January 7 – “The new toy”

We found Mom on the floor again the other morning … of the spare bedroom.  She wasn’t hurt or anything, just couldn’t get up.  Best we can tell she made a wrong turn after a bathroom trip and ended up sliding in slow motion off the side of the bed onto the floor.  Then last night she was up literally all night.  Chris was right by her side, too, patiently directing her to the bathroom or back to bed.  I finally got up around six, so I’m on shift now to keep her from falling.  Hope I can do somewhere close to the job Chris has been doing so she can get some sleep. 

After church I started playing with my new toy, the VHS to DVD converter.  It does way more than I wanted, so I had to wade through all kinds of extraneous (although very cool) bells and whistles just to come to an understanding of the “capture” command.  Nothing would work like the instruction manual said it should, though.  I finally tested out the VCR to see if there was a problem there, but it played just fine (Well, just fine for a VCR.  After all, this is the world of the DVD and blue-ray).  So my next step was to tinker with the cable connections.  Believe it or not, the thing that finally worked was forgetting about the hot shot S-video cable I ran all over town looking for.  I took it off completely and managed to get a picture using just the two other connectors.  Good enough for what I was looking for at this time. 

One tape was called Nathan skating highlights.  It was he and some friends roller blading, and it included the infamous scene of him rollerblading off our roof when he was fifteen or so.  It wasn’t in very good shape, though.  There was a lot of skipping and looking like the top of the screen was on the bottom and the people were cut in half.  I’m still playing with all the details, but I did manage to get a tape digitized that my uncle had put together with all our old home movies from when I was growing up.  From there it was easy to simply drag it over to be copied onto a DVD.  What I didn’t expect was the DVD creator on the computer to create “scenes.”  We tested it out and enjoyed old home movies on the TV.  Mom even enjoyed it.  We caught her waving back at the little tykes on the screen, and every so often she reacted as if she knew someone.  Couldn’t ever come up with their name, but I tried to supply that when I could.  It turned into a fun hour and a half or so.  Maybe I can start a business.  Know anyone who needs VHS tapes transferred to DVD?  What would be the going rate for something like that, anyway?  We could always use the extra money.  Hmm.  I think I’d settle for a few more of those fun hours with Chris and Mom.

Psalms 55:6-8 says, “I said, ‘Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!  I would fly away and be at rest — I would flee far away and stay in the desert; Selah.  I would hurry to my place of shelter, far from the tempest and storm.’”

Father, I’m not so much interested in hanging out in the desert, but that place of rest idea sure sounds like a good one.  Amen.