More videos of the crazy lights

As promised, here are more videos of the house in Windsor, CA (read the previous blog for more info). What a great place to live. Sorry if your connection is slow--these will take awhile to load. They are between 10 and 30 seconds a piece. The shorter ones are short because it wasn't as cool of a section of the program, while the longer ones get cut off at 30 seconds because that is the longest video my phone will let me record if I am going to send it as a message.

If I have time after the Christmas Eve service tomorrow, I will go film it with my video camera and try to put it up sometime in the next week. If I don't get it up by then, Merry Christmas!



In the following one, you can kind of see the inside decorations and the paint job on the house which looks like a gingerbread house.



Below: The house has a face, and the mouth sings "You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch." The car that drives up in the middle of the video is the one that I mentioned came to pick up a kid who lived there.



The rest are all from "Wizards In Winter" (Trans Siberian Orchestra), which has the best programming.





The grand finale is already up on the previous blog. So check it out over there.

Christmas Lights in Windsor (awesome video)

Julie heard about this house from her boss. So we drove there tonight. The whole neighborhood is really lit up. Some houses were pretty atrocious. This one was kind of ugly, but it was also amazing. I think it is not as classy as the house that was made popular on YouTube, but it was also cooler in some ways because there were mostly Christmas lights, and not inside lights. Also the house had a facade on every surface of its front that made it look like a gingerbread house. And one of the garages (the one on the right) has a real batmobile in it. Weird.

Another reason this house was better than the one on YouTube is that it takes about 7 minutes to drive there, so it's a lot better.

Here is the last clip I shot with my cell phone. They had the music on a radio station that played for about 2 miles around the house. The garage was opened, and there were Christmas-y things in it.



Sorry about the cars driving in front. This was the best part of the show, and 2 people decided to leave right when I recorded. Earlier, a car pulled up right in front of the house, and we were kind of frustrated, until a teenage kid walked out of the house and got in the car. It must be weird to live either in this house, or next door in the little cul-de-sac.

I will probably try to post the other 4 or 5 videos I have on my phone, or maybe go tape it with my video camera.

Safeway

Every time I go to Safeway, I use Julie's Safeway Club Card number. I don't have a card for it, so I just put in her phone number. I signed up for a card a few months ago (June or July), but it was late at night and there was a line, so the clerk just set up the card and told me to fill out my info later, so it probably won't work.

I am really into getting airline miles all the time. I flew a lot for all the missions trips I was going on and I managed to get close to having a free domestic flight on United. Since United is partnered with Safeway, you can earn United miles when you use your club card. Julie has a pretty decent chunk of miles too. So I really want to make sure we're getting miles when we shop there.

Whenever I shop by myself, I use Julie's card and pay with my credit card, and they usually just say "Thank you" at the end of the transaction. But 3 out of the 4 times I've gone to Safeway with Julie (both before and after being married), we used her club card and my credit card, and a really dumb thing happened. Safeway clerks are always supposed to say "Thank you, Mr. So-and-so," or "Have a nice day, Ms. So-and-so." And they get your name from your club card or your credit card, if you use either.

Usually they read "Ratiani" and don't even try, but when I pay and use Julie's Club card, they always say, "Thank you, Mr. Swinburne." And they always say, "Swine-burne." Julie always laughs as we walk away. I told her yesterday as we were walking away from the store that at least "Ratiani" is intimidating enough that they don't try it, whereas "Swinburne" seems easy enough to say that they all attempt it and fail miserably.

Also, I realized that in Sonoma County, things are liberal enough that a large chunk of the married population does not have the same last name as their spouse. So even assuming that Julie and I are married and sharing a Safeway account (which we are), it is not a very safe assumption for a Safeway clerk to make that we still have the same last name. By the way, Julie legally still does not have the same last name as me.

The Christmas Star

Lately I haven't had much time for creativity besides when I get to create a logo at the printshop. The only other thing I really do is make slides and backgrounds for church. I want more than just a gradient. I kind of like the slide backgrounds to look like stage lighting. I usually start with a blank photoshop document, and by just using solid colors, gradients, and filters (and creative blending), I can get some cool looking backgrounds that kind of look like the Windows Vista startup screen or the Mac standard background (the purple spacey thing).

I made one the other day for our young adults' group meeting, and figured it would maybe work for a song background with some tweaking.

Well, I was just making a slide for the Christmas Eve service and I wanted to find a picture of the Christmas star. So I googled "Christmas Star" and didn't find anything I liked. I did find this:



So, I tweaked what I had made in photoshop to give it the traditional Christmas star shape at the center of the light source. I think this might be more what it would look like if you were in outer space near the Christmas star and could see the swirling gas clouds around whatever the light source was.

End of the semester update

I don't know who reads this anymore besides 2 or 3 people, but that's OK. I still need to write because it is good for me. I would like to get back into it more.

I have not had much time for blogging lately. As I've mentioned, I'm working 2 jobs--20 hours at church and 20 or so (between 15 and 30 really) at a print shop as a graphic designer. And I just got married, and I have been going to school full time at the Santa Rosa JC.

This is finals week. 2 of my classes were short classes that ended a couple weeks before I got married. 2 just finished, and I have one more class that ends on Wednesday. They were all online.

I am done going to school for now. I took the classes for a few reasons: to learn new stuff, to have fun, and to enable myself to become more creative. I did all those, then started working on an associate's degree. I don't really care about the degree very much, so in and of itself, it's not a reason to keep going.

It was not very fun anymore, since I was busy, and while I definitely have empowered myself to be more creative, I haven't had time to apply my new skills creatively at all.

And as for learning, I learned a lot. I can do all sorts of stuff in InDesign and Photoshop, which makes my graphic design job really easy, and I am very efficient at doing things that took me and their previous employees a lot longer to do. As for the webdesign classes I've taken, I can make standards-compliant websites with cool features like drop down menus. And while I don't need a web editing program to do any of that, since I know all the code, I can use the best one available (Dreamweaver) to speed things up.

But, I am really glad I don't have to take classes. I will probably start back up at some point. It is really nice to have my student loans from Simpson in deferment, and I don't know if they will remain so if I don't keep taking classes. I would like to learn some more about video editing, photoshop's more obscure capabilities, and flash animation.

Hopefully in the next few months, I can do some creative things. First off there are a couple wedding videos I need to finish, and then my own. Also, I bought ProTools this summer to start recording more music, but I haven't had time to even install it. I would like to redesign our church's website. Right now the pastors are going through a process to define our vision more clearly. Once we do, there will be new verbage and imagery to capture that, and a new website and potentially logos and graphics will need to be developed. That will be a lot of fun to do.

Speaking of recording music, the best produced CD of the year just got re-released in a deluxe version. I'm talking about Coldplay. And the coolest thing is that they released the extra disc as an EP. I just bought it. I'm listening to it for the first time. I am pretty excited that in about a minute, Jay-Z is going to come on during a Coldplay song. So as for this blog, I am going to stop so I can listen to this collaboration. (Did you catch the words stop, collaborate, and listen in that last sentence? (did you catch my re-ordering to match Vanilla Ice in the last parenthetical question?)
.....

And...after hearing the collaboration, I don't really like it. It sounds very added-in later, even though I think that Jay-Z was there during the recording process, because I seem to remember reading about that in the Summer of 2007. But now at least I know what the song is about, since his rap clarified that. Still a good buy overall, if you liked the last Coldplay album.