Mystery Illness Solved / Bryan Moves / VHS to DVD Project Complete!
Since July, I've been dealing with a mystery skin illness. I mentioned in my last couple entries that I was seeing doctors and dermatologists about the problem and after getting a biopsy done, I finally have my answer: Lichen planus. It appears that, once again, my immune system has decided to go all crazy and attack normal body parts. In June of 2012, it was Alopecia areata. Then a year before that, my doctor discovered a thyroid issue that could be caused by my immune system slowly killing the organ. It appears that my immune system wants me dead. I had my blood drawn earlier this week for a special test to be performed to see if there are certain antibodies that my immune system is needlessly producing against the normal functions of my body. If I do have such a disease, there is no cure and I'll be spending the rest of my life just battling the symptoms, such as alopecia and lichen. In the mean time, I'm on topical steroids for the lichen and it's slowly vanishing. I'm not thrilled that my body is doing this, but at least the next time I get a mystery illness in the future, I'll know that it's just my immune system and not some horrible or rare deadly infection.
Bryan, who still lives with his mother, completed his move to a small hamlet outside of Salem, Oregon, earlier this week. Much like Ryan's move a few weeks ago, it came as a sudden shock. They moved down there to be closer to his mother's family as well as to get back into a real house instead of the attached townhouse they lived in for a short few months while here in town. It's going to be quite an adjustment for Bryan, who now has to try to cram all his stuff and live in a room that's nine feet long by ten feet wide. Plus, he still wants to continue working part time as a janitor at the Zoo, so his commute is a 100-mile round trip. We ran the numbers and discovered that he'll have to work two whole hours at the Zoo every time he goes in simply to pay for the gas necessary to make the trip in his SUV. He's already part-time, so it's nearly pointless to keep the job. He's too broke to move out and get his own place, so it's a rough situation.
More than a year ago, I promised to take my family's large collection of VHS videotape home movies and digitize them onto my computer so I could turn the video into DVDs. It was a daunting project simply because of how many VHS tapes my parents had. Something like twenty tapes. Each tape had to be digitized which took weeks of watching the tapes roll to make sure it worked. Then every digitized video file had to be cut up into separate event segments, cleaned up, researched, and organized before finally being converted to the DVD format with custom DVD menus plus packaging and custom DVDs. For more than twenty cassette tapes-each tape with up to six hours of raw footage-it was simply a huge project. And because it was my family's history, I had to do it right. Earlier this year, I finished digitizing and converting the much-simpler VHS tape collection of Nicole's family, but progress on my own family's tapes stalled since then.
So while I feel bad that it's taken me more than an entire year to finish this project and get it done, I'm proud to say that it's finally complete and that it's a true family treasure, nostalgia trip, and unique new heirloom featuring dozens of family members both living and since deceased from all over the country. Altogether, there's twenty-one hours and thirteen minutes of footage covering my family's history from around 1987 through 1999 all spread out chronologically over six DVDs. I'm relieved that I can finally toss copies of these discs at my family and put this project to bed once and for all. The plan is to surprise my family (Whom have by now nearly forgotten all about this project) and hand over copies during Thanksgiving dinner next week. Here's a photo of the final product: All six discs in a nice clean case with artwork. Whew!!
Bryan, who still lives with his mother, completed his move to a small hamlet outside of Salem, Oregon, earlier this week. Much like Ryan's move a few weeks ago, it came as a sudden shock. They moved down there to be closer to his mother's family as well as to get back into a real house instead of the attached townhouse they lived in for a short few months while here in town. It's going to be quite an adjustment for Bryan, who now has to try to cram all his stuff and live in a room that's nine feet long by ten feet wide. Plus, he still wants to continue working part time as a janitor at the Zoo, so his commute is a 100-mile round trip. We ran the numbers and discovered that he'll have to work two whole hours at the Zoo every time he goes in simply to pay for the gas necessary to make the trip in his SUV. He's already part-time, so it's nearly pointless to keep the job. He's too broke to move out and get his own place, so it's a rough situation.
More than a year ago, I promised to take my family's large collection of VHS videotape home movies and digitize them onto my computer so I could turn the video into DVDs. It was a daunting project simply because of how many VHS tapes my parents had. Something like twenty tapes. Each tape had to be digitized which took weeks of watching the tapes roll to make sure it worked. Then every digitized video file had to be cut up into separate event segments, cleaned up, researched, and organized before finally being converted to the DVD format with custom DVD menus plus packaging and custom DVDs. For more than twenty cassette tapes-each tape with up to six hours of raw footage-it was simply a huge project. And because it was my family's history, I had to do it right. Earlier this year, I finished digitizing and converting the much-simpler VHS tape collection of Nicole's family, but progress on my own family's tapes stalled since then.
So while I feel bad that it's taken me more than an entire year to finish this project and get it done, I'm proud to say that it's finally complete and that it's a true family treasure, nostalgia trip, and unique new heirloom featuring dozens of family members both living and since deceased from all over the country. Altogether, there's twenty-one hours and thirteen minutes of footage covering my family's history from around 1987 through 1999 all spread out chronologically over six DVDs. I'm relieved that I can finally toss copies of these discs at my family and put this project to bed once and for all. The plan is to surprise my family (Whom have by now nearly forgotten all about this project) and hand over copies during Thanksgiving dinner next week. Here's a photo of the final product: All six discs in a nice clean case with artwork. Whew!!