Barking Space

Crazy

That’s a good word to describe my state of mind.

Why? Because I always take on a lot of projects.

Observe. Current projects…

• Create a DVD celebrating my daughter’s first year.
• Learn some songs for our camping trip.
• Organize my hard drive.
• Write some more articles for Toronto Thumbs.
• Get into shape.
• Learn some new languages.
• Try to learn how to write lists without ending the list prematurely with an item about learning how to write lists.

The DVD

I like to celebrate things. My favourite things to celebrate are people.

When we were kids, my brothers and I would look forward to the times when my dad would set up the slide projector and the screen and we would watch slides of all of the photos that had been taken over the years.

It was pretty awesome to watch ourselves grow and there would always be a new “chapter” to look forward to.

In the digital age, it is so easy to take pictures and just leave them there to look at later. How many people actually go back and look at them all?

One thing I’ve heard a lot of since I’ve become a parent is that it’s easy to forget what your child used to be like. I have a pretty incredible memory when it comes to important things like this, but even I will admit that sometimes I am amazed when I look at a picture from the beginning. She was that small?

So I decided to make a photo/video slideshow with a soundtrack based on the songs we listened to during Little J’s first year on the planet.

Sounds simple enough, right?

WRONG!

The DVD has spiraled out of control. Check out this meaty feature list…

• Main feature is a two hour slideshow made up of at least eight hundred photos and forty videos, chaptered by month.
• Songs from the soundtrack fill almost every moment, attenuated manually to allow the audio in the video clips to be heard clearly.
• The great Don Lafontaine himself was kind enough to provide a birth announcement for us.
• The Main Feature is encoded in high quality format, with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound.
• The second disc (yes, you read that correctly), will have all of the video clips from the year sorted by month and named for the sake of context.
• This disc will also have a little video showing how Little J has grown, thanks to some foresight by us. We’ve been taking pictures of the three of us in the same pose/position relatively consistently over the last year.
• Labels, case, the full nerdery.

So yeah. The main feature is done. The first burn didn’t work out well, most likely due to a disc defect. This worked out for the best, as there were some minor corrections to make.

Now onto the second disc!

The Song List for Camping

I usually bring my guitar with me on car camping trips. Two years ago, I bought a Martin Backpacker Guitar knockoff to bring into the interior.

It was nice to have it with us, but all of our songs eventually turned into mumbling and shitty fretwork because on one had we didn’t practice, and on the other we didn’t know all of the tabs for the songs.

That knock-off didn’t last very long, due to the poor quality of construction, so I dropped the money for a real one.

I’ll be damned if I spend good coin on a nice guitar for camping and don’t learn any songs all the way through.

So Dave and I have an agreement that we will each learn ten songs all the way through. Some of the songs on my list…

• Sucker by John Mayer
• Some Fantastic by BNL
• Redemption Song by Bob Marley
• Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden

Of course, I don’t know how committed Dave is to this venture. One time we had a deal that ended up with me owning every Mortal Kombat inspired music CD and him asking me why I expected him to own every KMFDM disc on the market.

To Be Continued…

Filed under: Anecdotes, Friends, General Dialogue | Tagged: Camping, Composition, Creation, DVD, Friends, Fun, Music | 4 Comments »