First Day of School!

Today was the first day of school – whee!

My end of summer was really packed full of action & adventure, which is why I’ve not updated my journal in that time. I finished up my visit with Amy (more details later, I hope!) and the day after I returned, flew in for a week spent at mom & dad’s cottage at the Lake. And as we were at the lake (soon joined by ) we didn’t have any internet connection. Yeah, yeah, excuses, excuses!

Still, I decided I wanted to have something interesting in this post, so I’ve uploaded a short video that I filmed at Open Streets MPLS while visiting Amy. We rode bikes to Lake St and then got on Minnehaha which was blocked off to street traffic for about 20 blocks. While perusing the various things going on, we saw a group of tap dancers from Keane Sense of Rhythm demonstrating their craft and giving mini lessons to folks interested. I filmed them for a bit and have edited the video a little for your enjoyment as well. The song playing while they tapped was “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train.

Oh, and I just want to brag here – I was able to finish reading 30 books during the summer! I’ll update my summer stats at another later post (probably).

Any video editors out there?

Dad and I recently edited a 25-year video retrospective for the Westar Institute, and this has garnered dad the opportunity to do more video editing for them. The art director who’d been doing the job says he uses Final Cut Express, which is a Mac program. But dad is Winders/Linux. The main thing he needs to be able to do is sync to videos using their audio tracks so that he can cut to one camera when someone walks in front of/behind a speaker or get close-ups from time to time. We both use Pinnacle Studios, which has been sufficient for YouTube videos and the 25-year retrospective. And it may be sufficient for this style of editing – we haven’t tried it yet. He’s been informed that he’d be reimbursed for software expenses, so we could buy something if Pinnacle won’t suffice.

So, you budding directors out there, what would you suggest? Adobe Premiere Pro? Avid? Anything else?

Fun with Dry Ice

A delivery is made to school which required dry ice during transport, so I had to claim it for myself. I performed several demonstrations for my chemistry and physics students, and then decided to film them with my phone. Despite the glitches (old PC doing its best with Pinnacle Studio), I’m pretty pleased with how the video came out.

Segway Day!

Although we all got up early today to wish elsaf farewell for her journey home and walk her to the train station, judiang and I returned in order to sleep some more. Heh. (Judi did get her “regular” at Starbucks, but we still opted to sleep in.)

We managed to fart around enough in the morning to avoid having to have breakfast and go right to lunch – Indian Fud to be exact. I looked through my old LJ entries to find the name of the Indian place we went to last year: The Indian Garden on Ontario. We were going to take the bus, but Judi thought it was too cold and we wound up cabbing it.

Turns out we arrived before they were open, so we walked over to Michigan Ave and returned to the Apple store. We watched a neat workshop on Aperture, a photo editing program that looks really useful. But it’s $200 (and is it Mac specific?) so I shan’t be getting it.

We returned to Indian Garden and had a wonderful lunch buffet. Lots of tasty tasty. Once we’d gotten food in our systems (and spicy food at that) Judi was energized and warm enough to walk back to Millennium Park. We saw several women walking for a 3-day breast cancer walk going on in the city. We wished them luck on their walking and commended them for their efforts.

We were early to the bike center, so we sat and rested for awhile. Then we took a potty break over by the outdoor concert hall. A choir was practicing, so we watched that for awhile before returning for our segway tour.

Judi and I found helmets and signed our lives away before we were given our segways to ride. There were 18 of us on the tour with two really friendly (and knowledgeable) tour guides, Jeremy and Dave. We walked our segways down a hill (the one that I rode up at the end of our bike ride yesterday) and took them over to the “ice rink” (not one in the summer, just in the winter). There, Jeremy taught us how to get on ’em, get off ’em, go forward and back and stop and turn, etc. We had a nice opportunity to learn the ins & outs of segway steering.

One of the first things Judi and I learned about segways is that they’re not as easy as they look. If you stay relaxed, it’s easy peasy. But I kept clenching my knees and toes while riding which made it harder on my feet. I loved going up hills on the thing – much nicer than a bike! Still, I like bikes better for most of the rest of the riding. 🙂 As Judi said, when you’re on a bike, you can easily put your feet on the ground, but with the segway, when you stop, you’re still standing & adjusting to keep the thing stationary.

We toured around the lakefront, mostly at museum campus. I saw stuff Judi’s never taken me to. Heh. When I was able to hear Jeremy’s tourguiding, I’d learn stuff about the city I hadn’t known. He took us to what used to be Meig’s Field (now a prairie of wild flowers). I took photos and a video, which I’ll paste at the end of this post.

We were pretty tired by the time we returned to the bike center. So we sat and rested some before we headed off to the bus stop nearby. We took the #4 bus back to 13th street, then walked home.

Our original plan (well, Judi’s original plan) was to put her new grill together then go to Jewel and buy stuff to grill to christen the grill. But as it got later & later and I got hungrier and hungrier, it looked less & less likely that Judi would be putting the grill together. She finally decided we should go out for supper. I suggested Grace O’Malley’s, so we walked there.

We both ordered the Guiness cheese soup as a starter and amaretto sours. I ordered the beer battered fish & chips with the salad & bleu cheese dressing. Judi ordered the chef’s Caesar salad with steak. Then we ordered dessert – I picked the pecan brownie ala mode and Judi got their Bailey’s cheesecake. Very yummy supper!

We’re now watching the Olympics (wow on that 4×100 swim relay!) and geeking. Tomorrow Judi promises to put the grill together, so I guess we’ll grill hot dogs for lunch. And then I’ll head off to home again, to see my poor little neglected kitties.


Segways R Us
Segways R Us

The last two in this row are the ones that Judi and I was using. 🙂

Judi glides on
Judi glides on

Judi gliding around on her segway at the planetarium.

Judi and me!
Judi and me!

Yes, even I rode a segway today! Jeremy, our guide, took the photo.


Going Digital!

As I slowly make myself a digital-only gal, I have several store-bought PAL VHS tapes which I no longer need. Just in case anyone here is still analog and has either a PAL or multi-play VCR, I’ll be happy to send you any of these tapes for free. (If I don’t already have your snail mail addy, you can e-mail it to me.) I’ll be throwing ’em away in a week or so. First come, first served! (Sorry folks with NTSC-only VCRs. I’ll eventually start getting rid of those tapes, but I’ll get to ’em later.)

Titles are as follows:

  • One Foot in the Grave series 1&2, 4
  • One Foot in the Algarve
  • Nearly all of the One Foot in the Grave specials
  • Porridge: A Day Out
  • Porridge: A Night In
  • Porridge: No Way Out
  • Porridge: the movie
  • Murder Most Horrid series 1
  • TISWAS: The Best of the Best Bits
  • TISWAS: More of the Best Bits
  • TISWAS: Comedy Capers
  • Rab C Nesbitt: series 5 part 2
  • A History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (the ABC tapes, not the BBC tapes)
  • Babylon 5: vol 5.01 & 5.05
  • The Prisoner eps 1&2
  • The Wind in the Willows (Terry Jones version)
  • Danny the Champion of the World
  • The Curse of Fatal Death
  • Delta & the Bananamen
  • Ghost Light
  • Castrovalva
  • Mark of the Rani
  • Trial of a Time Lord

Zoo Vids

The following are short 15 second videos of critters from our Toledo Zoo visit. (My camera can do 15 second shots with no sound recording. So far, that’s been quite sufficient for my needs.)


Meerkats at play. I love the one that falls over while leaning back.


A glow-in-the-dark jellyfish. (The conversion to YouTube means that it gets darker faster for some reason.)


Finding Nemo: a clown fish plays with an anemone.

Alas, I keep getting errors on my processing for the Butterflies video, so you folks are spared won’t get to see that one.

(It’s nearly 11am and judiang is still asleep! Just cuz we stayed up til after 2am to watch some shooting stars…)

More Cute Overdose

The kitties are finally used to my house, I believe. They’re eating like birds (ie 10 times their own weight in food), they’re doing their business in the litter boxes, and they’re exploring every nook & cranny they can get their claws on. Yesterday was “spend as much time in the reading room as possible” day. The day before was Lucy’s “hide in the pink chair” day. Today seems to be Linus’s “play with the feather/ball toy for 20 minutes at a time” day. It’s been quite entertaining.

Of course, I’ve got a couple more pictures to display. In the course of my home improvements, I intend to put floor to ceiling bookshelves in my reading room, so I’m going to need more bookends. Well, I was certainly surprised when I looked in the reading room yesterday and saw a pair of bookends I didn’t even know that I had.


Linus & Lucy (or is it Lucy & Linus?) as bookends.

While exploring the reading room, Linus discovered another wonderful place to sleep. On the bottom shelf of one of my bookshelves are my collection of Elmos (except for the life-sized Elmo in the living room). They make for a wonderful place to cuddle.


Linus & the Elmos.

While the kitties were playing in the kitchen yesterday, I used my camera to video them. My camera doesn’t do sound like some of the later models, but they really weren’t making any sounds anyway. So I thought, “Let’s try that YouTube thingy” and created an account. I uploaded the video to YouTube and now you can see the 15 second video as well.

http://www.youtube.com/v/bD3Wha2sOLU

Tonight, the parental units will get to meet their new grandcats. I think they’ll be delighted by them. They are, after all, delightful! 🙂