it’s 10:19 p.m. saturday night and it just dawned on me that i’ve been sitting here in total and complete silence for about two hours now.
that’s after i stopped vacuuming.
i realize that i’m not very good at just relaxing while kevin is away. i’m not good at it right now, anyway.
i had thought to myself that i should call somebody, go somewhere, do something…but there are just so very very many things i want to get done. i’ve done a couple of them, but there are so many other things that i can’t possibly get to…
here’s a picture of the pop-up camper that kevin is staying in.
this is his friend garrick’s camper, and garrick is allegedly going to be selling it to get a newer model, and kevin told me when he called yesterday that garrick would sell this one to him “at a great price.”
hmm. “great price” is very relative around here.
would we ever use it, is my chief question. we haven’t been camping in…how long? quite a while. plus, where would we store it the other 364 days of the year?
here’s a picture of the inside.
not such a detailed photo as i’d have liked. and here’s a picture of garrick’s dinner last night, which kevin sent me for some inexplicable reason.
it looks obscenely large and kind of gross, if you ask me. i guess this was some kind of fish fry? fish fry with a side of fries and a roll. a beige dinner.
and here’s the photo he sent me tonight, of the fish boil they had. i haven’t heard anything from him, except a message earlier, and two pictures of this fish boil (in case the one picture of the fish boil wasn’t enough).
so i know he’s been eating. lots of fish.
but what about ME? and the INSANITY of me???
it’s a long story.
for years, i’ve been meaning to videotape mom and dad, to quiz them about their lives. at least three years i’ve been wanting to do this, and finally started videotaping dad after he broke his wrists. we finally finished the videotaping (three tapes worth), and today i started to videotape mom.
we filled up an hour-long tape, and when we were done i said “let’s just look at it.” AND THERE WAS NO AUDIO.
oh brother. this is because i’d attached an auxiliary microphone and i DIDN’T PUSH IT IN ALL THE WAY.
OH BROTHER.
no audio.
i’d also just gotten a new DVD recorder, which i need for making DVDs of the mini dv tapes from the camcorder. i realized about a week ago that the old DVD recorder wasn’t working properly. it wasn’t working right about a year ago and i don’t know why i figured it had probably fixed itself in the interim. sometimes i’m very unrealistically optimistic.
so mom and i did then a test to see how the picture looked, and then i recorded the mini dvd onto another DVD on the new recorder, and it looked terrible. was it the new recorder? so i made yet another DVD, then i played it in the blue-ray player, and the first DVD didn’t play at all, the player just kept spitting it back out, and then i finally managed to made one that worked but the picture was crappy so i tried cleaning the camcorder and then it looked kind of better but then i made a DVD of one of my scotland tapes to compare, and the one from scotland was definitely better. all this time i was working with the two DVD remotes plus the remote to switch the input on the TV and it all got a little overwhelming after a while and was making me very frustrated.
meanwhile the sky had turned green and it was raining a lot and very very windy and the ferns i’d just bought were sitting in the back yard and i was afraid they’d get blown to bits and was going to stop and rescue them, but mom volunteered to go out in the rain and do it. she’s a very GOOD mom.
plus i’m sure she was happy to have a few minutes away from me swearing about all the technology that just wasn’t working right and making me very frustrated.
i finally figured out that the problem is with the camcorder. it’s six years old, which is TOTALLY DECREPIT in technology years. i decided that the video quality was good enough, and we sat down and i asked her many questions yet again. it’s good that we did it again, because she had a few more interesting anecdotes this time. but at this point i was pretty mentally challenged and sometimes i couldn’t think of anything to ask her, but she just kept going…mom is a TROOPER.
after we finished she went home to a technology-frenzy-free zone, and i started making a DVD of the tape i’d just recorded. And then i was desperate to clean a little – i don’t know if i’ve mentioned this, but i’m a HORRIBLE housekeeper. the kitchen floor was horrible, horrible, and when kevin was leaving for his camping trip he kept tromping in and out in his great big boots, bringing in even more bits of stuff from outside and so inside it was JUST LIKE THE OUTSIDE.
so i vacuumed. yes, vacuuming at seven o’clock on a saturday night. DO I KNOW HOW TO HAVE FUN OR WHAT??? that’s me, party girl.
i was very happy to vacuum, because when i was done the place didn’t look quite so wretched. i can’t mop tonight though, that’ll have to wait til the morning.
but then i sat down and started researching camcorders. and a few hours after i’d started that is when i realized that i’ve been sitting here in total silence. except for mollie’s snoring.
there are way way WAY too many camcorder choices out there, and i guess tonight wasn’t a great time to start looking after my technology-overload. do i get an HD camcorder? one article i read said that they’re really not necessary, but then if i don’t have HD i can’t record in that great big format, 1080×720 or something. plus the more reviews i read, the more irritated i got because some people LOVED a camcorder and other people thought it took REALLY SHITTY VIDEO.
oh brother.
i could keep taping mom using the old camcorder, but the picture won’t be so great. but then when i looked at the finished DVD, i decided it didn’t look so bad…
at this point i honestly don’t think i could make a decision about anything. i’d like to have a glass of wine and watch some SNL if it isn’t a repeat, maybe do a little reading. wind down so i can get up in the morning and MOP. and then rush around doing all the things that i wanted to do besides cleaning and obsessing over video-related things.
the thing is that i’ve started editing the video i shot in scotland…LAST SUMMER. i’ve been enjoying doing it, after spending a whole lot of time trying to figure out a good way to get the footage onto my computer – there isn’t an easy way to get it onto the laptop and i was going crazy for a while before figuring out how to do it. i’m almost finished with the first video which is just the first two days of our trip. but i haven’t worked on it at all today when that’s what i wanted to do. plus i have a writing project that i haven’t even thought about. plus…plus…
PLUS i looked up the video editing software i use, pinnacle, on amazon just to see what people said about it, and was quite dismayed that it got HORRIBLE HORRIBLE REVIEWS. i mean, HORRIBLE. like, one star. everybody HATES it. the thing is, they complain about the stuff that has also made me crazy about it, but i screwed around with it long enough the last time i edited a video that i finally figured out how to make it work for me. it was a HORRIBLE PAIN, but i did get it to work, pretty much.
perhaps i am, indeed, going a little crazy. i should get out. but i just have so much i want to do here…
i also took a bunch of photos and i have to upload them here. not gonna happen tonight either, now that 11 o’clock is approaching. the last time i got up, mollie got up with me and looked expectantly at me, hoping that she’d get her treat and we’d go to sleep.
NOT YET I STILL HAVE STUFF TO DO.
relaxing, i’m going to be relaxing now. randy invited me out tonight, but he wasn’t going out till NOW. much too late for me.
ok then, i can’t imagine that you could POSSIBLY be having as much fun on a saturday night as me…
hillybilly grace with my snoring dog.