[Saturday 10/26: 5.37 miles in Starkville; 10/28 3.2 miles; 10/30: 3.2 miles; 11/2 3.50 around the lakes near our usual hotel in Loveland]
We are back in grandbaby country this weekend. I spent a bunch of time yesterday with each of them and it was great. GS-1 (Grand Son number 1) is talking and zooming around. We had interesting conversations about pre-school and about how eating and growing tall are (or are not) interrelated, all sorts of stuff. GD-1 is not quite walking but getting very close. I carried her a bit, and I also was walking-support for a series of laps around the living room. They seem to be getting along well. SIL is getting extra hours call-outs on his job and that is a combination blessing and curse, blessing for the income and curse because it cuts into the home time and leaves him more tired than usual.
Our travels went well. We started out Friday morning with a visit to MIL at the hospital. She was actually making a substantial recovery from earlier in the week. She was awake and active and moving around. Earlier we thought she might be in a dire position. So that was really nice!
We flew out of Memphis, which is over 2 hours drive from home, so there was the drive.
Then we hit some road debris just near the airport and had to change a flat tire at the threshold of the economy parking ramp.
But with those hurdles, we still made it to our flight, got to Dallas, had our change (with about an hour delay) (oh we also ate some BBQ at an airport restaurant which was tasty but about 2.5x the normal price – situation normal there) and then flew to Denver.
We had some delay at the rental car place where there were lots of customers but few customer service people. That took about an hour. And we drove to Loveland arriving a bit too late for a quick check-in with the stars of the show, they had all gone to bed.
Our rental car this time is a Toyota Corolla with a real ignition key and 30k+ miles on it. It drives fine and the seating is acceptable.
I am back at our usual hotel at which we get a good rate due to being the workplace of a relative (by marriage). I haven’t seen him so far this trip but I hope to before we leave.
I have done a couple more streaming things on YouTube. There is a morning livestream that I sometimes watch, sometimes participate in. And he is not on every morning. So I decided to do a place-holder live- stream on those days when he does not. I’ve done that three times now and I’m working the kinks out of my technical and software setup. I have had a few people watch the live stream and a few make comments but no one has come on video with me, yet.
I went and bought a headset with integrated microphone for my cell phone. That’s what I used this morning and it was a great improvement on the microphone that is in the cell phone.
I bid on a couple of JVC video cameras on govdeals but they went for the $250 range and I didn’t want to go that far on my first try. I’m also watching the SLR style cameras, some of those are specifically equipped for live stream video creation.
Also on the camera front I did get my old CCTV camera sorted out with the appropriate connectors such that I can use that with my laptop for streaming. It has a “warm” color and it has pretty interesting autofocus which will work on things which seem very close in, maybe an inch or two from the camera. I can put my hand in front of the camera and it will autofocus and I can see my fingerprints on my fingers very clearly.
That old camera has a serial connection also which will take VISCA commands and there appear to be some libraries for coding up those kinds of commands. So I might look into that to see if it does anything I would want to put knobs on.
I did a little practice youtube with that which you can tell by the warmer color.