Get the camera away from that dude!

Recent events reminded me of when the Mrs. HTF and I got our first video camera.  It was just a few weeks before we were married, which is a pretty odd time to record for posterity – however, this didn’t stop me from taking hours of video… 

Last week we took our old tapes into the Costco to have them turned into DVDs since our old camera died back when George Bush had approval ratings in the high 70s.  Yesterday we got these priceless DVDs and sat down to intently watch our past life.  Somehow while watching we found ourselves simultaneously horrified, troubled, and bored.  We clearly didn’t understand which parts of our lives posterity was gonna wanna see and for how long they would want to actually watch.  Let’s just say the OFF button should’ve been used way more frequently.  The video opens with a small crew in my apartment stuffing our wedding invitations into envelopes while I offer horrible commentary and occasionally pan over to the TV to video tape parts of an NBA game – and that’s pretty much the highlight of the next several hours of video.  My first words are, “Wow, I can zoom in pretty good with this thing…ok, now we’re zoomed out.”  Those are my personal highlights.  Yeah, there’s some quality stuff from the reception, walking out of the temple, and even a couple minutes of memorable honeymoon stuff.  But in the mean time we just recorded and recorded anything that moved or would perhaps move someday.  My commentary, while trying to be funny, comes off like an awkward walrus trying to perform spinal surgery – painful to experience and hard to watch.  I recorded entire shows from Sea World (honeymoon) and surely violated some copyright law in the process.  This was basically the only part my kids seemed to like watching though – mostly because of the seals with balls on their noses. 

The entire second tape is video of my first trip to Alaska – over Christmas.  In this video we attempt to, well,

narrate snow.

This is way harder than it sounds – there’s only so much you can say about snow, but not to worry, I said even more than that.  There’s also like 10 minutes of a moose in the driveway one night eating leaves off the tree.  This is cool for a minute, but then it’s just, pretty much like staring at your TV while it’s off.  One thing we did notice that gave us pause was how nicely and flirtatiously (meaning “with flirtation and/or cheese”) we used to talk to each other.  I blame that change on the 4 kids fighting upstairs about who ate the dart from the Nerf Gun.  Happily, as the years have passed we’ve taken less and less video and have tons of photos – this is safer if for no other reason than you can’t hear my voice on photos.

So if you ever do see me with a video camera – do us all a favor and take it away from me by force if necessary.

PS – we have like 15 more tapes to move to DVD, hopefully we got a little better once the kids came… but I kinda doubt it.