped at Freshco. I took advantage of the fact that the No Frills deal on grapes at $2.18 a kilo was still on until today and so I did a price match on three bags. I also got some bananas. 

            I weighed 87.75 kilos at 18:24.

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:13. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Me and Gravity” the concert video continued to fall behind the studio audio. They still weren’t quite synchronized for the line, “between transplants of love’s glass embrace” and so I got them lined up by cutting some of the video. I had the same problem for “No surgery can split this waltz” and fixed it in the same way. There were similar issues and solutions leading into the final chorus for “Me and me and me and me and”; “me and gravity”; “me and gravity” and “In the end it’s plain to see…” It looks like I’ll have to do the same for the rest of the song and so I’ll tackle the second part of the chorus tomorrow. 

            I uploaded today’s song practice videos and I’ll convert the first one overnight. I didn’t have time to review any more of the September 13 video. 

            I made pizza on artisan naan with Basilica sauce, a circle of cheese sticks, five year old cheddar and an egg dropped inside the ring. I had it with a beer while watching the first two episodes of Branded. 

            The theme song tells the back story to the show. Captain Jason McCord was the only survivor of a massacre by the Apache. Out of loyalty for his commanding officer he refuses to say why he lived and the others died and so he is branded a coward and drummed out of the cavalry. Now he wanders around trying to make the best out of what is left of his life while continuing to face people who know of the Bitter Creek massacre. He’s an engineer by profession and so he travels where the work is. 

            In the first story he is crossing the desert when he comes across a man dying of thirst. He shares his water, his horse and his provisions and brings Jed Colbee back to health. Jed is crossing the desert to reunite with his wife Sally and child Jessie in Grant Wells. He hasn’t seen them for two years as he’s been raising the money to buy a little farm. They are about a day’s journey from Grant Wells when they camp for the night. That night Jed wakes him to tell him he’s taking the horse and the rest of the water because he doesn’t want to take the chance that they’ll both make it by travelling together. The next day Jason walks until he collapses but he is saved by a Navajo who wants to see him take revenge on Jed. A few days later Jed is with his wife and daughter getting supplies for their homestead. He leaves McCord’s horse for him at the stable and tells the owner that if McCord doesn’t claim it in two weeks the horse is his. But shortly after that McCord arrives. When Jed sees him he thinks Jason will want to kill him and so he puts on his gun and faces him on the street. But McCord just tells Jed he owes him a drink and leaves. Sally was played by Janet De Gore, whose Broadway debut was in The Member of the Wedding in 1950. She co-starred in the TV series The Law and Mr. Jones. She retired from acting in the mid 1960s. I didn’t realize these are only 22 minute episodes so I decided I might as well download season two as well. 

            The second story is considered the pilot episode. A reporter for the New York Herald named Ned Travis tracks McCord down. He’s been writing about him in his paper and now he wants an interview but McCord refuses. We see the flashback from his unspoken memories. They were under attack against impossible odds and McCord told his commander they needed to retreat to save the men but General Reed had succumbed to dementia and wanted to fight to the last man. Travis goes to the widow of Lieutenant John Pritchett who died in that battle. She shows him letters from her husband that prove McCord is innocent. He plans to return to photograph the letters but McCord comes to see her and urges her to destroy them. He says the letters could ruin the peace with the Apache that was established by General Reed. If the general’s name is dishonoured there are members of congress that would use it as an excuse to break the treaty, which will cause the Apache to attack again. She’s reluctant to destroy her mementos of her husband but she finally throws them on the fire just before Travis returns. His reasons for wanting the letters destroyed seem implausible and illogical to me.