[ Anita ]

From the entry by PookyTam:

‘If it’s important to you, take the time to do it.’

That pretty much sums it up and is great advice even for things beyond writing.

Sometimes it’s good to take a look at life and calculate how much time you spend on different things each week. Then add it up to how many years it will be over the average lifetime (76 years). It’s shocking and can really put things into perspective.

For example, how many hours do I spend in front of the TV vs. doing something I love? Or do I love TV so much that the amount of time is justified?

And at the end of my life will I be happy with having spent x amount of time watching TV vs. x amount of time writing?

So I was sleepily browsing who knows what on the internet and stumbled on a site called Prelinger Archives. It’s basically a collection of old movies, ads, propaganda, and other generally derelict footage that probably would have been lost forever otherwise. A lot of it is from the 40’s-50’s-60’s, which really clicked with me since I’d been watching a lot of TCM at the time. I started to think about maybe doing a YouTube video that incorporated some of that footage.

Whenever I was listening to my iPod I kept an eye out (ear open? mind…well whatever) for a song that might work with something from Prelinger. ‘They Won’t Have Me’ by The Indigo Girls with all it’s imagery of old farmers and new subdivisions seemed like it would be fun to try. I wasn’t sure if it would actually pan out, but it turned out to be pretty easy. A few minutes of searching came up with all sorts of footage of farms, farmers, suburbia, and even the Subdivision Man lol. Awesome. I need to do more of this in 2009.

The video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It-ryeOjR24

The relay was great, this was the first time that I stayed for the whole 24 and it was a lot of fun.

Our team sold ‘lap trackers’ to help people count how far they walked during the Relay. The best part about the whole thing was that I got to meet a lot of awesome people :). I posted some pictures and blogged about it…

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=53239722&blogID=406196433