Tim hiked a High Peak today and I was left home alone. It’s a good thing because it was cold outside and I had plenty to do. I wanted to finish my two rainbow blankets. Naturally there’s a problem. First I didn’t have enough yarn to keep weaving and took a trip to the not big city (mostly small haven) 45 minutes a way and bought one skein of eight colors to finish my project. Oops. So much for my weaving calculations. Then I became so enthusiastic about the first blanket, I didn’t leave enough warp for the second blanket. So the first blanket is 46 or 48 inches long and the second is 21″. Good for a newborn baby for a few days. I now have to bind it to make it. They are beautiful though. One is a twill and the other is plain weave.

While I wove, I had another project to keep me busy (in addition to keep the wood stove going). I am converting my VHS tapes to digital format. To do it, I bought a video converter, the Diamond One Touch.
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After working through a couple of kinks, it worked great. I plugged RCA wires into the VHS player and connected to Tim’s computer with a USB. Not exactly one touch, but close to it. I had a couple of glitches. Tim’s computer kept not quite going to sleep, but would lock down despite power settings, which said never sleep. After a search, I found the solutions. I had to disable the setting which said, on resume, display the unlock screen. Voila. I no longer had to sit at the computer swiping the touch pad every five minutes. There was initially some terrible audio static, which went away, perhaps because I moved the VHS and computer apart.

I had a chance to watch my old family videos in the process. First let me say I have the absolute cutest and sweetest kids in the world. Just sayin’. We were mostly a Christmas, birthday and sports video family. I learned a few things I the process. My kids got way too much stuff for Christmas, or I let them down big time this year with only a white elephant exchange. Audio recording should not be on during football games. I have a 90 minute graduation film, bought from the school, with about 10 minutes of footage I really want to see. My son’s swimming coach critique gave me a few pointers I may incorporate.

What really struck me though, was the responsibility I have to my family. At some point, my father converted all his old 8mm tapes affectionately known as the Lynne Bahlkow story, to VHS and gave the tapes to his three kids. As the oldest, I had the most footage by far. My younger sister was a newborn, next she graduated from high school and then became a parent herself. Now it’s my job to get the VHS to a format that my kids can use and look at in the future and then ultimately convert to the next generation to keep our family film history alive. I’m going with MPEG 4 for now.