Katherine Justice

            On Saturday morning I worked out the chords for the second, third and fourth verses of “L'amour en soi” (Love in Essence) by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice. Now that I know the hum is unavoidable as long as my neck pickup is single coil I was able to just go ahead and play through it. I audio and video recorded the session for the thirty fifth day and will continue for ten more. There are only four more sessions of the project in which I’ll be playing the electric and so it’s too late to order a humbucker. But now that I know I need one I’ll order it ahead of next year’s recording project. I dealt with the hum on the Kramer instead of playing the Gibson because I wanted to do some recording while playing the tremolo bar. I had to do several takes of “Vomit of the Star Eater” to get a tolerable one. It just took a couple for “Sixteen Tons of Dogma”. 

            I weighed 87.3 kilos before breakfast. 

            At around midday I headed down to No Frills. The grapes were on sale for $2.18 a kilo but only one bag had firm ones. If I run out I can do a price match with the No Frills price at Price Chopper before Thursday. I also bought two packs of raspberries, a bag of two artisan naan, dental floss, Basilica sauce, Triscuits, a jug of orange juice, a jug of low sugar iced tea, and a container of skyr. 

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before lunch at 14:39. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of low sugar iced tea. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride but on Saturdays during the recording project I get to the supermarket later, have lunch later, and take my siesta a later and so it was too late to go all the way downtown. I rode to Bloor and Dovercourt and headed home. That’s a half an hour. 

            I weighed 87.85 kilos at 18:00. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:09. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Me and Gravity” I finished editing the old concert video of the second instrumental. The concert video of the instrumental was about half a minute longer than in the studio. I cut out the extra parts and then lined it up with the audio for the beginning of the last verse when I sing, “But some days my feet hit the ground…” But the rest of the line, “with my fate turned the right way around” jumps ahead of the video. So now I need to find some outside video, preferably from silent films, to insert into the timeline and push the concert video back. Maybe the scene from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times in which Chaplin gets sucked into the mechanism of the factory machine. 

            I uploaded today’s song practice video. I reviewed another ten minutes of the September 12 video. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce, a fence in the middle made of cheese sticks and five your old cheddar, then I dropped an egg inside the fence. I had it with a beer while watching episode 27 of The Big Valley. 

            Nick’s girlfriend Melanie Deland is visiting and being shown a new game that is currently all the rage in San Francisco on the first pool table in the Big Valley when there is a visit from Nick’s old army commander Jock McLean. He announces that they have located the lost Barkley riverboat The Monarch and he’s been put in charge of the salvaging it to recover the million dollars in government gold it was carrying. The viewer sees close up that Melanie is troubled by this news and she faints. Nick takes her home where after Nick is gone she hears that her father Cyrus Deland is having a nightmare. When she wakes him she tells him about the Monarch. He tells her to contact Peter Doolan and to tell him to call a meeting of the Circle. Cyrus used to be the head of the Barkley shipping line. Later the chest is hoisted from the boat and opened but it is full of lead bricks. Doolan arrives at Cyrus’s home and the other members of the Circle are already there. One of the members is worried about hanging as aside from the gold, twenty three men went down with that ship. Doolan says they need a scapegoat who can’t portray them and suggests the late Tom Barkley. Cyrus protests because it could result in the Barkley estate having to pay back the money but the rest of the circle agrees to Doolan’s plan. Doolan is the publisher of the Stockton Eagle newspaper and he begins his plan with the headline “Tom Barkley Implicated in River Monarch Sinking”. The result is that many old friends begin to shun the Barkleys. Melanie avoids Nick. Nick and Heath go to Doolan’s club and start a fight with him and his friends. Jock has been assigned the investigator of the affair. He examines Tom Barkley’s records and there are many deposits with no indication as to where they came from. Victoria explains that her husband had businesses in five states. Contracts were not as formal in Tom’s day and between men of honour there was no contract at all. Jock’s investigation reveals that the ship was sabotaged. Jarrod finds a newspaper clipping that references The Confederate sympathizing Knights of the Golden Circle, some of the members of which had access to the gold and a motive to steal it. Those members were living in Stockton and included Peter Doolan and Cyrus Deland. Nick confronts Melanie and she denies that her father would know anything on the subject but in her emotional state lets it slip that Doolan wouldn’t know either, when Nick didn’t ask about Doolan. The Circle meets again and Doolan wants to know where the gold is hidden but Cyrus refuses to tell. Doolan tries to have Nick killed so Melanie can’t be tempted to tell him anything. That night in Stockton Nick is shot by Doolan and he and another Circle member try to make it look like a robbery. He is about to finish Nick off when Jock sees it from his hotel window and fires to chase the assailants away. While Nick is recovering Melanie comes to see him. She tells him her father was involved. She says Cyrus offered Jock a trade of the gold for amnesty. Cyrus takes Jock to the gold but when it is uncovered Jock kills him. Then he covers the gold again. Nick arrives and Jock tells him Cyrus tried to kill him after leading him to where he claimed the gold was but there was none. Then Nick sees and smells smoke from one of Jock’s cigars coming up from below the ground. Nick tries to walk away but Jock shoots him. He's going to finish him off but can’t bring himself to do it and so he stays to help him and allows himself to be caught. 

            Melanie was played by Katherine Justice in her first TV appearance. She was Miss Ohio of 1960. She graduated from Carnegie Tech Drama School and then studied at the Hubbard Playhouse. Her film debut was in The Way West. She guest starred in the TV movie Prescription Murder, which is the first Columbo story starring Peter Falk. She played Sheila Hogan on Falcon Crest. She co-starred in the TV series Dangerous Women.