I'm baaaaack!

I'm baaaaack! Didja miss me? I have a good excuse for not blogging for (gasp!) an entire week! OK, well maybe it's not a good excuse, but it is an excuse...

Lexi had her cheer showcase last Sunday at which point I took the last pictures and video tape for the cheer season. Then I began to work on putting all the pictures and video clips together to make a DVD of the girls' highlights. I needed to have the video done by the end-of-season banquet yesterday so I could give copies to all the girls on the squad and the two absolutely awesome high school coaches who donated their time and talent to teach our girls. Seriously, these coaches were so incredibly terrific that all the cheerleaders were crying as they said goodbye to the coaches at the banquet yesterday because they're going to miss them so much.

So, I was busy working on this video, editing pictures, cutting video segments, and choosing music for the video. I went through the collection of music on my iPod and picked out a couple songs to use in the video. I asked Savannah what she thought about my song choices. She quickly browsed my library of music and said, "Seriously, Mom? Seriously???" She rolled her eyes and said something along the lines of, "You don't have any non-old people music!" She took out her own iPod and played song after song for me, telling me which ones would be good for the cheer video. Thanks to her, I now have non-old people music on my iPod by such legends as Lady Gaga, Iyaz, Ke$ha, and Miley Cyrus (or is it Hannah Montana?) I don't even know how to pronounce these names! How exactly does one pronounce a dollar sign?

Although I've taught myself how to make a video with Windows Movie Maker and consider myself fairly savvy, I had no idea how to get music from my iTunes library over to WMM.

After messing around for hours, I finally figured out I could put the cheer songs into a playlist, burn a CD with them, then rip the CD and import into WMM. <---does that sound like Chinese to anyone else? There's gotta be an easier way to do that, but alas, I couldn't figure it out. In the end, I got my music, pictures, and videos organized and started arranging them. I worked on it for a couple more hours then saved the project and went to bed.

The next evening, when I tried to open the project to work on it, it was nowhere to be found. Argh! My computer geek friend (always good to have computer geek friends!) said he could probably retrieve it for me, but I knew I couldn't wait until I had time to have him look at my computer so I started all over again. I worked for another 6 hours or so and had the video about half finished. I made absolutely certain I saved it this time. All's great. I have a couple more days to work on it. I'm halfway there. No problems.

The next morning, I had the brilliant (and by "brilliant", I mean "completely "UNbrilliant"!) idea to clean out and organize all my picture folders. I have about a bazillion (give or take one or two) large-file photos on my computer and I think they're starting to slow things down, so I condensed them, organized them, and put some on CDs and deleted them. A little later, when I opened my video project to resume work on the movie, guess what I saw. Yep, a whole bunch of little red Xs where my photos used to be. My idea to rearrange my picture folders and put all the cheer pics into the same folder? Notsogood. Again, there was probably a way to save the whole mess, but I was so mad and frustrated at this point, I just deleted the whole darn thing and started all over again.

Meanwhile, my power cord which had broken and was a little touchy, stopped working altogether. The only way I could use my computer was to hold the power cord "just so" while typing and moving pictures around one-handed. Every time my right hand cramped up from holding the cord, the computer would stop charging and I'd have to spend a good 10 minutes wiggling the cord around until I got it to start charging again. This is the biggest reason I didn't blog last week. What a huge pain in the butt it was to finish the video this way. I just didn't have it in me to try to push the cord in enough so that I could check mail or blog with only my left hand.

Thanks to my computer geek friend (have I mentioned how important it is to have computer geek friends?), I was able to get a good deal on a new power cord and it was shipped super-quickly so I'm back in business now! Oh and I did finally finish the video. Of course, when I went to burn the copies, after taking half an hour or more per copy, they didn't work. Every DVD I burned had a glitch and would stop playing at some point during the movie. Thankfully, Austin stepped in, transferred everything to his computer and burned the copies lickety-split for me.

Sooo, all is well. My video is done. Cheer is done. My computer is working once more. And next year when I open my big mouth and say, "I can make DVDs for everyone!", for the love of God, someone slap me!