The Aerie
So the big event that I couldn't hint about was my mother's surprise 70th birthday party. I recently hooked her up with a laptop computer (something which I expected to do just AFTER finishing that snowman in Hell), so I figured if I made any careless mention or hint of the event, my mother would choose the next hour to try out this google-whatisit and see if her son had one of those blog-thingies...
The event was very successful, due in no small part to my sister's deep neuroses which led her to devote who-knows-how-many hours to making every detail perfect.
For my part of the perfection, my sister asked me to put together an audiovisual slideshow of my mother's life. This was to be based on photographs that my sister obtained by sneaking into our mother's house and stealing photographs from her albums while she was at work. (See, I'm not using the word "neuroses" here lightly.) Due in no small portion to my own neuroses, I ended up dedicating most of last week to getting the thing put together - and that was with the more than able assistance of my dear daughter, without whom the slideshow would have involved a casette tape playing "Memories" while Irfanview walked through the photo directory.
Interestingly, I found myself putting my laptop to full, even clichéd use. On Thursday afternoon I sat on the bus home from work, and imported all the scanned, enhanced, and cropped photos into Windows Movie Maker (which is to Apple's iMovie what Frankenstein is to Adam, but it got the job done). On Saturday morning I started converting the final version of the movie to DVD format while my laptop was hooked up to the second monitor in my office. I switched it to single monitor mode, carried it out to the car, plugged it into the power adapter in the lighter socket, and drove most of the way up to my sister's while the video conversion process kept running, and the computer didn't crash once. A-mazing.
While the computer chugged away on car power on the way up to my sister's place, we spotted an airplane overhead towing a lovely banner entitled "10 Week Abortion." Lovely. What a day-brightener that was. I wondered how many starving kids in Africa could have been fed on the money being used to fly that banner around and change nobody's mind.
When we arrived at my sister's place no plan survived contact with the enemy - in this case, technology. The DVD's that worked fine in my crappy old DVD player at home would not read in my sister's crappy new DVD players. Apparently one advantage to buying cutting-edge DVD technology was getting all sorts of features for cheap, like the ability to read Windows-formatted filesystems. As the technology improved, DVD manufacturers apparently began to save money by pulling features like that out of the DVD players while keeping the price the same. I tried it in her downstairs DVD player, I tried it in her upstairs DVD player - no luck. And I knew my sister's home computer was going to be no help whatsoever when it displayed the "Windows 98" banner upon bootup. May as well try to play a WMV file on an abacus.
Fortunately the laptop saved the day again - I plugged her desktop monitor and speakers into the Vaio and ended up with a functional presentation medium. I PROBABLY could have attached the laptop directly to her wide-screen TV, but the altar was set up in front of it and got in the way of testing.
Yeah, the altar. More on that tomorrow.
Posted by Albatross at June 26, 2006 12:51 PM | TrackBack