We had a very lovely weekend. The weather was warm and sunny. It was good to be outside and even though I had to make two trips to Home Depot to get all the parts necessary to fix a couple of sprinklers, Saturday was a good day. Sunday was a little bit windy but still a delightful day. For once we got the summer on the weekend! Today, however, was a return to winter. It has been cold along with rain, freezing rain, and snow all day long. It’s forecast to continue through tomorrow evening. So I got the sprinkler system tuned up and running just in time for enough rain to come so that the system isn’t needed. It’s uncanny how often that kind of thing happens.

My sister-in-law Pam from Ohio has been visiting here for the past couple of weeks. She liked the idea of a blog, so I’ve set her up with one. She’s put a couple of posts in it. Now I just need to encourage her to write on a regular basis. Writing is good therapy for me, even when I don’t have much to say. I just ramble along and whatever falls off the fingers is what ends up on the blog. A couple of years from now I’ll enjoy looking back at what was happening in our lives at this time. Two years ago I started keeping an online journal. I wrote a small piece of software for this purpose and used it for a couple of months. By that time I had discovered some real software for doing online journals, which were by then called weblogs and often abbreviated to blogs. I’m now on my third generation of software and have been able to post stuff to the blog on a fairly regular basis. I’ve certainly learned a lot about this whole world of online journals. It’s a good method of talking to myself!

Just about everything has come together for the trip to Manila. I’ll leave on Saturday and arrive about midnight Manila time on Sunday evening. I’ll take my digital cameras with me along with my iRiver voice recorder. I might find some interesting sounds to record while I’m there. Our neighbor, who also works at the same place I do (and is the new High Priests Group Leader in our Ward) will be in Manila for one of the weeks that I’m there. It’ll be fun to do some things with him. His youngest son is headed out on his mission this week. He’ll get the boy to the Mission Training Center, spend a few days with his wife as an empty-nester, and then head for Manila.

I’m enjoying the Mac Mini computer. It’s got quite a bit of capability and some of the things are just so easy to use. I took a number of pictures over at the luncheon for dad’s birthday party. I plugged the camera into the Mac Mini which immediately recognized the camera and downloaded the pictures. I selected 16 of them and dropped them into iPhoto. Some needed a little touchup which turned out to be very easy to do. I told it to make a slideshow out of the pictures and about seven minutes later I had a slideshow complete with music and Ken Burns effects. That is, the show panned across the pictures giving them a kind of a motion effect. The program automatically imported some music from iTunes and laid that down as a soundtrack. It was about a fifteen minute job to get a great slideshow onto a DVD. I was quite impressed.

So, if it is so easy to do that, how hard is it to put a monologue to the slideshow so I could talk about what was happening in the pictures? It took a couple of hours of a lot of trial and error, but it did work. I could probably do it in about 45 minutes now. The longest part was slicing up the recorded audio. I used the iRiver to record the monologue. I tried to put it through Garage Band to slice up the little bits of sound, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that. I finally ran it though the audio mixer program I use on my Windows XP box — audacity — and used that to slice up the monologue and convert it to mp3 format. I then put the mp3’s onto a USB flash drive, took that to the Mac Mini, and imported the mp3’s into iTunes. From there it was a piece of cake to drop the audio clips into the iMovie sound track and line them up with the picture transitions. Anyhow, it all came together very nicely and I’ve given a DVD to dad in honor of the event. It was a lot of fun and educational besides. It opened up new ideas for what I can do with the pictures I’ll take over the next three weeks from Manila. Maybe I should take the camcorder with me as well?? That might also be interesting. We’ll see how heavy the suitcase gets! While the weather is trying to figure out whether it’s winter or spring over here, there’s no question what the weather is like in Manila: HOT and HUMID. Lovely. I just might be wishing for winter by the time May 12th comes around.