No More Minors in Our House

Well, when you take it a step, a day, at a time, eventually you get to the mileposts. Our most recent milepost marks the 18th birthday of our youngest Daughter. She's taking full advantage of her majority by staying out late every night. She will be graduating from high school in June, and then I think we'll be in for a wild summer ride!

Although it feels good to be free of the responsibility of raising children, I am not free from fiscal responsibility yet. It's a strange twilight, where we need to re-assess the roles we will play, and the amount of accountability we will assign to Daughter while she lives here (rent-free, for the moment.)

Getting the Stuffing Out

Thanksgiving Day, 2009
There were only three of us this year, because Pat went to Seattle to visit friends. We didn't take pictures, just this short video of Laurel unstuffing the turkey. In fact, next year, we may not even do a turkey, but may go out - there's more cleanup when there's the same amount of food and not enough people to make a dent in it!



I took the video clip with my new Flip Video camcorder from PureDigital Technologies. It's a superseded model - it can hold 60 minutes of footage, and the new models can do 120 minutes - but hey! it was less than half-price at Staples!

Flipped Out

I spotted it in Staples a couple of weeks ago and couldn't resist the low price - very deeply discounted from its original list because a newer edition is on the market now. It gets rave reviews from librarians, teachers, and Computer World magazine for its ease of use, so I decided to get one for myself: the Flip Video Camera. I've been taking it everywhere with me, and have a dozen 20-second shorts now. Here's one:



I'm taking it with me to Internet Librarian in Monterey next weekend, and plan to post a few videos from the conference here and on my work blog.