Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Reading to Samantha on Thanksgiving Weekend

This video report is of interest only to immediate family members.

My daughter brought her family from California to Oregon for Thanksgiving. We met my newest grandson, Jack, for the first time ... he had his first birthday in September. And we were amazed at how big my youngest granddaughter, Samantha, had grown since we last saw her two years ago.

On Saturday, the family gathered for a Spaghetti feed at my sister's house. After dinner, as we were trying to digest all that pasta, I gave Samantha her copy of "The Dangerous Book for Boys". I also gave her a second copy to give to my son's children, who also live in California.

Samantha liked the books, so she crawled onto my lap so I could read to her from 'her' book while she held onto the other book.

She liked the pictures.



Then we got to Page 53: "Famous Battles -- Part 1".

And the rest ... is history.



In case it didn't strike you immediately, my granddaughter is very expressive and highly opinionated.

She didn't get that from my side of the family.




Technical Note:
While I wanted to post these videos to share with my family, this is also a experiment in using BLOGGER (Google Blog) to post videos which are destined primarily for this blog.

I've been using You Tube as an 'upload application'. Sometimes, I don't really want to post to You Tube, and this is an attractive alternative.

For bloggers who, like me, are not using the New Blogger software, it's worth the effort to use Windows Movie Maker to do the first edit. Blogger doesn't allow you to edit (including titles, which I've used here) like WMM does. Also, I wanted to send small files to Blogger. The first video was originally 50MB, the second was 27MB. Blogger can handle them, but by using WMM to make 'less dense' (smaller) files, the Blogger upload/conversion process was shortened dramatically. It took me 3-1/2 minutes to provide shorter files to Blogger, and it took at least that much time to convert the resulting 5MB files to whatever density/size are provided.

Besides, I don't have to copy&paste the HTML coding that I get from You Tube, and my 'personal' videos don't end up on a highly visible website.

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