Info about what’s going on in my life or life in general
I’ve mentioned before that my brief video of Husky Homestead in Denali, Alaska has gone a little bit viral. What you not have noticed is that over the holidays it crossed the 100,000 views mark! I’m still somewhat stunned but it is fun to watch the number keep climbing on a simple 30 second video that I shot while on vacation. At present it’s up near 120,000 views.
Almost everyone’s career has some interesting moments, but how many people can say that their career has had enough interesting moments to fill a book, nonetheless a book that people would actually want to read? My cousin (first cousin, twice removed on my maternal grandmother’s side for you genealogy buffs out there), Theresa, can say exactly that. She spent her career as a member of the US Foreign Service. She was in Saigon, Vietnam during the Tet Offensive and again at fall of Vietnam. She was Consul in Cebu, the Philippines, chargé d’affaires in Laos, Ambassador to Guyana (appointed by Ronald Reagan) and Ambassador to Brunei (appointed by Bill Clinton) among many other fascinating positions and places.
I strongly encourage you to take a look at her newly published book, A Long Way from Runnemede: One Woman’s Foreign Service Journey. I’ve known Theresa forever and have always loved hearing her stories but reading them all in one place made this a book even I couldn’t put down. Besides, the fact that the cover features a picture of her standing in the Oval Office with Ronald Reagan has got to tell you the book is going to be interesting!
I don’t shoot many videos, but since my DSLR camera can shoot HD video, I occasionally shoot a few short clips while on vacation or of my 2 year old niece on special occasions. I’m not crazy enough to try and host my own videos so I use YouTube to host them and embed them on my site. I know they’ll get viewed on YouTube as well, but never expect many views.
Most of my videos have at most a hundred or so views and most have much less. Then there’s the 30 second video I took at Jeff King’s Husky Homestead in Denali, Alaska. it was getting a view or 2 per week until few months ago. I started seeing comments on the video. I never get comments on any of my videos. They started out as hate mail from misguided animal rights folks who don’t understand dog sledding. But then it turned into normal comments.
The part that I find astonishing is that while my other videos still have at most a hundred or so views, this video is now at nearly 33,000 views. I can’t explain it, but it’s fascinating to watch as people from over 129 countries have watched it. Besides in the United States, it appears to be most popular in Hungary, Germany and Poland.
So, feel free to check out what apparently 33,000 other people have already seen!
I was recently told by a someone whose opinion matters more to me than most that I don’t write in my blog enough anymore and that my weekly Twitter summaries are all that are there anymore. This post is my attempt at fixing that a little. If you don’t like reading things that jump from topic to topic you may want to click away now! You can consider this a bit of an omnibus update focusing on what’s going on in my life instead of just random comments on world events.
I’m back from my vacation in California. I spent a little under a week in Los Angeles County with my friend Marianne who I’ve not seen nearly enough of over the past decade. Besides doing a lot of long overdue catching up, we visited Griffith Observatory, Long Beach, the La Brea Tar Pits, Hollywood, Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank and more. And of course, we visited more than a few filming locations from the Back to the Future movies. You’ll be seeing and reading more about this great trip when I eventually get my photos posted online.
After many months of spending a crazy amount of time trying to find all the various pieces for the bathroom remodel, it was finally completed a few weeks ago. All of the hours taken up by searching for the the stuff we needed for that project can now be committed to other projects. The next big one is working on digitizing the dozens of VHS home movies that have been sitting around quietly decomposing in a cabinet. I wish I’d started that project about 5 years ago, but better late than never! Now I just need to get all of the home movies on film reels converted before “vinegar syndrome” does them in!
So, there you have it. That’s what I’ve been up to, plus working on planning a vacation to Michigan later this year. Now that you’re caught up, hopefully I’ll do better at keeping up with this my blog going forward.
My photos from Canada are finally online. We spent 5 days waking around Montreal and exploring the sites. All of the kilometers that we walked were offset by eating tons of amazing French food at a variety of sidewalk cafes. After 5 days of enjoying Québécois hospitality we rented a car and drove to Ottawa where we got to experience the British ceremonial and political side of Canada. I honestly did not how much there was that I didn’t know about Canada. It was a really educational trip. The last day of our trip was spent in Perth, Ontario, where we wentto the Perth Garlic Festival which was a ton of fun and a delicious experience!
The photos can be found in the photos section of the site.
I had no plans to sign up for Google Plus until I did it on a whim a few days ago. I never used Friendster when it was the big social site. Then when MySpace and its animated GIFs and embedded MIDI files came along, I never signed up. Then Facebook showed up and despite the fact that many of my friends and family are addicted to it, I never signed up for an account and don’t plan to do so. In general I’ve never seen a need to provide a forum where my coworkers can contact my family or my high school friends can contact my former employees, etc. If want to talk to a friend or family member, I can send an e-mail, send a text or call them.That being said, I do use Twitter and pipe my posts back to my own website. This is an important fact because I think I’ll use Google+ much like Twitter or my own site. I plan to make everything public even though Google+ offers some very granular and really easy to use privacy options should I ever want to use them. One of the main reasons I’ve avoided Facebook is their disastrous history of making people believe their posts are private and then violated their trust by somehow accidentally making their posts public. I’m not naive enough to think place blind trust in any company, but unlike Google’s “Do no evil” motto, Facebook seems to go the exact opposite direction!
Up til now, I’ve loved almost every Google product I’ve used in the past, so I do have high hopes for Google+.
Who knows how much I’ll use it, but you can find me on Google+ right here.
I just uploaded two new albums to the Photos section. They may not be as glamorous or stunning as photos of Alaska or Las Vegas, but some of the photos hold a special interest due to a tie to my family. While visiting a friend in Lewes, DE, we took some time to explore downtown Lewes including the waterfront and a historic churchyard cemetery. Those photos can be found in the Lewes album.
We also visited Fort Miles, a historic Army base at in what is now Cape Henlopen State Park. The fort consists of 15 observation towers (11 in Delaware, 4 in New Jersey), 10 gun batteries and other support structures such as barracks, etc. It was built during World War II to defend the mouth of the Delaware Bay from German ships and u-boats that might want to do harm to the vital ports of Wilmington and Philadelphia.
This facility holds a special interest for me because the people who assesed incoming vessels and decided whether the Army should blow them out of the water were US Navy sailors. One of those sailors on watch in Fire Control Tower #9 was my grandfather. While visiting Cape Henlopen we were lucky enough to be there on a day when the facilities were open for tours. We climbed tower #7 and toured gun battery 519. We also watched as renactors acted out a battle with the Germans that thankfully never really took place at Fort Miles. These photos can be found in the Fort Miles album.
When you think of Las Vegas, you usually think of gambling, drinking and general debauchery. Before heading there for a long weekend, I researched and found some fun things to do that didn’t involve getting drunk and passing out in the Bellagio fountains. It was supposed to rain on Saturday and Sunday so we ran around on Thursday night and Friday trying to do as much as possible. The only rain (and a little snow) that we got was during the night, but it’s a good thing we got an early start because we barely finished my checklist of places to see before it was time to fly home on Monday!
My photos from the trip are now online in the Photos section of the site.
I just posted the photos that I took at the Mount Holly Fire and Ice Festival. It’s a ice carving competition and chili cook-off. This year is was nice and cold and there was even snow on the ground which made it even more fun than the last time I went four years ago. Check out the photos here.
Time really flies. I mean that in more ways than one tonight. I noticed this video of the Challenger disaster on CNN.com because today is the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. It s the exact video that I watched live at my Grandparents’ house in 1986. It hardly seems possible that it happened 25 years ago. after watching the video, I thought about writing a blog post, but I felt like I’d written something about it already. I couldn’t figure out what would have prompted me to write about it in recent months. When I looked back, I realized that previous post was from 28 January 2006 on the 20th anniversary! Like I said, time clearly does fly by.