Epiphany - inspired to sell

The other night I woke up at two in the morning with a message in my head - Sell your house. The house this message was referring to was the house I lived in before I moved in with J and her mom. I still own this house; I had it rented out to a couple of really good tenants.

These tenants were just over a year through a two year lease. Unfortunately they encountered some financial difficulties and could no longer afford to stay there. I sadly agreed to let them out of the lease, and I listed my house with a rental agent.

I have owed this house for almost nine years and lived in it for almost eight of those years. It was the first house I bought, and I admit to having a emotional attachment to this house.

This voice from within was telling me Sell it. I replied that I didn't want to give up this house, but the voice gently repeated, Consider selling it.

I have learned through my life experiences to pay attention to such messages from within. I started thinking about what would happen if I sold the house, and saw that there were a number of reasons why this idea made sense. I also have a strong intuition that this undertaking will be an important and strategic step towards reaching financial independence, though I don't know exactly how that will happen.

Although losing my tenants is unfortunate, perhaps there is a greater good that will come out of this.

Windows Movie Maker and audio dropouts

I've noticed that some of the video projects I have created with Windows Movie Maker contain dropouts in the audio track. I first noticed this on the DVD's I created in March. At the time, I thought that the reason I was getting those dropouts was because my computer was low on memory so that WMM lacked the resources to render the video file properly. I suspected also that my hard drive was filling up so that there might not have been enough hard drive space for the temporary files.

Since then I have added memory to my computer and I have cleared off some of the large AVI files that were chewing up space on my hard drive. Then I rebuilt the afflicted videos - and found that they still contained audio dropouts. Thus I concluded that lack of resources was not the cause.

I verified that the audio glitches did not originate in the source files I was using. There were no glitches when I previewed my project within WMM. However, when I created an AVI file from my project, I found that the resulting file again contained the glitches. So I have concluded that WMM has some problems with the audio when it creates an AVI file.

Washing machine broken?

I think our washing machine is broken. The reason I think this is that apparently everything we put in it shrinks. My shirts, my pants, they all used to fit me fine but they have all shrunk in the past few months and the only reasonable explanation I can think of is that it must be the washing machine.

My belt has shrunk too, I've noticed. I used to put it on the third notch; now I am using the second or even first notch. I've never put my belt in the washer; it must be all the heat and humidity we've experienced this summer that has caused the leather to contract.

Please Mr. Postman - Dancing mom

It's been a few months since I've worked on a video project - the last time was in March when I created a DVD to give to J's brother and to my parents at Easter (See Slicing salami)

The last few videos I made were effectively slide shows set to music. I was using Windows Movie Maker at that time, and it was not able to use the MOV video files from my digital camera. Since then, I have obtained a new application called ShowBiz. This software came bundled with my DVD burner actually.

ShowBiz has no problem with MOV files. It also lets me do more with effects and transitions. For example, I can chain video effects up to two levels. What this means is that I can combine effects.

I used some footage I shot in April when J's aunt and cousin came to visit. The whole family ended up having a dinner party with dancing and karaoke. I had several scenes that I had shot of J's mom dancing with various people. I split the scenes and spliced them together in a pleasing and entertaining combination, and set as soundtrack the song Please Mr. Postman by The Carpenters. I called this video Dancing mom.

J and her mom were both pleased with my video,and it reminded them of the fun we all had.

GarageBand.com

I have recently discovered a web site called GarageBand that focuses on independent music, and I have finally got around to setting up an account there. I haven't uploaded any tracks yet; I have to review 15 songs by other artists first in order to get an upload credit. I plan to do that over the next week or two.

I've uploaded a picture to my GB account but it is distorted. I uploaded an image of a business card with my name and logo, but my image is rectangular and GB made it square. The conversion process stretched it out vertically which makes it look silly. I'll replace it with an image of one of my CD covers.

After I complete my 15 reviews, I will be able to upload one of my own tracks, and then it will get reviewed by other members. Thus, I will be directly fulfilling one of my goals for 2005: Build and use a peer review network for my songwriting.

Links:
GarageBand website
My artist page on GarageBand

Point Clark - thirty two years to find a lighthouse

When I was about eight years old, I went on a trip to a beach, with my sister, my parents and my cousins with their parents.

That trip happened a long time ago, but there were a few things about it that have stood out in my mind for much of my adult life. One was the lighthouse. I remember seeing it on the left side of the road as we entered the parking area. It was open to the public, with an admission fee. I being who I am wanted to go inside the lighthouse and climb to the top, but my parents wouldn't let me.

The other thing I remember about that trip is losing my blue ball to the lake. The way I remembered it, someone threw the ball and it went into the water. My dad remembers it differently - he says nobody threw the ball into the lake; instead me and my cousin were playing with it when the wind caught it and blew it into the water. However it actually happened, I do remember standing on the beach watching my ball floating away in the water, and none of the adults would go into the water and bring it back for me. I lost my ball that day and was very sad and upset about it.

Throughout much of my adult life I did not know where this beach was but I had come to believe that it was at Point Pelee, and that the lake I remembered was Lake Erie. Those boyhood images remained in my memory and in recent weeks began to draw me. I had to go back to that beach again; I had to see that lighthouse again. Those memories were taking on an obsessive quality - perhaps it was a feature of the mid-life crisis I'm supposed to be having.

A couple of weeks ago I dragged J and her mom out with me to Point Pelee. I was going to find that beach!

I did not. However, I began to realize that perhaps the beach of my memory was not at Point Pelee. There were certain signs that just did not add up. But if not Point Pelee then where was that lighthouse? Did it even exist at all outside my memory?

I did some digging on the internet looking for lighthouses. I found one that suggested a likely location - Point Clark, which is at Lake Huron and not at Lake Erie. I picked the memories of my sister and parents - did they even remember that trip? They did! Everything they recalled about it lent credibility to my new theory about its location. My sister said the name Point Clark resonated with her as soon as I said it - she was sure that was it. She also suggested to me that perhaps I was still trying to get back my ball. Whatever my subconscious motivation might have been, one thing I knew - my inner child was seeking my cooperation. I just had to take him to Point Clark.

I had planned to do some traveling with J along the Lake Huron coastline, so I insisted that we stop at Point Clark along the way. We found Point Clark the town and then with some help we found the site of the lighthouse. I actually stopped to ask someone myself for directions – how serious is that!

Well, we found the lighthouse. It was on the left side of the roadway, just as I remembered it. Naturally I wanted to go up the lighthouse... so up the lighthouse I went! J wasn't up to climbing the 114 steps so she waited in a shady spot on the beach while I paid the admission and took the tour up the tower. The climb was an easy one for me because of all the practice I've had doing the stairs at work in the past few month. I took in the view at the top and also took some pictures before coming back down. It was a little scary coming back down because the stairs were a little steep and there were no handrails at the top two flights.

By the time I came back down, I realized that my sister had been mistaken – I didn't come here because I wanted to get back my ball; I came because I wanted to go up the lighthouse. What a miracle, that an eight year old boy taken on a one-time trip to some beach with a lighthouse would find it again thirty eight years later, return at the age of forty and climb to the top of the lighthouse.