Dreams and movies. The simpler life

20221209

I can’t claim it came to me in a dream, but I did have an inspiration with regard to producing videos with Powerpoint.

I had been creating the PowerPoint, then simultaneously filming my presentation and having the computer capture my presentation slides, after which I would merge the two in my movie software. It required making a complete presentation without mistakes. 

This method should have more shortcomings than it does. I would like to use animations in my PowerPoint.  However, PowerPoint does not handle animations when you make a movie of your presentation. This is a longstanding bug that the monopolist is not in any hurry to fix.  Gates is spending his money getting us all extinct via the jabs – no interest anymore in fixing buggy software when he can improve a buggy human genome.

Bottom line, there is no disadvantage to adding the static slides after filming my face delivering the talk. There is considerable advantage in that I can read my text instead of memorizing it and re-record one slide at a time when I make mistakes.  You can see the result here on Rumble.  Amazon should post it here in a couple of days.  The lighting is bad – no electricity – but I was able to fiddle with the brightness and contrast parameters enough to make it acceptable.  I have also posted it to YouTube, where I have quite a few followers, but I’m not including a link here because Google is doing evil.  See Bill Gates and Microsoft above.

I now have to commit the speech to memory so I can deliver it Saturday at Toastmasters.

We are going back in time here in Kyiv. I think about that as I go to bed without light, wake up and shave in darkness, exercise and bathe by flashlight without hot water, and stay in bed for eight or nine hours a night because there's nothing else to do.

It's really not unpleasant, It calls to mind our ancestors who lived this way not knowing anything else. Every generation brought marginal improvements. Even I suppose those Stone Age ancestors in mammoth bone huts covered with mammoth hides must've come up with small innovations generation to generation. People sharing wattle cottages with their animals obviouly made stepwise progress.

People had a philosophy of getting by. My grandfather had a saying that we all learned by heart:

Use it up,
Wear it out,
Make it do,
Or do without.

That grandfather was a doctor. He could have afforded to be extravagant, but he wasn't. His one luxury was Packard car half a block long. But in terms of clothers, furnishings and food he was a simple man.

My other grandparents weren't given to aphorisms, but didn't have as much money. They led by example.

When my father died my brother and I surveyed his clothes and decided that there was nothing that even the Goodwill would want. Like a lot of older people, he had seen no need to buy new clothes for several decades. The one thing he had that I wanted was his Elk Volunteer Fire Department jacket.  It was in somewhat better shape than the rest of the stuff, but mainly I wanted it for sentimental purposes. Something I still wear to remember my father by.

This winter I succumbed to Oksana's blandishments and bought some warmer clothes. I mentioned that we had gone to a used clothing store and bought some things for Marianna couple of weeks ago. I had stumbled onto this store looking for a new coat for myself.

It took longer than it should have to realize that they were selling used clothing. Everything was in such remarkably good shape. I bought a couple of pairs of snow pants and a jacket for fairly reasonable prices. One of the fasteners on the snow pants is bad, so I wear them as pajamas, but the other pair of pants and the jacket are absolutely first-rate. All that for about $70. Why would you buy new?

This raises the question, how did they wind up in a used clothing store? Obviously the previous owners did not hew to my grandfather's aphorism.

The old clothes that I wear serve as biographical reminders. My oldest piece is a down-filled signal orange jacket filled made by Sierra Designs back in the 1960s when these things were new. My friend Jerry Gregg, after whom Eddie gets his middle name, worked in their store and gave it to me. I wore it all the time motorcycling in California. Oksana is the third wife to enjoy wearing it when it gets really cold. I too sometimes wear it around the house as the temperature hovers around 60.

The pants I'm wearing as I write this belonged to a suit dating back to my time with IBM, which ended 44 years ago. That was the last job that required one. The moths got the jacket but they left the pants alone. They are warmer than cotton, good to wear on these 20° days.

Next in antiquity is a pair of red wool socks I bought at the Boy Scout store when my son Jack, now 40, was in Cubs. They still keep my feet warm at night.

The Peruvian sweater I am wearing was a gift from my second wife Mary Ann, sometime in the mid 90s. I wear it every other day in the winter. It has lots of holes in the back from having been pulled over my head too many times, and a long rip in the sleeve that's going to come totally unraveled one of these days. However, it is been like that for more than a year. I don't particularly like its style, but it is warm. And conservative that I am, I don't want to wear any of my four good sweaters just for warmth. Those are for going out.

Up until this recent purchase my good jacket was a yellow one that I had bought sometime in the late 90s. It was new when we took a family vacation to Montréal in March 1999.

Those were the days when I had more money than I knew what to do with. Divorce cured that problem! This was a $600 jacket marked down to only $300. What a deal! I cannot imagine why it was worth even $300. It is lovely, but certainly no better than the jacket that I just got for something on the order of $30.  The yellow one has Bogner across the back.  Curious, I looked on the Internet to see who they are.  It is a German company whose jackets now cost about $2,000.  How can a jacket tbe worth that?  How do they justify 7% annual inflation from an already outrageous price?  The mind boggles.

That family trip to Canada is memorable. Our son Jack wanted to go snowboarding on Mont Tremblant. We all piled in the car went up first to see the Frank Lloyd Wright house at Falling Water, then we drove up to Montréal where we stayed in a bed-and-breakfast run extraordinarily well by a couple of very gay guys. I had stayed there before at a conference.

We went our separate ways on this vacation. Mary Ann and Naomi didn't want to bother with sports. They went shopping in Montréal. I took Jack and Suzy up on the mountain. Suzy didn't want to go, but at 10 years old didn't have much choice. Jack rode the ski lift up and snowboarded down all day. I spent the day with Suzy trying to help her to become comfortable with skis on the beginner slope. I didn’t miss skiing myself – it has always seemed like more effort and expense than it is worth. She complained all day about the cold and didn't get much exercise. And that was our winter vacation.

Anyhow, that $600 jacket is still in fairly a fairly good shape, and I wear it around the house when it isn’t cold enough to justify the orange one.

This morning Eddie and I went shopping for some presents to give to his friend Yarema as he visits them in Uzhgorod, on the Slovakian border, over the weekend. I gave him $60 to spend in the dry fruit store. He stocked up on all sorts of good looking stuff, as I bought a bit for our house as well.

A kid’s mind is a sponge. I recently described the lactose intolerance issue. Today it was epilepsy – we saw a woman in convulsions on the Metro platform. There were a dozen people standing around, presumably including people who knew her. After he got a good look I encouraged him to keep on walking. They didn’t need help. That occasioned a conversation about epilepsy, which he didn’t know about.

We talked about osteoporosis as we crossed the railroad tracks. I offered the opinion that we should walk down the stairs instead of down the slope. My bones are in pretty good shape for my age, probably because I get a lot of exercise, but it still doesn’t make sense to take chances.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where Oksana is leading a Christmas concert at Zoriana’s southern kindergarten, Marianna is sleeping, and Eddie is off for a music lesson with Mme. Maria. I left sheet music for We Wish You a Merry Christmas and White Christmas last night as I brought Zoriana to her lesson. I hope Eddie learns to accompany himself as he sings them.

Graham