Erik's Blog

I’ve been playing around lately in After Effects, which is more or less “Photoshop for Video”. After Apple’s dumbing down of iMovie (Apple dumbed something down? Imagine that!) last year, it’s refreshing to get back to editing videos with an actual timeline and keyframes.

Our little primate specimen decided that everyone should be up and active at 7:30 AM every day this week, so I’ve seen every sunrise so far. Monday’s was beautiful, but I just enjoyed it without recording it. On Tuesday, I actually got out the camera and recorded the area of the horizon where the sun appears. And on Wednesday and today the sky was gray and boring for the sunrise.
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I’ve been wanting to make this particular timelapse video for a long, long time. Oddly enough, it was a Viagra commercial I saw the other day that played a candle burning in reverse (obvious imagery) that made me finally decide to do it. I used some birthday candles that we’ve been using for Nora’s birthday parties, which, by chance, are “sparkler” candles that not only relight themselves when extinguished, but also send off sparks every so often. The camera was set to take a photograph every three seconds, so the majority of the sparks were missed, but several of them where captured. What surprised me about them was the obvious rotation of the burning projectiles, resulting in squiggly lines of fire in the photographs. Behold!
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I’m a bit of a NASA TV addict. I particularly love watching live shuttle launches and ISS docking maneuvers. The fact that we can launch ourselves up out of our atmosphere and rendezvous with a space station moving at 7.7 kilometers per second 340 km above the Earth blows my mind every single time. Yesterday, as I was watching STS-129 approach the ISS, I had to pause the video to do something else, and when I moved the Quicktime slider back up to the live feed, I noticed how much cooler it all looked at accelerated speed. So I saved the feed I’d been watching, sped it up twelve times, and put some music to it.
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Lots of walking on Sunday exhausted me, so I went to bed very early. When the 7:00 Monday morning baby feeding time arrived, I was ready to get up and start my week early. I could see just a hint of light in the east, and something about the clouds told me that it was going to be a lovely sunrise.

My intervalometer, the gadget that attaches to my camera to tell it to take a photo every five seconds, broke about six months ago. It just stopped working consistently. The new one that I ordered came in a few weeks ago, so I’ve been itching to try it out.
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Nora, we’ve recorded the size of your hands and foot again in a clay keepsake. Recently my parents sent us a new shipment of clay keepsake kits. You requested that one of them be sent to your friend, Matteo, in Brussels, and we kept the other two. Since we used one when you were three months old, we thought it would be nice to do one at six, nine, and twelve months as well. Luckily the package arrived during your six month birthday party. That weekend, we sat down to knead some clay…
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I do have to admit that feeding Nora vegetable puree is actually kind of fun. After the first feeding, I realized, “So this is what bibs are for!” After the second day, it occurred to me to ditch the bib, as the shirt underneath always got stained anyway, and why wash two items when you can only wash one? A feeding session seemed like the perfect occasion for a timelapse video. So here we go…
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I recently tweeted that:

Daughter’s current mobility status: Can’t crawl, can’t sit up, but won’t necessarily be in the same place you left her 5 minutes ago.

Which prompted one wiseass comment asking if I was alluding to teleportation. The truth is that I don’t fully understand her current method of locomotion. It has to do with raising her feet, sometimes grabbing them, letting them fall to the side, and then rolling back over to her back. Somehow her finishing position is not the same as her starting position. When repeated multiple times, she can move quite a ways.
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Previously on The Activity Mat Chronicles…

You are about to witness what Nora does all day between the eating and the pooping. She’s always been a fan of the supine position, preferring it to any inclined sitting position. And with her recent interest in physical objects, both looking at them and, to a somewhat lesser extent, manipulate them, she’s been enjoying the stimulus provided by her activity mat. She’s also a big fan of pulling her dress up to her mouth and sucking on it. Her dresses spend most of the day soaking wet from slobber. We joke that we should buy her cheap dresses and really elegant underwear, because it’s the underwear that’s most visible.
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A friend of my parents gave us a "clay keepsake" gift. I had never heard of such a thing, but the value was immediately obvious to someone who has photographed his infant daughter’s body with a quarter for scale. The idea is that you flatten out some "clay" (really some kind of space-age polymer), press your kid’s hands into it, place it in the oven (the clay, not the kid), and what you get is a keepsake that will let you remember the size of your child’s hands at the time of the molding. Including the 15 minutes in the oven, the box announced that the whole process "takes only 20 minutes from start to finish!" Yeah, right…
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This video has been sitting on my computer for a month now, and I finally got around to uploading it. No doubt we all look similarly twitchy and ridiculous when we speed up video of us falling asleep, but I think Nora looks particularly so. It’s not a great video, but I figured I’d share it anyway. It’s funny to watch her belly go up and down in the times when she’s not thrashing around.
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