Here Northwest of Philadelphia in the countryside, it's been one sunny day after another. You wake up toasting, hot already. The day has begun because princess is awaking late, around 10am, after having gone to bed late...quelle surprise! Each day is a succession of hot perfection- blue sky and sun, sweet dappled lighting and crisp green trees. Fat bumble bees hunting for nectar in delicate lilac coloured trumpets, their big fuzzy voluptuous behinds hanging out of the flower. Bugs and grasses singing with the Earth instead of a symphony of traffic, commuters and concrete. A pleasant and welcomed shock to the system. And in the evenings, fireflies floating and zipping through the cool dusk air. There is always one wild loon of a bug zipping around crazily while the rest buzz along and take it slow.
We sat and watched the fireflies from a step a few nights ago. It was beautiful, like someone had laced a huge tree with tiny Christmas lights that move, on random mono colour pulse setting. The tiny lights contrasting on the dark silhouette of the trees. They make me happy and are great entertainment. We should consider introducing them in regions to boost morale. Introducing things...that always works splendidly right? What could go wrong?
And I can see it all. From the small double pane Dutch farmhouse window where I sit editing day after day. I am editing a video and have 1 hour of selected footage that I have painstaking collected and must delete down to 12 minutes!
'I say, 12 minutes...too short my good man, too shot! By Jove, you'll have to do away with a lot of good stuff'.
'Indeed Sir, quite right'.
But my servitude had come to and end! The video was uploading in the full glory of a great fiasco yesterday. Why such a great fiasco you ask? Well, because it's me and because of Murphy, you know, that guy and his Law. That's the funny things about deadlines, you work right up to them no matter what. By you I mean me of course! However, I do think the majority of the population works right up to a deadline. We need a goal, something to work to. Why we cannot trick ourselves into to thinking the deadline is a day sooner then it really is I'll never know. Oh wait, stop there, in my case the deadline really was 14 hours earlier. Hooray for global jet setting and time travel. And so, at 8pm on Monday night here I sent my video into the future, to 10am Tuesday morning. Neat huh? It would have been neat and relaxing, had it all went well, or smoothly or just went.
The great file uploading fiasco: With an unsatisfying short 2 hours to deadline, I exported the movie out of it's program, quickly and thank the Gods without hiccups. I then upload it to the equivalent of the digital devil- file sharing programs! *gasp* Why this is a slow, tedious and difficult process in this day and age, I'll never know but I am putting it on my list of things to complain about when I am one hundred and sixty year old and have no teeth. This is walking to school in the snow, uphills both ways...barefoot...naked.
Uploading, first to one site and then another, just in case something should go awry. Little did I know that awry was
exactly what it had in mind! The first site was keen to calculate how long I would be on the edge of my seat for, waiting for transfer. The time counts up and down, down and up as it calculates your fate and you chew your nails waiting to see just how long it will take to upload. It counts up, 8 hours 'Oh, my life is over' and the down 1 hour 'Im going to live!' and then 1 hour and a half 'Dah! Cutting it close my friend'. It turns out, the timer comes from some other world where minutes are not 60 seconds because after 10 Earth minutes, the timer moves only 2. You wonder if the people who run these sites simply put the timer there to lure you into a false sense of security after having conducted market research on the number of their customers who throw their computer out of multi story windows while waiting in fruitless endlessness for completion.
All the while I'm thinking 'Why is today not yesterday? Then it wouldn't be tomorrow already'...confused?....very.
And so the first file uploaded just before the deadline....and had a mental breakdown. Queue, the honorable and most distinguished second file! The second file uploaded around the deadline and did not like the cultural differences between America and Australia. It should check out China and have a melt down then. Ah ha! Was it not lucky that I started a third stealthy file then? huh? huh? Why so much repetition? The internet must be munching away on data purely because of duplication! So by my midnight, after 2 phone calls to tomorrow, 4 computers doing my bidding and 1 reluctant assistant, my video was uploaded, functioning or not, to 5 places and in 2 different file types! Success!?!
