One of my favorite YouTube channels is a travel vlog by Darren... it is called ExploreList. Here's his latest video, about a day he spent at Scarborough, England:
At the end of the video he asked us to tell him about our favorite place to spend time when we were children. That question brought back a lot of wonderful memories about visiting Tilden Regional Park in in hills above Berkeley, California.
I should write about it more on my childhood memoir site: Cali Childhood. About six years ago I wrote 50,000+ words worth of childhood memories during a NaNoWriMo month.
I finished my video yesterday and uploaded it to YouTube. There were still a few things I could have done better - but let's face it - this is just a simple YouTube video and for me, these videos are all learning experiences. At some point you have to quick picking at it and upload it to YouTube, then move on to another project.
I struggled with learning the software programs, Audacity and Adobe Premiere Elements 13 - but this video project taught me a lot. The next one should be easier if I keep up the momentum to continue making videos regularly.
This is the book I reviewed: One Zentangle a Day by Beckah Krahula. I'm still working my way through the book, but I did enough to feel confident in recommending the book for anyone interested in learning how to do Zentangle art. This is essentially a thirty-minute per day form of meditation through focus on artistic process. It is easy to learn, and practical to use.
Thirty minutes of artistic focus calms and de-stresses us, and that's a good thing.
You might notice, if you go to the YouTube page for this video, that I included a lot of text on that video page. I'm doing that to help the search engines classify and understand my YouTube pages. I also place text in the Closed Captions (CC) section as it helps search engines rank a page as well.
I appreciate all subscriptions to my YouTube channel. As of today, I have sixty-two subscriptions - which isn't very many! I guess not too many people are interested in seeing an old lady's videos. YouTube seems more successful for the youth culture - with young teenagers getting thousands of subscriptions. To be young and beautiful helps, and they appeal to young YouTube users - teenagers - who have plenty of time to watch youth videos about topics important to them, like what makeup to use, or what clothes to wear.
Well, God bless them... and all that. I wish them well. But I'm still hoping to make my YouTube channel something older people (or anyone) would like to subscribe to.
After reviewing all the videos I made last year, I noticed my book review videos were getting more hits than any of the others, so I will be making more of them. After all, I'm the "Book Lady" on YouTube now. I love this persona.
One of the most frustrating things I do is... videography. I am trying to learn to use my new video editor. That's already a task. But the worst part of my video making journey is that I am not a speaker... I'm more of a writer. So getting my thoughts out there on a video is very challenging for me.
Case in point, here is one of my first videos ever. I tried to memorize what I wanted to say. It came out very stilted. I noticed that when I spoke freely it sounded better. I look like a scared rabbit in this video, and that summarizes my problem with video making.
Now you've seen my worst video ever. I keep that video on my channel to remind myself of where I came from. It is also a good reminder of what I'd like to include in my book review videos.
Background noise on that video is outrageous!! I still don't have a good camera.
My goal is to learn to produce better videos, that will gradually improve. I'd like to produce mini-documentaries rather than just splatter my life all over YouTube.
What I've done so far has been fun, a learning experience, challenging, difficult, and frustrating. However, I will continue on, and learn to make better videos in the future.
I am still dreaming of developing my BookLady YouTube channel, though I haven't added to it in months. What am I waiting for?
Last year I had a goal of creating 100 videos but I created only about fifty... and currently there are only 47 videos on the channel. I may have deleted a few. So I didn't achieve my goal and that is always a downer.
I was hampered by lack of a good video editor. When I ordered my new computer a few months ago, I had a video editor installed before Dell shipped it to me. My new video editor is lightweight - I've got Adobe Premiere Elements 13 - there are other much better (and much more expensive) video editors such as Adobe Premiere Pro CC - but what I've got is a good place to start and will be more stable and trustworthy than some of the free video software programs I endured last year.
Today I looked at my BookLady YouTube channel and found that some of the videos with the most views are my book reviews! I didn't make many of them last year because I thought they would bore people, but apparently the opposite is true. Fewer people looked at my walking and biking videos. Live and learn! I will make more book review videos in the future since they are so popular.
I've been a Bigfoot blogger for ten years now. Go ahead and laugh if you want to. It is weird how these things happen.
There's always been curiosity about the big elusive creature. Does anyone forget the first time they saw the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot video?
When my 2 youngest children were about ages 6 through 10 we took a lot of "home school field trips" and several times were in Trinity County, CA - to visit Weaverville, the Joss House, the museum there, and the area around Clair Engle Lake, aka. Trinity Lake. As we approached Trinity Center, CA - there was a Bigfoot statue, and I was immediately drawn to it. "This is what I've been looking for," my heart told me. "They're here."
Ever since I first heard about the town of Happy Camp, I wanted to be there. Happy Camp, CA is a very remote small town in the center of the Klamath National Forest in Northern California. On January 11, 2000 I moved into a cabin-like house there, surrounded by the forest. The house was just outside of the town, in a semi-secluded area. There were other houses nearby.
The town of Happy Camp is full of Bigfoot statues now, but when I moved there, the only Bigfoot statue was the one in front of the post office.
There were also "Bigfoot footprints" painted on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store, and many of the businesses in the town were named after Bigfoot. There was the Bigfoot Trailer Park, Bigfoot Towing, and the Bigfoot Car Wash. That was in 2000 - several years before JavaBob opened his restaurant, JavaBob's Bigfoot Deli. Now that is closed but there's a place called the Bigfoot Store that has a deli in it, across the street from where JavaBob's restaurant was.
Brandon Tennant of Idaho, and JavaBob Schmalzback in JavaBob's Bigfoot Deli late in 2005, in Happy Camp, CA. At the time we met Brandon Tennant, he was doing research while organizing a Bigfoot conference held in Pocatello, Idaho in 2006.
I was always curious about Bigfoot, and wondered why so few of the Happy Camp local old-timers had anything to say about it. They acted like it was a joke, but they loved the annual Bigfoot Jamboree, a three day annual festival over Labor Day weekend.
By 2005 JavaBob was president of the Chamber of Commerce and I worked in a small office across the street from his deli. The chamber needed a focus for marketing Happy Camp and chose to market it as an artist's retreat town. I told JavaBob that we already had a theme in the town - and it was (and still is) Bigfoot.
Anyhow, I got serious about wanting to find the truth about Bigfoot. I wanted to know why this town claimed a theme of Bigfoot but then denied any knowledge of Bigfoot sightings in the area. So I bought the domain name for my blog, Bigfoot Sightings, and started doing research.
I've never seen one, but many credible people have, and I know they're real. I collected no less than five Bigfoot sighting reports about sightings that happened within a mile of the cabin I lived in, there in Happy Camp.
When I moved to Idaho in 2013 I wanted to be able to continue Bigfoot research in the forests around where I live, in Northern Idaho. I live in Post Falls, which is on a prairie. No Bigfoot here! And I have no car anymore... so I can't do field research. But I do intend to continue working on my blog, which has been silent for many months now. I spent this morning "cleaning it up" - ie: making format improvements - and reading the amazing comments people leave there about their Bigfoot sightings.
I do believe I'll be blogging more there, soon. It is time for me to compile the rest of what I know about Bigfoot sightings in the Klamath River Valley.
...
I said yesterday that I might write more about Keith today, but I'm just not ready. Maybe soon, but not today.
1. In March 2013 Bob's instability and indecisiveness helped me reach a breaking point for my residency in Happy Camp and for the relationship. I became 100% determined to move and leave him, to the point that my emotions died. I truly felt emotionally flat and desperate to change my situation there.
2. I decided to move to Idaho, and proceeded to downsize. Bob wanted to go with me. I threw away bag after bag of needless things, gave things away, gave most of my books to the library book sale, gave writing books to the Chamber of Commerce, sold what was left of my furniture including my grandmother's bedroom set which I really didn't want to sell... but I realized the need to sell my furniture so I could move more easily. [It turned out to be a good idea.]
3. The day before my move to Idaho, Bob annoyed me for the last time by threatening to burn down the house with me in it, and I told him I never wanted to see him again. He finally (!) agreed to remove all his possessions from the U-Haul truck we were loading, and the house, and he vanished into my memory. I missed him for a while, but no longer do. I'm happy he's no longer part of my life. He is a narcissist and I needed peace of mind . . . and indeed, I do have peace of mind now.
4. I gave my car to Bob before he vanished. I gave my van to my son... neither were working well enough that I wanted responsibility for them anymore. I decided that I wanted to be car-less so I'd be forced to get more exercise - walking and cycling.
5. I drove myself to Idaho, but not before I nearly died from heat exhaustion while cleaning out the house I vacated.
6. I found a nice apartment in Post Falls, Idaho only hours before I would have been forced to live in a homeless shelter.
7. Two weeks later I walked into a church for the first time in many years, and gave my life and heart to Jesus.
8. I attended a lot of church services and Bible studies, and made new friends. All my closest friends here in Idaho are Christians.
10. I was baptized on July 4, 2014. Freedom in Christ.
11. I trained myself to ride a bicycle and took a 37-mile bike journey on October 4, 2014. I rode on the North Idaho Centennial Trail from the Washington state line to the end of the trail on the eastern edge of Lake Coeur d'Alene.
12. Now I'm in the process of moving again, to another apartment in Post Falls. I'm leaving a ground floor apartment to live in a third floor apartment. . . and I'm very happy about that.
- but this video project taught me a lot. The next one should be easier if I keep up the momentum to continue making videos regularly.
- but what I've got is a good place to start and will be more stable and trustworthy than some of the free video software programs I endured last year.
