Along the Way

I saw a beautiful little film this afternoon, which probably most people have never heard of.  I was feeling slightly under the weather and when the mail brought the film, I decided to just take the afternoon off and watch it.

I am currently reading (well, technically listening, since it's an audio boook) to a book written jointly by Martin Sheen and his son, Emilio Estevez.  The book is both an autobiography of both men, and the story of the movie, The Way, in which Estevez directs his father, and also appears as his son (type casting!).

I have been fond of Martin Sheen ever since The West Wing (he's still my choice for president!), but knew little about him and, as I read his filmography, realize I have seen very, very little of what he has done professionally outside of West Wing.  

His story is fascinating and I've discovered that I really like celebrity autobiographies read by the writer.  Kristen Chenowith's, for example, was maybe the best of the lot (so far)...such a different experience from just reading the book, because in a few places, she bursts into song on the recording.  Such fun.

However, I listened to a bit of Debbie Reynolds' recently released autobiography at Audible.com and decided that it would drive me nuts to listen to her reading and should I ever want to read about her life, I'll get it in print rather than as an audio book.

But back to the Estevez family. Martin's father was from Spain and his mother from Ireland, which must have been an interesting combination.  When he began to seriously look for acting work, there was difficulty for a Latino to find work and so he changed his name from Ramon Estevez. He chose "Martin" for CBS casting director, Robert Dale Martin who gave him his first big break,, and "Sheen" for Bishop Fulton Sheen, who was perhaps the very first televangelist.  (My mother was a huge fan of his and watched his show...uh...religiously.  She also has many of his books.  I still remember those penetrating eyes and his "angel" who cleaned his blackboard for him.)

There were ten children in the Estevez family and Martin's mother died when he was young, so the father raised the kids alone.  An undemonstrative father, he was quiet and withdrawn though obviously loved his children fiercely.   When Martin and his wife (now married more than 50 years) began to have children (4 in all, three boys and the youngest a girl) he determined that he was going to be a more hands-on, affectionate father.  I admire the fact that wherever he went on a movie shoot, whether it was a few weeks or a few months, the whole family went, up until Emilio, the oldest, was in his last year in high school and didn't want to miss school.  

Sheen also discusses his problems with alcohol very honestly.   He has been sober for a very long time now.

As I listened to the book, I became more and more interested in seeing The Way.  It's the story of an ophthalmologist (Tom Avery) whose son, with whom he had a contentious relationship, was killed on his first day walking the Camina de Santiago, a 800 km road from St. Jean Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.  Tom goes to France to retrieve the body and decides to have it cremated and take it on the pilgrimage himself.

Most would-be pilgrims get physically fit, but Tom was not--nor was Sheen, age 70 when the movie was made (you know...an old guy).  He decided he wanted to experience the walk as the character would have.  The book tells of lots of things that happened on this movie shoot, and how fortunate they were to have 40 days in a row with almost not bad weather--apparently unheard of.

Through the movie we see Tom gradually open up to his fellow travelers and, a bitter man at the start, developing friendships toward the end.   Also along the way, he makes peace with his son, whose image appears briefly at various spots.

The more I listened to the book, the more I wanted to see the movie, so I checked Amazon and discovered it was only $5, so I ordered it.

This was a real tear jerker for me. . Maybe it was because it centered so much on a child killed much too soon.  Maybe because Tom leaves bits of his son's ashes at various spots along the way, or maybe I was just taken in by the story, but I was very moved by it.  If you get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it (and if you are a friend of mine living nearby and would like to borrow the DVD, I'd be more than happy to lend it to you).

---

Tomorrow will be another busy day.  I'm driving to San Rafael (of course) to meet with my mother's doctor to pick up a form that must be taken to Springfield before we can start the moving in process, then drive up to Springfield to drop it off and make an appointment for a "contract signing" next week (after which the apartment belongs to my mother, whether she moves into it right away, or a month from now), then to my mother's (who won't know I'm doing all this driving around before I get to her house) to take her to Kaiser at 5 to have her TB test read.  And maybe, just maybe find those damn pills for her!!!

I will be in the car for such a long time I am almost certainly going to finish the last of "Along the Way" by the time I get back to Davis.

An Inspiring Video

Buddy Outside

Buddy Outside from Bev Sykes on Vimeo.

Conversations with Sheila

I talk to the dogs. Everybody talks to their dogs. Often conversation with dogs tends to be monosyllabic. "Down." "Sit." "Stay." Fuller conversations might include things like "good girl" or "treat time." Occasionally I will talk to Lizzie or Polly as I would to a person. they don't pay much attention, or look at me as if wondering what language I'm speaking.

Sheila understands me.

Sitting at night at the dinner table, when I have finished my food and have no treats to share with the dogs, I look at Sheila and say quietly, "I'm finished eating, but he's still eating." The other dogs continue to look at me, hope in their eyes. Sheila immediately looks at Walt and goes to sit next to him.

Or at breakfast after I've given them each a crust of my toast, Lizzie and Polly keep hoping for more, but when I say "that's it" and hold my hands up, Sheila immediately leaves the table and goes back to her post in the living room, protecting us from dog walkers, trash collectors, and students walking to school.

I occasionally lock the dogs in the house, when Lizzie gets a bee in her bonnet and can't be outside without barking. Sometimes I forget that the dog door is closed. And then at some point I open it, but by then, the dogs have already tried to get out and have given up. Sheila will sit in my office, looking at me, eyes crossed because she has to pee. I'll say, quietly, "you know the dog door IS open." Immediately she whirls around and goes out the dog door.

It's surprising, sometimes, how much she seems to respond appropriately when you speak to her in sentences.

Lizzie doesn't talk to me, but she reads my mind. She can be out in the back yard and I can be thinking about leaving the house and she'll be in here in a flash, ready to get the treat that I give the dogs whenever I go out, or return home. She watches me like a hawk for any movement, however slight, which might indicate that there is a possibility of a treat in her future.

For Polly, it's non-verbal. When she climbs into my lap, snuggles herself into my armpit, lays her head across my chest, then looks up and licks me on the nose before sighing and settling her head back on my chest again with a happy sigh, you don't need words to know what she's saying.

Happy Birthday, Paul (1/28 ... which is when I wrote this)

Tools

Warning: Geeky stuff first, then more normal stuff after...

I made a video today with Adobe Premiere Elements. I bought the program a long time ago, inspired by the good stuff Ned's been doing with it. But the older I get, the more difficult it is for me to retain stuff and to "get" stuff and so I haven't really done a lot with it.

Ned came over and worked with me for a day and I thought I'd absorbed a lot, but after he left, I realized I hadn't. Things don't stick in my brain like they used to, which is very frustrating.

However, I have this new camera and it takes nice video, but I can't convert this high def video to a format where I can edit it in my very basic Windows Movie Maker. I knew I was going to have to learn Elements in order to be able to edit the videos.

Today I sat here and willed myself to do something with Elements--and I did. I managed to get a video put together, after great frustration, I was even able to add transitions (those soft fades that I use between scenes) and I was able to save the video into an .avi format.

But the .avi format was 962 MB in size (the hard drive on my first computer was 60 mb) and I am still of the era when compressing video down to a smaller size was very important. I was able to bring my Elements video into Movie Maker and got it compresssed down to about 11.8 MB. I don't know if compression is as important today as it was years ago when I first started posting videos, but old feelings die hard.

But I'm proud of myself for having taken the video tools available to me and figuring out how to make them work for what I wanted to do.

(I didn't post the video because it was the complete video of Ashley's going-away party and I posted the unedited, uncompressed short version a couple of weeks ago)

I am old enough that when I took biology classes in school--even in high school--we were taught that the thing that separated man from the animals was tool making. Human beings were the only animals who had figured out how to use tools.

Today we know better.

I'm not sure if Jane Goodall was the very first person to discover that chimpanzees use tools, but if she wasn't the first, she was probably the first person that people actually paid much attention to. On 60 Minutes Sunday night, they interviewed her, returned to her Gombi preserve, and showed early films she had made which showed chimpanzees using twigs to retrieve ants from a log.

She said that she had gone into her project originally intending to find out that chimpanzees are just like human, only kinder. But after watching chimps attack other chimps, and after being nearly killed by one of the groups she had been studying for a long time, she sadly realized that chimpanzees are just like us, warts and all.

After 60 Minutes we watched a Nature special called A Murder of Crows (according to James Lipton's book "An Exultation of Larks," a group of crows is called a "murder of crows).. If you can find it, watch it. You'll be amazed. Crows are incredibly intellligent birds. For example, they learned that the best way to crack a nut was to drop it from a height onto concrete. They learned exactly how high to fly so that it dropped by just cracking, not shattering the outer shell, so that the nut remained whole. More than that, in this particular place, the concrete was on a street and they learned to time their drops with the stoplight, so that when cars stopped for a red light, they could drop the nuts, fly down and get the meat out before the light changed.

There were several such examples, but the one that boggled our minds was a crow who learned how to use a stick to get a treat that was left in the back of a cage. He would pick up a stick that had been left some distance from the cage, take it to the cage, stick it in, pull the treat forward and eat it. They later made it harder. The stick he picked up was too small, but there was another cage that had a larger stick in it, so the crow used the small stick to get the larger stick, and then the larger stick to get the treat.

I just love stuff like that and you see over and over and over again how much more intelligent animals are than we thought they were.

Proof of how animals are far more intelligent than we dumb humans are is that you won't find a single animal running for public office or spending zillions of dollars trying to buy power and prestige and boring the heck out of other people who are forced to listen to their stupid messages over and over and over again.

Lucky animals.

Bits and Pieces

Why housekeeping can be very frustrating. The dogs have been tracking in mud from the sporadic rain storms, along with the usual dust, flying fur, and the pieces of foam from a pillow they have been destroying for the past several weeks. Today I was cleaning it all up, including all the stuff that had accumulated under the furniture in the family room and kitchen. I had this nice little big pile swept up.

First, Polly came over and started rooting through it, like a shopper at a big bin sale, until she found a piece of paper she wanted and then gingerly lifted it out of the dust and ran off to jump in one of the recliners with it.

Then the garbage man arrived and the dogs raced from the front to the back of the house to chase them away.

Back to square one!

Yeah, Polly is still here. She's got it all figured out now. She starts trembling the minute I put a leash on her on Saturday to take her to Petco, and is still trembling when she gets out of the cage at Petco. In between arriving and leaving she may snap at a few people. Then I pick her up, get into the car, she gives a smug smile, stops trembling and snuggles under my arm for the trip home. We keep telling her this isn't her "forever home," but she's not buying it.

I am Polly's goddess. She lives for my attention. Look at that face. That face says "are we going to cuddle now, please?" Never mind that I have just spent several hours in the recliner with her...I had the audacity to get up for a couple of minutes.

Whenever I walk--anywhere--she follows along behind me, constantly leaping at my calves. Whenever I go behind a closed door she stands at the door whining. She's worse than a toddler.

But she's the best dog to sleep with. As soon as I cover us up with a quilt, she burrows under it, along my left leg, sometimes with her head on my chest, and falls asleep. She doesn't move all night long and when I wake up some 5-7 hours later, she is crushed that I actually sit up and get up. How dare I leave her alone in the chair when all she wants is to sleep in my lap.

That pathetic face and body language say "you have that funny black box pointed in my direction; please don't hurt me." It's why I have so few photos of her. She's terribly uncooperative.

Who knows how much longer this little girl, who has been here nearly 4 months, will be here. I suspect that it's going to take a long time for her to transfer her slavish devotion to me over to a new forever mom. But it will happen eventually. My calves will rejoice on that day, though I will miss her whenever I go to sleep at night.

She's a sweet little dog, but she's not home yet...even if she thinks she is.

---

I went to write a note to that guy who called me the other day to tell me how much he liked my journal. One of the things we spoke about was Lawsuit and his desire to find more Lawsuit music. I went to YouTube and found all the "new" stuff that Ned has uploaded over the past several months--more than I had seen in a very long time.

Walt and I both watched the video below and laughed a lot. It's very long (10 minutes), but if you can stick with it through the first 8 minutes or so, I think it's worth it. It was recorded in August of 1996. It was the only time during a Lawsuit concert that Paul was so dumbfounded he couldn't find words.

---

Bits of Theatre

First, here's news for anybody who might be reading this and who lives in South Florida. Steve and Jimmy have been approached about doing The Big Voice at the Broward Stage Door Theatre. The show has won awards for excellence everywhere it has played across the country and garnered unanimous rave reviews off Broadway, yet few people have heard of it and even fewer have heard of Steve and Jimmy, so I'm doing my bit to get the word out: you won't be disappointed in this show!

Secondly, not to start another round of discussion, but I do want to address a comment made in my Review Blog in response to my recent negative review. The writer wrote, "Wow Bev, did you forget this is a community theater with actors working FOR FREE and the love of theater? Your review just makes you sound like a bitter hack."

I kind of liked the idea of being a "bitter hack" and in fact embraced it and changed the name of my review blog from "In My Opinion" to "Bitter Hack." I even changed the logo at the top so that the words "Bitter Hack" are MUCH larger than "In My Opinion" ever was.

However, I thought about this anonymous poster ('cause they're always anonymous if they have something negative to say, you know--unlike myself, who puts my name and publishes it in the newspaper for all to see) while I was at another opening night last night.

This was opening night for the university production of Oklahoma! at the big Mondavi Center on campus. It was so good it absolutely blew me away. As I watched the actors singing and dancing on stage, giving a performance that would not have been out of place on a Broadway stage, it hit me that these were full time students, many of them also working part time jobs, working FOR FREE, for the love of theatre, yet if they were tired on opening night, there wasn't a single person on the stage who let that show. The energy level was high, the voices were amazing, and, as I said, I doubt they would have received a negative review if the production had been done in a Broadway theatre.

People who pay to go to theatre shouldn't have to accept less than top notch performances from volunteers, working FOR FREE and the love of the theatre on any performance night. And if less than perfect performances are given, they deserve to be pointed out.

So there.

On a much smaller "theatre" screen, if you are on Facebook, it would be worth your while to add me as a friend if only to see the link I posted to a video of Dan Ciruli's baby boy, Sawyer. Now baby videos are always cute, but this one was just great and since you aren't likely to know Dan, and since the video isn't on YouTube where I can link to it, the only way you can probably see it is to be my Facebook Friend. (Unless his wife does what I suggested they do and sends it to the Ellen Degeneres show, since I can't imagine her not running it if she were to see it.)

And finally, on the print side of theatre, here's something I can link to. Davis Life Magazine, which is an on-line magazine about Davis, just did a nice article on Ellen and Shelly, using several photos that I have taken over the years. The thing I like most about Davis Life Magazine is their fabulous photography and I felt pretty special being asked to let them use some of my photos.

Plan Ahead

I was about 7 months pregnant with Jeri when Disney re-released Bambi to local theatres again. It was showing in a little theatre in downtown Berkeley. Bambi and Dumbo were two of my very favorite movies when I was a kid and I had to go to see it. Problem was, Walt didn't want to go to a kiddie matinee.

So I stood in line chatting with the little kid in front of me so people might think I was there with her and not a very pregnant woman going to see a kiddie matinee alone. The theatre was full and I was the only person there without a child in tow. I decided it was Jeri's first movie, even though she couldn't see it yet (which may explain why, when she had her own room, she chose to cover the walls with deer wallpaper!).

I swear Bambi can make me cry at the credits, or could then (especially since I was always more weepy, if possible, when I was pregnant than when not pregnant). I loved seeing the movie again and left the theatre with red-rimmed eyes and hoping people wouldn't notice that my nose had taken on the appearance of an Irish alcoholic.

Those were the days before video recorders and definitely before the days that we had a video recorder. Even when VHS machines came out and we finally bought one, movies on tape were more expensive and you had to be very selective in what you paid full price for (unlike my trip to the Dollar Store the other day, where I found a DVD of three episodes of The Loretta Young show for only 50 cents!)

But as time passed, I started recording my favorite movies and occasionally splurging movies on tape as well.

I think Bambi was the first Disney movie I bought on tape. I bought it for me, though the kids may have watched it. I remembered that kiddie matinee and was happy to know that I could finally actually own the movie and watch it whenever I wanted, without having to pretend that I was with some other little kid in line (though, of course, by that time I had my own little kids to take to a movie house that might be showing a Disney film.)

Over time, I bought other Disney movies that were favorites of mine -- Dumbo, Pinocchio, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and, when it was finally released, Fantasia, though I think I bought that more for Gilbert than for me.

Our kids grew up and beyond the age when they enjoyed Disney movies. And, in fact, I don't know that I remember them ever watching those videos, though they may have.

But at some point, as the kids got into their teens, I made a decision to plan ahead for our grandchildren. I would get a Disney library on tape so that when they all came to visit me there would be lots of movies I could share with them (because I would have lots of grandkids and they would all live close enough that they could pop around several times a week, or I could fill in as a babysitter when necessary).

Who could have predicted video games would become more popular than old fashioned Disney movies?

Who could have predicted that it would take so long to have one grandchild.

Who could have predicted DVDs?

At Christmas time I was looking over Laurel's Amazon wish list (which is mostly things that she'd like to have for Brianna), and I noted that, not surprisingly, Laurel's tastes in Disney paralleled my own (with newer Disney movies on the list as well). I realized that the chance of Brianna ever being in this house long enough to watch one movie, much less my library was slight.

I was also in the mood to clear stuff out of a cabinet, so I wrote to Tom and told him that I had this whole library of Disney movies and asked if he would like me to bring them down to them when we went down at Christmas time.

He told me they had just gotten rid of all of their VHS tapes and their VHS player and that they were an all-DVD house now.

So much for planning ahead.

I think while Walt is gone I'll fix a big bowl of popcorn and just gorge myself on all those unwatched Disney movies. Someone should watch them at least once!

---

(happy birthday, David...)

Virtual Refrigerator Door

It's really cool when you find yourself not only liking your kids, but admiring them. I have admired my kids on many occasions throughout their lives for all sorts of accomplishments. I used to hang their creations on the refrigerator door, but they've long outgrown that.

I admire Jeri for the bold step of moving across the country and starting a new life in Boston -- and making such an incredible success of it. It's something I could never have done. I was a real wimp and the thought of leaving the comfort of California and moving anywhere scared the bejezus out of me. I had the chance to move to France to be an au pair, and I didn't do that. I had paperwork to join the Peace Corps when it was first starting up and chickened out. Walt had the opportunity to move to Hawaii when Paul was a baby and I talked him out of it because I wanted the kids to be able to know their grandparents, which they couldn't do if we lived far away. I've never lived more than 80 miles from San Francisco, so watching our daughter pack up her truck and drive, by herself, across the country to start a new life in Boston 10 years ago was just amazing and I had such incredible admiration for her.

Tom has built a house. Really. A house! I remember when he was in high school and brought a broken-down truck into the carport, took out the motor and stood there, surrounded by what looked like a bazillion little parts and a "how to" manual and began to rebuild the engine, just like I would build a casserole from a cookbook ("take one screw from pile [a] and add a washer from pile [b]..."). When he got it all done, there were parts left over and he said recently that truck ran like shit, but he built a friggin' truck engine out of a pile of parts. And when he was finished he turned the key in the ignition -- and the damn thing STARTED. I was incredibly impressed.

Around the same time, Paul and I had to put oil in the motor of the car on our way to San Francisco and the two of us stood there with the hood of the car up and a can of oil in our hands, scratching our heads like idiots, too embarrassed to ask somebody where we were supposed to put the oil.

Tom and Laurel bought this fixer-upper of a house (which, being in Santa Barbara, was so expensive we couldn't afford the downpayment, much less the monthly payments on it!). Then they remodeled the house, rebuilt the kitchen, built an apartment to rent over the garage. It's taken them a couple of years, but...my kid build a house! How did he learn how to do that? He's a banker and a computer guy, for Pete's sake. My admiration for his accomplishments knows no bounds.

But this week, I'm kvelling about Ned. Ned and I share a lot of the same interests and so when he does something I am more inclined to understand the complexity of it and to want to figure out "how did he do that?" so I can try it myself, because I actually have a shot at understanding his explanation. (Ned also built a room onto his house, BTW, and that has me as amazed as what Tom has built, but I know I'll never attempt that!)

Our kids have been making videos since they were old enough to pick up our movie camera and aim it at each other. When I posted the Video of the Day two days ago, it was an old video that Ned and Paul had made, originally called "Lawsuit, Lawsuit." I hope some of you watched it. I was impressed once again, not only for the cleverness of it and how well it all worked, but how they used one Lawsuit recording for the music, and stuck in all these clips, but in spots, like where Jeri had flute solos, though there are clips from two different concerts, they matched the recording perfectly. I talked with Ned about this today and he said that's because he is a drummer, so he always hears the drum beat and matches things to the drum beat. But if you ever watch it with the technicality of it in mind, I think you'll be as impressed as I was.

But what he posted today blew. me. away. He now has a new computer, so the world opens up to him and he's as much of a media nut as I am, but light years away in terms of talent and creativity. The musical group he plays with, Preoccupied Pipers (they just record and perform one 20 minute concert a year) has just released a new album, and he took one of the songs out of the album and made a music video. You really have to see it, whether you like that kind of music or not...just see it to appreciate all the work that went into it.

I make videos on my home computer and I know how much work goes into a project like this. I am in total awe of what he produced here. I can't remember how many hours he said he worked on this, but I'm sure he'll add a comment in the guestbook section to remind me.

I know everybody's kids are wonderful and mine are probably no more wonderful than yours, or yours, or yours. But I only have mine to talk about and when I look at some of the things they have accomplished, I just stand back and shake my head ... my kids did that! There isn't a refrigerator in the world big enough.

Putah Creek Crawdads

(Hi, Wayne)

We went to see the Crawdads perform at Ludy's Main Street BBQ in Woodland, California last night.

No Experience Is Ever Wasted

I don't remember when we got our first movie camera. I was always jealous of Walt's family because they had movies of his growing up years -- all those hula festivals in Hawaii -- and we never did. We couldn't afford something as expensive as a movie camera. We had photos, but it would have been fun to have movies.

I don't remember if Walt and I got our first movie camera before or after Jeri was born. But we did have it for her first months of life (nothing more exciting than a movie of a newborn lying in a crib sleeping invarious cute outfits!)

Walt and I even tried a foray into animation, with a movie that took forEVer to make, but which ran about a minute. I don't remember what it was exactly, but I remember that I was walking through a pile of socks or something like that. Very avant garde at the time.

Walt and his friend Dave had grand plans for what they were going to do with movies. "When they got rich" (I'm still waiting).

But it was great having a movie camera to record the various events of our young children's lives. And, in time, we moved up to a video camera.

Jim of Jim's Journal talks about his history with cameras in a recent entry talking about his new Flip video camera, and his history pretty much parallels ours. I really related to his experience with his first video camera:

When Jill and Jeremy were little Nancy and I bought a video camera and VHS video recorder (two separate pieces of hardware... having the video recorder and its heavy battery as something you could sling over your shoulder made the camera lighter and easier to hold than with the all-in-one units) and it only cost (in 1986 dollars) about eleven or twelve times as much as this Flip Video unit cost me (in 2008 dollars).

God, it was wonderful being able to record to video, but it was like carrying a small television around with you wherever you went. Still, it was state of the art, so we loved it.

Video technology improved and by the time we got our next camera, it was not only smaller, but the kids were old enough that they could use it themselves. Well, that was pretty much the end of videotaping for me for a number of years. The camera was always being used to film some project or other.

Never saw so much creativity come out of a group of kids. I cannot tell you how many home movies we have, all of which involve some sort of a chase scene, on foot when they were young, and in cars when they got older. There was frequently some sort of "superhuman" aspect to it--a hero in to save the day (Ned had a Superman complex). That often involved finding a high place to jump off of. It is fortunate that I didn't realize they were jumping off of our roof (we have a 2 story house) until years later.

Whenever the kids got together with their friends, there was a video involved. Lawsuit rehearsed at the local theatre (where the kids all worked as well), so as they got older, the videos became more complex, involved scenery that might be hanging around the theatre.

Today the Lawsuit group are all in their late 30s or early 40s and still when they get together, there is a good chance that a video might be involved. They are still doing chase scenes and special effects. The plot lines haven't really changed in the past 25 or so years (though sex had been added to the last videos I saw)

What possible things could they have learned from all that playing around with videos? What good could it do them in their future life?

Well, check this:

Ned is now the image director or producer or something like that (the receptionist in his office didn't know what he is "officially") and his job is ... well, the image of the station. Writing and recording jingles, for one thing and making videos to promote the station.

(And yes, that is Ned as the newscaster in the above video.)

His videos frequently involve chases and/or special effects.

Gee--I wonder where he learned that... (and I'm wondering if anybody has jumped off a roof yet.)

This is unbelievable

Life in 90 Seconds

My videos are getting shorter!

I've started posting to Flickr, which truncates videos to 90 seconds. In fact, it truncates it to something under 90 seconds, I discovered with yesterday's video. So if something seems to end precipitously when you click on the box with the photo in it, click on the YouTube link for the full video.

Walt is currently in Boston collecing his Christmas gift from Jeri (tickets to a Red Sox game, which they attended yesterday)

So I guess this is a good time to confess my latest indiscretion. I flipped for the Flip video camera. So many people on Flickr are using this inexpensive, pocked-sized DV camera that, now that I receive a regular income from Social Security, I decided to be wild and daring and test it out. (I had to buy it before Bush's tax rebate arrived so I don't get accused of trying to stimulate the economy!) It arrived two days ago, and I absolutely love it.

It has lots of limitations. It doesn't zoom, for one thing. But the picture quality is, I think, pretty good. It's so easy to carry around (in fact, it fits in the new camera case I bought for the replacement camera I just got, so I can carry both of them and my digital voice recorder at the same time!)

One of the reasons I got the camera was that I'm doing 365 days of videos, like I did 365 days of photos. This just makes it that much easier. And much more challenging, actually, because of the 90 second limit. My videos in the past have generally run about 3 minutes.

I don't quite have a handle on creating something specifically for a 90 second video, but I hope that as I continue to make them I can get better at it. And if I can't do it well in 90 seconds, I can always post the full video to YouTube, for those masochists who want to see more of this drivel that I upload.

I've flipped for my Flip!

After my day driving all over the hell and gone, my plan for today was to sit in my night clothes all day and not move. But then my mother called. The medication (Vicodin) is not working and she's still in a lot of pain when she tries to move. She called her doctor who called in a new prescription to the pharmacy and who also ordered an spinal x-ray to see if she can determine the problem.

So instead of lounging about all day, I was back in the car retracing most of my steps from yesterday. We went to the hospital, had to wait a long time for her new medication (which required security clearance and triplicate signatures, since it's a narcotic), then got the x-rays and were back home again in time for me to get home to feed the dogs.

It is very depressing to watch what is happening to her. Especially depressing because you hear about it all the time in older people, especially people who have been as healthy and as independent as my mother has been. Something happens to them. A fall, an illness, a surgery they didn't anticipate. It sets off a constellation of problems and it seems to be a slippery slope.

With my mother it started off with the broken ankle. She was only really out of commission for six weeks, but it was nearly a year before the wound was completely healed. That was a year of getting up every morning to do wound care on herself, a year of reminding herself that she wasn't "her old self" any more.

My mother loved to dance, and her dancing days are over, she knows, because of the residual situation with her ankle.

But she was handling it all right until this sciatica popped up. She has a pretty high pain threshhold, but this is eating away at it. She is turning into someone I don't recognize, someone angry with the pain, angry at not being "well," and whining that she can't fix it. I understand completely. I sympathize completely, but it makes me focus on the reality of her being 88 rather than on the amazing person my mother has been at 88.

There's no getting around it. At 88, you don't have all that many years ahead of you and it has been my expectation that she would continue as active and lively and positive as she has always been, and die sitting up in front of the TV somewhere, a vodka and tonic in her hand, and an unfinished jigsaw puzzle in the other room.

The thought of perhaps her needing care, or to be in some sort of facility like Walt's mother is, waiting for the attendants to come and bring her her medications, doesn't exactly terrify me, but makes me feel very sad.

It also makes me feel guilty. If I were a "normal" person, I'd have a "normal" house where my mother could feel comfortable to come, move into her own room, and live out her days comfortably. But I'm not even comfortable to have able-bodied people my own age come in here, with the dogs and the mess and the confusion. It would not be possible for me to take my mother in, should it come to that.

I know I'm worrying about things LONG before I need to, but every time I am faced with frailty in my mother, I can't help but worry about how I can make her final years as positive for her as she has made my life for me all of my life.

Let's just hope they can find a way to help her through this current crisis quickly. Hold the good thought.

I am testing the video upload function of Blogger, with a short video I made for Flickr last night.

My job today

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Mabel's Last Day?

Mabel seems particularly cute today. I don't know if she's really that cute, or if it's just that wistful feeling, realizing that she's going to Petco tomorrow and, if anybody has any sense, she'll find a "forever home" and we won't see her again.

The nice thing about having a singleton puppy, especially as they start getting bigger, is that Lizzie has a new playmate. When they first get here, they are too little and she often hurts them, briefly. But as they gain strength, especially if they are as feisty as Mabel, they think they are one of the big guys. One thing I've learned--dogs have no concept of relative size!

I can't count the number of times Mabel has yelped when Lizzie nips her and then turns around and leaps at Lizzie, to continue play.

I watch the three dogs file out the partially opened sliding glass door (I've shut off the dog door until Mabel leaves because I really don't want her in my office, so I just leave the back door open all the time) and it looks like The Three Bears going for a walk. First goes Sheila, then Lizzie, and then Mabel taking up the rear.

The big dogs get treats when I leave, and when I come back. Mabel has figured that out too and she sits and waits for her own treat. It's so cute watching these three pal around together.

Part of me hopes that she won't find a "forever family" her first time out. I'd like to keep her a bit longer, but the younger she is, the better her chances and who could resist that cute face? I want her to have her own family...but I'm enjoying "borrowing" her for right now.

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