PROJECT FINISHED!
We had what I hope was our last snow for this winter in Yakima on Monday night. The temperatures immediately went up and things have started to melt. Hopefully Spring will not be far behind. It will still be cold here for another couple of months, but nothing like what we have had the past two months.
I have finally finished the computer project of transferring videos and pictures from the PC to the Mac. I had to go through 5,817 pictures and 701 videos, but I whittled it way down to a fraction of that. As you can probably guess, I had an abundance of pictures of birds and flowers, but I transferred only a few of those. In the end, what really matters is your pictures and videos that include people. I had such a good time going through all of them because it brought back so many wonderful memories.
A few years ago, Linda and I set up a slide projector in our spare bedroom and I projected all of my Daddy's slides onto a whiteboard and took pictures of them with my camera. The slides had been stored for years in a box, first in our shed in Lumberton and then in our garage in Yakima. So they had been subjected to a lot of temperature extremes. I decided to get them into some kind of digital media so they wouldn't deteriorate anymore. This was the easiest (and cheapest) way to do it, and I must say it turned out better than I thought it would.
Since I have been working on transferring the pictures to the Mac, I took the time to crop, adjust, and retouch all of the slide pictures. I got a few comments last week from people saying that they really enjoyed the old photographs, so I will most likely be including a few in future blogs. Below is one of those pictures that had a lot of dark splotches on it. I was able to retouch the digital version to get a pretty good picture. You can still see the smaller spots, but I was able to get rid of the bigger ones. This is a picture of my mother and father. Check out that tie. Snazzy!
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| My parents, taken in 1940's |
Fast forward a few years to this picture below, probably taken around 1954. I am on the left, my sister is in the middle, and our cousin Rob is on the right. We were quite a gang back then, when we were little.
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| Original gangsters |
Taken a few years later, the picture below shows my sister and me in front of what we always called "the pink house." My father loved the color pink, so he had the whole house painted pink with a red front door. Needless to say, it stood out from all the other houses in the neighborhood. You can tell that the hot summer sun on that pavement was burning our feet, because we are both holding one foot up as much as we can.
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| Our car, with gangster sidewalls |
I cherish these pictures of the old days. It's the only way we have of traveling back in time, at least until someone invents a time machine. So I would like to urge everyone to take as many pictures you can of the people in your life. You (or your descendants) will one day be glad you did.
MY NEWEST OBSESSION
I don't think I've mentioned lately how much I love being retired. For years I looked forward to retirement because it would enable me to do things that I just didn't have the time (or the inclination) to do while I was working. Since I got the new computer, I have been busy working with pictures and videos. But the other day I discovered a program on the Mac called Garageband. I decided to check it out and I am so glad I did! It is a music generating program. I was glad to happen upon it when I did because I had recently been searching the internet for music to accompany my videos. Any music I used would have to be "royalty-free" so I wouldn't have to worry about being sued for not paying for the rights to use it. However, most of what is out there for free is terrible. When I discovered Garageband, I thought to myself, "I could create my own music for videos!"
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| Basic Garageband setup |
Easier said than done, though. It has been decades since I picked up any kind of instrument or even attempted to read music, so to say I am rusty is an understatement. Still, I jumped right in and using my computer keyboard as a "piano" of sorts, I managed to knock out a decent little composition to go along with my "Icicles" video on the blog last week.
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| The "musical typing" keyboard |
The beauty of this program is that you don't have to actually have any knowledge of music to be able to create some fun tracks that actually sound pretty good. It is available as a download for Mac and iOS, as well as PC and Android. Below is a short video of some pictures that were taken right before and shortly after we moved to Washington. I used the same musical composition in this video that I used in the "Icicles" video, but I worked on it yesterday and cleaned it up a bit. I hope you enjoy it, and I promise I won't use this music again for a while!
PARTING SHOT
Since the snow has started melting around here, everything is a yucky mess. As a consequence, I haven't taken many pictures this past week, so therefore I am using one of Linda's pictures that she took of Summer Girl yesterday. The little rascal was being quite angelic, sitting there on her momma's lap!
That's all for this week, see you again next week!
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