Annie, Sammy, and I are on our way to the Self-Reliance Expo in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
We hope all our subscribers and other friends within driving distance will stop by and say, “Hi” tomorrow (Friday) from 10 am to 7 pm and Saturday, from 9 am to 7 pm.
Lenie baked seven loaves of whole wheat bread to help us make the cover for Issue No. 114. Following is the first of a three-part video series detailing how we arrived at the cover. Jay Stoler shot and edited the video.
Here’s another video of our continuing deadline for the next issue. Forgive the poor quality, as it was shot with my old (three years old) Canon. YouTube supports a higher resolution, and we will retire the old Canon and use a new Casio (mine) and a Flip Video (Jay Stoler’s) in the future.
We continue to run tests of video on the blog to iron out a few technical problems. Google is so quick with its indexing that, before we could delete the test blog posts, it sent blog subscribers an alert notice that we uploaded a post. Sorry about that.
We’re doing a lot of experimenting with this blog, so be patient as we tinker with the videos we’re trying to upload to it. We’ve experienced a few problems but we’ll work out the bugs soon. As we struggle through the final days of deadline for the next issue, Jay Stoler has been shooting video of the staff working. Here’s a brief video he made depicting the goings-on at the office. We’ll upload others in the coming days and weeks.
Annie and Erik have been at our house for a week, and this morning Erik flew back to his Marine Corps unit in North Carolina to await deployment. So Annie and the grandkids will settle in here and wait for his return. There’s plenty to do as we are in the midst of deadline for the next issue, as well as my house remodel. Busy hands and a busy mind makes time go by quickly.
Following is a short video of Erik’s last night at our house:
We’re about 72 hours away from deadline for Issue No. 113, so I thought I’d do a bit more experimenting with video blogging by showing you how we put together an issue. This video is a bit long — about 9 1/2 minutes — but it is condensed (by Jay Stoler) from a 90-minute meeting of editors involved in the final layout.
Keep in mind that all of the articles under discussion have been edited and largely layed out. We know pretty much everything about the articles, art, and ads we are pouring into the issue. But it is still a very mind-consuming job with many details to consider. Hopefully, the video will give you a glimpse into how well we work on deadline.
