Nana

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  • 01 Feb

    I Bent My Wookie

    For years I had a lot of random stuff decorating my bedroom, mainly carryovers from things I had in my college dorm room that really had no meaning.

    Now when I look around the room, whether I see something on the walls, on my desk or dresser, I can think of at least one story about that object and a person tied to it.  I think I’m going to share some of those stories, though it’s very possible I’ll get distracted and this will be the first in a one-part series.

    Today I want to tell you about Chewbacca.  Anyone worth any pop culture salt knows who Chewbacca is, but you don’t know this one.  He’s much smaller, coming in at about 3 inches in height, but don’t let his size fool you. He’s still a badass.

    I got Chewie on Monday, December 29, 1997.  Before you get too frightened at my awesome recall skillz, I have to admit that on my own I would have at best guessed the year.  I was a freshman in high school, and the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., had an exhibit called “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth” (note the very 1997ness of that website).

    In a word, it was awesome.  The exhibit had the suits for Chewie and Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2, a Stormtrooper and others, along with the models for all the different spacecraft including the greatest ship ever made: the Millenium Falcon.

    December 29 was during our Christmas break at school, and I remember my mom and my Nana picking me up from track practice along with my little brother (a huge Star Wars fan).  You needed a ticket to get into the exhibition, and thanks to my penchant for collecting stubs from just about everything I’ve ever been to, I still have that one:

    After we made our way through the exhibit, we naturally ended up in the special Smithsonian Star Wars gift shop.  I browsed around for a little bit looking at the admittedly cool stuff, but there was nothing I couldn’t live without.  Nana, however, insisted that she buy me something, so I went over to a series of bins with the smallest items I could find.  They were little figurines of all the major characters, and I settled on Chewie, by far the best character in the series.

    For a long time he resided on my various desks, but now has a far better home in my quasi-entertainment center guarding the Blu-ray player.

    By cjhannas Nana nostalgia Uncategorized
  • 24 Mar

    And You May Ask Yourself, How Did I Get Here?

    If you have been reading for a while, you may know this blog started on MySpace — which I’m told at least one person still uses — before moving to its current location.

    This set of posts dates back to mid-2005, but really the groundwork goes back a bit further to some things many of you don’t know about.

    Most writers have a distinct style you can pick out if you read enough of their stuff, and what you might call my “voice” really started during my junior year of college when I took over writing the weekly sports column in our school newspaper. It was a space where I could write about pretty much whatever I wanted, and experiment with different ways of breaking rules English teachers had drilled into my head.

    Two years of that column produced some of what you might expect, and some slightly different stuff.

    But I guess we can actually take one more step back, to my freshman year of college. That’s when I started my first website on GeoCities (which I’m sure nobody still uses). It was called The Ert Movement, and basically sprang from the idea that if something can be inert, why can’t the opposite be ert? The overall content is, admittedly, a bit ridiculous, but it was another place where I could experiment with a different writing style and see what this whole Internet thing was about.

    The Ert site eventually became a “real” website when my brother and I bought a domain and started using a web hosting service.

    Later, I used the same host to store most of the pictures you see here on the blog. Sorry to anyone who was looking through the archives in the past few weeks — we changed hosts and the pictures were down for a little while. But we’re back, so no more blank boxes.

    The Ert site, which is still up for those who want some interesting reading, has a section called “Journals.” The posts are short, sometimes crazy, and a few of the later ones are actually represented here as well. Towards the end of actually updating the site, I got really lazy and just had my brother post some of the latest blog entries so we had something “fresh.”

    But if you read some of the journals, I think you can see the very beginnings of what has evolved here. Here are a few quick favorites:

    Soda cans + college kids + hot glue = masterpiece

    Non-power windows confuse a nice young woman

    In graduate school, I had to make a personal website for an online journalism class. The main part of the exercise was posting a personal story, which in my case was about my grandmother who had died a few months earlier. I later added a longer story — one of my better ones — about a family at our church who lost their mother to brain cancer, which I had written for a college feature writing class. The site also has a section of quick stories I wrote during a trip into Washington, D.C., one day that involved picking out a person I saw and making up their story.

    So add up all those things, plus newspaper and magazine articles, and the countless TV/radio/web news scripts I have written professionally, and here we are.

    Hopefully a few people have enjoyed reading.

    By cjhannas ert Nana Uncategorized writing
  • 25 Feb

    Working for the Memories

    Last week I posted an audio story about how my mom and her family communicated with each other by tape when my grandfather was deployed in Vietnam.

    I mentioned the incalculable hours that in some way went into making that post and said I would explain some of the background work you didn’t see.

    In 2009 I was working part time for a company that among other things converted all kinds of old media to digital. That included things like 35mm photo slides, 8mm movie film, reel-to-reel audio tapes, records, VHS tapes and cassette tapes.

    Sitting in my parents’ basement were a box of reel-to-reel tapes, a few movie reels, a film projector and a reel-to-reel player. Since I learned how to use that older equipment, I set to trying to digitize my grandparents’ old stuff.

    I started with the audio tapes:

    Which involved this machine:

    A few years earlier, my younger brother and I had tried to use the machine, but couldn’t quite figure it out. Turns out it was broken anyway. After opening it up, and a quick (lucky) find on eBay, I had a replacement belt for one of the motors and a working machine.

    The transfer process can sometimes be a bit convoluted. In this case, it involved running an audio cable from the tape player to my camcorder, which was in turn connected to my computer. Slightly complicated, but it worked.

    Things went well for a few tapes. For being as old as they are, they sound remarkably well.

    Then while I was playing a tape, a loud BANG and a puff of white smoke came from inside the machine. I quickly unplugged it, recovered from a minor heart attack, and found that it had just blown a capacitor. I had to wait a few days for the new $0.15 modern capacitor to arrive, but it was pretty easy to solder in place and finish the recording process.

    Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I listened the audio files from each tape on my computer. Using Adobe Premiere editing software, I was able to make little clips of each section that sounded like something I might use in the story.

    I just happened to be going to dinner with my parents, and brought along a (very cheap) microphone and recorder on the off chance my mom was willing to sit down for an interview. I was kind of surprised that she immediately said yes, and her insight I think added a lot to the story I was already forming in my head.

    The next day I started writing the script, but stopped after about a page. What I had wasn’t terrible, but I just wasn’t happy with the direction it was going. Mainly the issue was that I did a lot more of the setup before you ever heard any of the old audio, which is really the whole story.

    I stepped away for a day, and on the Metro ride into work I brought along a notebook and started over. It took a second night of writing on the subway, but I think the result was much better the second time around.

    The next step was recording my audio. Without access to a recording studio, I opted for the next best location — the closet in my bedroom. With the Flashlight app on my cellphone lighting the way, I was able to record my track and feed the audio into my computer.

    From there, it was just a matter of using the editing program to splice together my audio, the interview with my mom and those small clips I had pulled from the original audio.

    The post last week included two pictures from the era. Those are part of more than 1,700 of my grandparents’ 35mm slides that I scanned in 2009. Just like the audio tapes, the pictures are things I had never seen and provide a look into what their lives were like back then.

    They even help connect to our family today. In some of the pictures you can see a striking resemblance between my mom and aunt and some of their kids. The backgrounds of the photos inside their various houses are interesting too. They show a lot of the artwork and decorations they had that were the treasured keepsakes in their house when we packed it up five years ago.

    Many of those things are in our homes today. For example, check out the wall behind my grandmother in this picture:

    As I type this, I can actually reach out to my left and touch one of those scrolls, which are hanging in my bedroom.

    Here’s a bonus piece of audio (50 seconds) from the tapes that didn’t make the original story, with my grandfather talking about where he got the scrolls:

    So, lots of overall work, but definitely worth experiencing those memories.

    By cjhannas audio family Nana Poppop technology Uncategorized
  • 17 Feb

    Voices From the Past

    Some of these posts, I admit, take really no forethought and about three minutes to write.

    This one doesn’t have much text, but I assure you I couldn’t begin to count how many hours went into it.

    It’s a radio story — think “This American Life” — so you’ll need about 13.5 minutes and either some speakers or headphones.

    It might also help to have a picture of the people involved so you can have something to look at while you listen:

    Enjoy.

    Next time, a little about how all of this came together. Stay tuned.

    By cjhannas audio family Nana Poppop Uncategorized
  • 24 Aug

    No Lady, I Rode in on Pixie Dust

    Since at least one person found this entertaining, I thought I’d share with the masses. Today I did something quite dumb and ended up in a situation in which I could do nothing but sit down and laugh at myself.

    I went to my grandparents’ house to do a little work which involved going up to their second-floor porch. You get up to the porch by going out a door attached to one of the bedrooms. That is the only way in, and the only way out…unless you are like 12 feet tall. I did the spackling I went up there to do and proceeded to turn the knob on the door to get back into the house. The door was locked. The keys were on the kitchen counter. I am a freaking genius.

    So of course while I was up there and didn’t know I was locked out, there were people everywhere walking by with their dogs, kids, etc. The second I find that I’m locked out…nobody. Not a soul for a good 20 minutes. So I pondered my options, which included popping out the screens and hoping a window was unlocked (none of them were), jumping to the ground below (I value my knees), or waiting until someone finally came along.

    Fortunately, No. 3 eventually happened. I asked a woman if she could go around back and let me in. This woman either didn’t live in the neighborhood (which has pretty much identical houses), or didn’t realize there was exactly one way to get onto that porch. She said, “You want me to just walk through these people’s house?” I kindly informed her that it was my grandparents’ house without mentioning that I hadn’t exactly just materialized on this porch out of thin air or climbed up there on an invisible ladder…there was a key involved, I just don’t freaking have it, thanks. Fortunately my charm (or helplessness) was enough to get her into the house and for her to unlock the door.

    By cjhannas family Nana not smart Poppop Uncategorized
  • 06 Jul

    Encore

    I’ve got a weird exhausted numb frustration vibe going on. The past few weeks have been a strange series of things getting bad, then not so bad, then worse than they were, then a little less bad and then worst and then somehow better. Getting through Saturday should help.

    There’s nothing worse than sleeping a lot and waking up completely exhausted, though I guess I’ve never gone through a weekend so exhausting on so many levels. Then there’s having to sit in a class and listen to a lecture or try to write a story when you want to be someplace else.

    Being done with these three classes, the finals, the getting stories published after being hung out to dry, the constant fear of spelling something wrong and getting an F…and then the viewing and then the funeral.

    Sunday is the start of better things.

    By cjhannas Nana Uncategorized
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