Donna and I went for a motorcycle ride Saturday. I attached a GoPro to the top of my helmet and recorded the good part, the ride up to Kitt Peak National Observatory and back down again. Later I cut several 30-second bits from the longer video and spliced them together in three short clips. This morning I experimented with adding music. I’m not entirely happy with the results.
The problem? Wind noise on the GoPro audio track. When I add music to the original audio, the result is wind and music mixed together. Apparently there’s no easy way to mute one so the other comes through clearer … without buying specialized audio mixing software, that is, a step I’m not yet ready to take. I know myself well enough to know I’d turn into a maniac home-office George Lucas. I’m an obsessive geek about too many things already.
Side note: when I searched Google for instructions on audio editing, 90% of the links led to YouTube videos. I hate those goddamn things. I want to be able to scroll back and forth between steps in a text document, and you can’t do that with a video. I suppose that makes me a dinosaur.
Anyway, here’s one of my short clips, just a minute-and-a-half long, enhanced with a little Brian Setzer.
If you’re wondering about the title of the clip, the ride was a Knuckledraggers Hash House Harriers event, so I used hash trail terminology. Since this clip shows the stopping point in the middle of the trail, the observatory on top of the mountain, I titled it Beer Check. The other clips are on Flickr, if you want to check them out: On Up & On Out.
I’m sorry to say Donna got a touch of heat exhaustion on the ride. It didn’t hit her until we got home, and she was out of it for a few hours. She drank a lot of water and was fine by bedtime, but I won’t be talking her into another motorcycle ride any time soon.
I have a ton of F-15 Eagle photos. They’re on my computer, on Pinterest, and on Flickr. Some are my own, some are from other sources. Inspired by a wonderful account I’ve been following on Twitter, Sea Creature Bot, this morning I set up F-15 Eagle Bot. Of course I’m not really a bot, any more than is Sea Creature, but like him or her, I’ll be posting photos only, no captions, no comments. Here’s F-15 Eagle Bot’s first tweet:
— F-15 Eagle Bot (@PaulWoodford14) May 28, 2019
I also follow Jenny Lawson, better known as The Blogess, on Twitter. The other night she tweeted this:
My mom used to tell me if I ate too much popcorn I’d get pack-belly and have to go to the hospital. I just found out pack-belly isn’t a real thing. My life is a lie.
Her tweet generated thousands of comments from people sharing whoppers their own parents had told them (and that they had believed right into adulthood). People whose parents had told them ice cream trucks were infested with cockroaches, that they’d been born with tails, that you never ran over cardboard boxes in the street because someone might have thrown away an unwanted baby.
I rarely participate in these things, but couldn’t resist throwing in a rather dark memory of my grandfather Estes:
When I was four I started playing with two black kids my age. We were splashing in a creek in a park. My grandfather waded in, grabbed me up and carried me away, and told me I’d get a disease from them.
I know I absorbed a lot of bigotry growing up. Most of us did. Maybe it’s just me trying to feel better about myself, but looking back I don’t think I ever believed my grandfather, that even at four, I didn’t buy what he was selling. What he said to me that day made me feel bad … not bad about wanting to play with those kids, but bad because he’d said a shockingly ugly thing. Maybe the first of the many shockingly ugly things I’d hear from other adults as I grew up.
Let me lighten this up with a different sort of parental tall tale, one much more in the sprit of what Jenny Lawson meant to share. I always loved it when Calvin’s dad would tell one. At least his were relatively harmless … unless you were Calvin.
