Yesterday, K and I saw so many commercials for Big Lots, and an inexpensive camcorder they were selling, that we had to get get us some. There's only one Big Lots remotely near us, and it's the kind of place that when you walk in, you feel like you need to take a shower. Anyway, we got them and came home, and I've been itching to try it out. It is easy to use. (It's got one of those little bump-out USB connectors.) I took a dark little sample movie and put it up on YouTube (and then took it down), just to see how it works. It works.
Here's the sample I just made for you guys. It's not much, just me walking around the front lawn. (I'm not in it, only my voice.) Now to see how well it uploads here. I expect to write a real entry later on.
watching WILL AND GRACE :: ENTRY #2102
READING: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
I did not make much progress on the kitchen yesterday, other than to wash out the containers I got for pasta and rice and stuff, but I mentioned to the Hubs that I was planning to clean out the one cabinet we keep food in -- it's very high and inconvenient -- as well as a set of shelves next to the fridge where we keep most of the non-perishables. He said something about going through the spices in the cabinet, and looking for anything else he might have bought at some time and seeing if he still needed it.
At this point, my spices look like a picture in a magazine of a perfect kitchen, and the two cabinet shelves above them are practically empty. Not only did he get rid of anything expired or unused, he emptied it properly, into the compost when appropriate, and put all the boxes or cans or bottles in recycling. Now he's got a football game on the little kitchen TV and is going after the set of shelves.
I know you think now that I have some sort of perfect husband, but let me remind you, this is the same I guy I asked to replace the toilet seat over a year ago, and the new one, in its package, is leaning against the wall next to the doorway to his little study. The CFL bulbs I bought to fit into the fixture in the bedroom ceiling, which I can't reach, are still in their package on the dresser. Why is he going through the kitchen stuff? I suppose it appeals to his sense of order. Which is all wonderful, until I sit down on the toilet one day and the old seat slides off on the side by the almost-broken hinge. On the other hand, all the leaves are raked up out front, which is also good.
I finished the Supreme Court book, very good. I never read The Brethren, so I can't compare. Now I'm reading the cat-in-the-library book, so, quite the change.
Yesterday morning after my haircut and errands, I started setting up the Wii Fit. A very intriguing device. I think what it is is actually a biofeedback device disguised as a game, which is not a bad idea. Anyway, so it did the evaluation of me -- I'm overweight, who could have guessed -- and then the funniest thing happened. If you are a Wii person, then you know that the characters who are playing the games on screen as you move them around are little avatars, cartoon people that you design, usually to look like yourself, called Miis. (One of them is a Mii.) My Mii has shortish hair, green eyes, glasses, a crooked smile, and a blue shirt, since I generally wear denim. I had the sense to change the body style to a little fuller when I originally created it. But when the Wii Fit finished my evaluation, all of a sudden, my little Mii changed to match, and there I am, not so much fat, but a lot bigger than I was before. It was pretty funny, I thought, although I shudder to think what the Mii would look like if the thing had gotten my real weight, instead of the scale-on-a-carpet distorted result.
My little house, which I have always jokingly referred to as The Mouse House -- ironic now, isn't it? -- is cluttered. Most of the piles of stuff, which my mother and sister have always called "our mountains" are out of sight, but the fact is that there is just not a lot of free space here. It's not uncommon that when I'm Wii bowling, for example, my swing will knock magazines off the coffee table, or more likely, my wrist into a corner of my desk. But there were literally only two Wii Fit activities I could do without moving something. So I had to move the loveseat back a few inches, which makes the room look a little off balance, but it's not like anyone's coming here, and if anyone is, it's likely to be one of the girls' friends who's here to play Guitar Hero, and so needs the space.
K is a little under the weather, which makes her alternate between bouts of cranky and super sweet. It's like never knowing who's going to walk into the room next. Once again, I refer you to the most realistic cartoon character of all time:
It's nearly five o'clock and essentially dark, so I feel like it's seven. We've been having very gray weather lately, sometimes with rain and sometimes not, but very little sun. It's depressing, I don't have to tell you.
I'm a little hungry, but not going into the kitchen while the Hubs is still working there. The little kaboomster did not fall far from the daddy kaboomster tree.
WATCHING SNL (from last night) :: ENTRY #1911 READING: Dewey by Vicky Myron
I can't actually say that I did nothing today, although I didn't do much, and I did it pretty much right here. I got my nails done in the morning, but other than that, I was transferring videotapes to DVD, and checking out some of the older DVDs I made on my previous computer system.
One of the DVDs I had made then was of a concert at my school that my oldest nephew was in, a concert of a school rock band that we have. He was the lead singer in his senior year. I had sent him this DVD a few years back, but now he tells me that it never worked. It's easier to dub a tape to DVD using the system I have now, but I can't find that concert video. Oh well. Today I copied the school musical from his senior year -- Little Shop of Horrors, he was Seymour -- and this other video ...
Every ten years, under the old plan, our school and every other high school and college would have to be evaluated in order to be an accredited school. There's a different system in place now, but part of the old plan was that a team of visitors came to your school and studied all your paperwork and wrote a whole report, and their introduction to your school would be a slide-show that had to contain x, y, and z that they laid out in their criteria, but it had to be within a certain time limit, too. And be entertaining. In 1989, it was my job to make the "slideshow", which an assistant and I made as a video. So I dubbed that over today too, and watched it.
Ahh. Of course, I remember every damn minute of making it, all the filming and working with the kids who did the live segments and the kids who did the voice-overs for the slide segments. I used all the prominent kids at the high school, a lot of class and student government officers and a few top athletes. My nephew was vice-president of his class then, so he's in that one, too, mullet and all. Heh heh.
There had to be a segment on the elementary schools in town, and I could not get cooperation from any of them to film during school time and borrow a kid to narrate, so one Sunday afternoon, I marched my two and Wonderful Niece and her twin brother, Good Guy, to the schoolyard down the block and made them repeat their little intro a dozen times. It is just so damn cute. The three big ones are standing in a sort of semi-circle with little K in front of them, holding the giant microphone up to each of them when it was their turn to speak. She was ... 5, I guess, so R would have been 8 and the twins 11. They were too cute.
The part that got me, though, was recognizing all the kids from back then, even the voice-overs just by hearing them. One in particular was a boy who was a freshman then, I think, with a sweet little-boy voice, very earnest, and I remember his baby-face from back then, too. He became one of my class officers in his junior year -- I was the class advisor -- and then remained one for his senior year, by which time he was over six feet tall, a wonderful boy. But the story does not have a happy ending. After college -- Notre Dame, I believe -- he got a wonderful job in New York, in the financial district, and was maybe 25 when one day he stepped off a curb to cross the street and was hit and killed by a taxi. His name comes up from time to time at school, and everyone who knew him reacts the same way. Such a loss, and a waste. And that seems like a long time ago now, too.
So. I watched old videos and was amused and moved. I checked over all the other videos I'd made with the old equipment, and they all seem to work just fine. I watched a segment famous in the annals of our family in which K at about 8 months takes 20 minutes to eat her first Cheerio. It's pretty damn funny.
And now R is here as well, and staying over for tonight, and I'd best call the Sibs before the witching hour.
