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Once again I am so behind. My sister Michelle came for a quick visit.  We had fun hanging out, going for a walk and seeing a big black bear two houses away and wrapping in up with a visit to NYC.  We walked all over the place, went to a street fair, visited Empire state building and then of course a show.  It was also the first time I have driven into the city, which I swore I would never do.  Obviously I survived and have managed to do it a couple times since.  Though I still refuse to drive in lower Manhattan.  Chris Jr. has been to two Junior Proms.   Grandma & Grandpa Hendricks, Josh and his boys came for a visit and most exciting of all was Chris’s Eagle court of Honor.  We had lots of fun visiting NYC once again.  The kids got to go see Mary Poppins while Chris and I went to a street fair.  We did a boat trip on the Hudson River and finished up by going to a Yankees game.

It was wonderful to have family here for Chris’s Eagle Court of Honor .  Grandpa Hendricks  gave Chris a really nice eagle charge.  It was a very nice ceremony.  We are so proud of Chris.

“We will not get another dog!” (Famous last words). Not quite sure what happened. It could have been the pleading, or Kate’s poem from school where she wished for a dog. (or the other times she told us how much she would love a dog). In the process of talking our selves out of it we ended up deciding to do the unthinkable. One trip to the pound (where everyone was told not to fall in love with any dogs but did anyway ) and some Internet searching we found our puppy. When I showed his picture to the girls, Alex screamed excitedly and jumped across the lawn. I have never seen them all so excited. We planned to pick him up the following Sunday. We surprised the kids by making the three hour trip to Corning on Friday. He is a great puppy and loves all the kids. We have enjoyed having him. Even Junior loves the puppy (though he acts like he doesn’t care). The kids have been very helpful. Sarah has offered to have him stay in her room though she discovered it is no fun to get up at 5 to take the puppy out. (She hasn’t offered again).
We named him Bandit. He is a big time lap dog and spends his evenings curled up on one of our laps. So much for never owning a dog.

I’ve spent this evening getting all of the video in order that needs to be put onto the computer, and also getting video that was already in the computer edited and uploaded.  These are all videos of our kids doing various things, mostly concerts and plays they have participated in.  In total, tonight’s editing success was 9 small videos, and one large one.  The small ones are pretty simple, the large one got to be more complicated.  Then they have to be rendered/compressed for upload.  A 2 1/2 minute video takes about 5-6 minutes to render, while a 35 minute video takes 2 hours.  Our 2 1/2-year-old iMac is a 2.8 GHz dual-core with 4 GB of RAM, so it’s not a slouch (though the new Core i7 would be sweet).  After that, the upload – the 9 smaller videos totaled 655 MB of data, which on the download side of our cable connection would take about 10-15 min.  Uploading?  Not so fast – we’re looking at 3 hours and change (at a 512 kbps upload)!  Come on Time Warner!  Give me at least 1 Mbps upload!!

Well, anyway, thus begins the elimination of procrastination.  The videos I’ve put up tonight were from last year – a concert last March at the elementary, with Sarah in the band, and Allie in the chorus.  We also have a jazz band concert at the high school (yes, from last March too) that Chris Jr. played in.  The large video didn’t get uploaded yet (coming tomorrow, er, later today) – that will be the play the elementary school put on last year that Sarah had a part in.

The next one will be Allie’s play from last week.  Getting some pressure from the Missus on that one.  It puts me out of order, which bothers my OCD, but it will thrill my 10-year-old, which more than makes up for it.  Then it’s back to Jr’s end of year concert, and 6 hours worth of tapes to import, edit and upload.  (I love the HDV, but am tired of the import process.  On the lookout for solid state HD…)

Hopefully y’all will think they were worth the wait

Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/user/hendricksfamilyny

I’m putting up the videos from the piano recital and All County we had published previously on .Mac.  What this also means is that I will need to start working on editing video again… so watch for updates…

Hello again, hello.

We decided to move everything to WordPress because frankly, .Mac/MobileMe was just too flipping painful.  You’ll see our old entries appear here as we migrate them, and new ones coming up soon.  (Actually, the Plum Point post is new, but we backdated it because we never published it.  Take a look.)

We’ve been meaning to add a blog for a while where we can put out little updates on what we’re doing, but haven’t got around to it.  So here we go.  A little history on the picture – this is Dad writing his first talk for church when he is about 7 or 8 years old.  It was memorized prior to delivery.  Good times.