Zip Zippy Zip !!!

Back from summer vacation.  Mom never got around to banking her timeshare week so we had to go.  I was expecting a long boring week because it’s in a small town and the cheap shopping is K-mart.  Thinking we’d be in the room most of the time, I brought a project with me – to put together a video of my trip to China in 2004.  I only got as far as the research.  I’m missing pictures of some sites (I lost a couple rolls of film from mis-loading) so I’ll have to dig up the photo CD’s for the pictures that Mom took.

I still don’t have a vision to make not-a-slideshow video of all those still pictures.  Meanwhile, the Movie Maker editor I’m using is obsolete, so I need to find another, hopefully upgraded, video editor that can do picture-in-picture, tracking, and side-by-side.  Maybe I’m dreaming for a free video editor.  Microsoft Story Remix shows promise but it isn’t available until Fall and it’ll work in the cloud – I don’t trust clouds.  Social networks are fine.  You put things up there knowing it will be seen, possibly ganked.  But clouds are supposed to be private and secure—they’re not.  They’re never as private or as secure as your own hard drive.

By Wednesday, Mom had driven me over the edge so I went and signed up for a ZipLine tour!  I was meant to do a zipline in Costa Rica 2011 but I’d sprained my knee badly in Panama.  IT WAS AWESOME!!!  Probably not as awesome as Costa Rica would have been but I’m scared of heights.  So I didn’t have the presence of mind to point my camera at anything in particular and I had enough to do just to keep breathing.  That saved the week for me, but OMG I had to work for it.  Mom has massive FOMO (fear of missing out). She can’t even step up a curb without help so there’s no way she could do the little hike or climb the steps on the platforms.  She probably would have overcome the arthritis in her hands to hold on out of fear.  I broke away quickly and dealt with about 20 phone calls from her until it was finally too late.  My friends and family are great.  I was a bit guilty but they were so supportive of getting a little “me time.”