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Rockylou – A 4H Winner

In 1972 a little 4th grader, named Rochelle, and her mutt dog Charlie won the Top Junior Exhibitor dog obedience title at the Humboldt County dog show. This was an exciting day. I had been diligently training Charlie all year long in our local 4H dog obedience chapter under the tutelage of my best friend’s mother, Mrs. Nichols. I trained for hours and hours, trying to get in at least a little everyday. During the final show performance I felt we had done a great job. They called out honorable mention…. nope… then 3rd place…. not us… then 2nd place runner up…. my heart dropped. I thought we had done at least well enough to get a ribbon. Then they announced the 1st place winner… #23. It was us! We had won 1st place!!! Wow, what a day that was.

Top JR Exhibitor
1972 Humboldt Dog Show
Rochelle Rogers

Rochelle and “Pooh Bear” Win 1st Place

The trophy was proudly placed on the mantle in the hallway of my childhood home on Elk River Court, on the outskirts of Eureka, California, until I moved away at 18. It has been on display in my own homes ever since. But the tail was broken off before it came to rest in my sole care. (See larger image on Flickr)

Below are a couple of photos I found of Charlie (who we fondly nicknamed “Pooh Bear”) and I growing up. He was my dog, my friend. He slept with me, shared an occasional Reese’s Peanut Butter cup with me, and loved to run along side the car as we got closer to home. (I now know from direct experience that the chocolate and running next to a car were not good ideas.)

The Rogers’ children in their Easter fineries with Charlie at Rochelle’s side.

Sadly, Charlie only lived to be about 4 years old. On our way home from a trip to town we let him jump out of the car window as usual to run. But this time he didn’t land correctly and rolled under the car. I held his trembling body in my arms as we rushed him to see Mr. Lochtie, the vet. But it was too late. He was dead. I was broken hearted and cried and cried. My dad and I buried him down by the Elk River creek under the tree house you see below.

Treehouse on the banks of the Elk River Creek behind my childhood home.

The trophy photo was taken with the Camera+ app on my iPhone for DS106 Daily Create TDC 751: “Take a photo of something that is sentimental. Explain your choice.” I apologize for the poor quality of the childhood photos. They were scanned many years ago by my sister when the technology wasn’t so great.

Star Spangled… WHAT?!

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Star Spangled What?! video link

Today’s DS106 Daily Create tdc597 was to “edit an existing video clip to include an unexpected object in the story.”

Video is my “thing”. Not so the case for many of the DS106ers. And I didn’t realize until I read a couple of comments in the DS106 Google + community today that some of you have felt intimidated to try your hand at the animated GIFs and videos from previous daily creates once you’d seen submitted projects. A tip for maximizing the value from this course? Don’t compare your art contributions to anyone else’s. Do what works for you. Do what you enjoy. Don’t worry about your level of expertise with the tools. We are all beginners in some areas and there are those with more experience we can learn from. The DS106 community is a supportive group of individuals who hold a space and offer encouragement for us to take risks and move outside of our comfort zone. It’s okay to be vulnerable here.

For me today that took the form of not pulling myself back. But I also decided to take on the challenge of seeing how quickly I could produce the video. (I really need to get some sleep tonight. Too many late nights working on DS106 stuff!)

B&W Chicken GIF courtesy of John Johnston

My first creative inspiration was to use John Johnston’s chicken GIFs: Red ‘Chicken Talking and his B&W Chicken (He would be considered one of our ds106 experts in the GIF arena.) Based on my personal experience this summer with a previous project [Talky Tina – Sweet as Tupelo Honey] I knew if I used the original GIF files in my Adobe Premiere Elements 11 video editor, I’d have to string together multiple copies of the still images to have continuous movement over several seconds. This would not be conducive to going to bed early. Ding! I could use my screen capture software, Camtasia, to actually capture the GIF in action over several seconds. It would already be in video format and could easily be inserted into any video I wanted.

Chicken Talking from John Johnston

Next, I started looking at YouTube videos made by other DS106ers. I downloaded a few of them to my computer with the Firefox Video DownloadHelper extension. Nothing was working. I then remembered an earlier daily create of my own, Speedy Star Spangled Banner. I thought it would be really funny to have John’s red ‘Chicken Talking’ GIF do the singing, but it took me a little trial and error to make a “logical” substitution of the B&W GIF.

My video editing software allows me to have several layers, and all I had to do was to put the video versions of the GIFs onto a layer above my original video. I then spliced out a segment at the beginning that referred to the previous daily create, added a video title image that comes with the program, personalized the text, rendered the video, and published it to YouTube.

In John’s podcast today, Evidently Not ChickenTown, he talked about how we can have a flurry of ideas after seeing other DS106 projects. Here’s proof.

Original Video:

Self-Reflection Tweets

DS106 Self Reflections

Tweeting about the DS106zone audio self-reflection assignment. Sean’s responses prompts a new parody assignment. While Alan shares it’s not all wine & roses.