Good Show - Personal Best, Episode 274

There's nothing like a deadline to get things done! That's what our live YouTube show is for me. We've been doing it for so many years now that I have muscle memory for what it takes to put a show together. 

First, the topic

I need to come up with a topic by Friday morning and hopefully have a sketch of the outline. It's good if I can have the review questions written before I go to bed Friday night - start with the end in mind. If I know what I want people to know at the end, it's easier to put the lesson plan together. 

Then the materials and the learning

Saturday is a work day - find if I have  any existing videos that teach what I want. If not, then I need to record at least one. I really like the combination of live presentation with recorded segments. Then Sunday is putting finishing touches on the slide show and practicing the timing. 

This week I came up with the topic early Monday, perhaps too early because that allowed time for doubts to arise before Friday. The topic was google slides. Not a normal topic for us because our audience doesn't normally make presentations. But I just discovered some new AI features that I thought would e cool to show, and google slides is a good way to use photos in a slideshow with features that google photos doesn't have. 

While thinking about it Tuesday Wednesday, Thursday - I realized how much I didn't know about google slides, so I started learning. Hold on! I seem to be in process of building a class that could go for several hours here! No. Should I change topics? No. My point is that google slides is for other things, not just presentations. Let's stick to that. But I have to show a little of the basics. Ok, my outline is

Google slides basics

Use an extension for google photos slide show

Using new AI for creating a picture

Now it's Saturday, pressure is mounting. I need to make at least one video. I spend hours and I don't like the result 🙁 

I didn't have anything done on time, but it still came off perfectly

Sunday morning I got nothing! But the show must go on. I focus on my end result and crank out 2 new videos

I write the review questions. I come up with an idea for Jim to show how to collaborate with google slides. 

It's 2pm and we go live. 

It was great! It's almost like we know what we're doing after 273 times!! This was one of our very best. I ended up being very happy with my content, and Jim's production skills have gotten top-notch. No glitches. Great sound. We have fun and I think the people watching us do too.

Here is the link to watch the show: https://youtu.be/j4NN3KLkNGI Or you can always just go to YouTube.com/@geeksontour, open the Playlist for "What Does This Button Do?" and find Episode 274

I felt the same way after this show. I always review how it went and think of some things I could do better but I couldn't thnk of anything! The audience asked some really good questions too. It was a good topic! I might even say we've reached our peak. It reminds me of the FMCA rally at the Ohio university where all of our seminars were perfect. 

Local Diving - and Lobster

 Our dive club - UnderSea Adventurers, USA Dive Club for short, plans local dives usually twice each month. We took advantage this week and joined 6 other club members to go out on a dive to the Abby 2 reef, and one other whose name I don't remember.

I belong to the 80-80 club of scuba diving. This means I only like to dive when both the air temperature and the water is 80 degrees or more. This is still winter - March - so the water was 75 degrees. hmmm. But, it looked like a beautiful day - 84 degrees air temperature - and Jim wanted to go diving while it's still lobster season - August 6 - March 31. 

On the "Parrot Island" dive boat - going out the Hillsboro Inlet at Lighthouse Point

It was chilly, but it was a nice dive. Jim got one lobster on each of the 2 dives. He hoped for more, but that's still worthwhile. 

I posted the above photo on facebook with the words - Goin' Divin' with my favorite dive buddy. Who am I kidding? He's not my favorite dive buddy - he's my only dive buddy! Who else would 

• make sure I had air tanks that were full, 
• gather all my gear together and put it in the car. 
• Get the gear from the car to the boat
• Assemble my gear
• Watch out for me underwater
• Gather all the gear after the dive and get it back in the car
• Wash it all when we get home
• Put it away?

Who? Nobody, nohow - he's the best!

Oh yea - and catch some lobster for dinner!

Actually, this is a photo from another time. We rarely eat lobster the same day he catches them. We're pretty wiped out from the dive, and he's found that they come free from the shell much better after being frozen. We love having a freezer full of lobster!

Weekend getaway, peace, love, and vans

No travel on our calendar for February thru April. So, when I saw an ad for peace love and vans I said"cool" and showed it to Jim. He said "cool." So we went. It's 4 hrs away and starts on Friday afternoon, so we left Thursday and stayed one night at Hillsboro River State Park. Beautiful. And we took a bike ride before heading up the last hour to the event.

Friday afternoon was beautiful. We took a bike ride around the grounds. So fun to see hundreds of Vans. That evening was s'mores in the woods. Far out!

Saturday morning was a yoga class under the"taking tree" - that's when it started to rain. They moved the class under a tent. It was fine and the light rain actually sounded kind of meditative. 

Monday morning is when it stopped raining.

I felt so bad for the organizers and vendors. There were no buildings, everything was outdoors. Oh well, we got to spend time in our sweet van. We did check out a few others and saw nothing we liked as much as ours - nice.

And we when did a live show, with a little video of the event. Here's the video: https://youtu.be/KUZAljePyB0

 And here's the full episode Episode 272.

Not a perfect day

Our cruise ship next stop was in Hilo Hawaii. We were late, which meant that the people who were trying to get off the ship were backed up by at least and hour. AND it was raining. But we persevered and got off the ship to a waiting car driven by Arynne's friend Lizby. 

She drove us thru town and on to the Rainbow Waterfalls. Beautiful. 

Then a tropical drive to the botanical gardens that are so beautiful we hardly even noticed that it was raining. Yeah, right. Those flimsy ponchos don't do shit. We got soaked. And there were so many trails, one of us took one trail and another took another. How are we going to meet up? But we did. The gardens were so beautiful that we hardly noticed the rain. Besides, it's a rain forest right? It should be raining!

Look at the size of those leaves!

While I went touring with the girls, Jim, Devon and Jo Ellen went on the Volcano tour.

I think I had the better rainy-day tour, in the rainforest! They're supposed to be seeing the Kilauea crater here. 

Next up was the Booch Bar in Hilo. Did you know there is such a thing as a flight of kombucha?

I had previously arranged to meet up with Johanna and her husband Bill, who live near Hilo. I haven't seen Johanna since we were in grade schools together in Anchorage Alaska. 

Here we are - over 60 years later!

Here is Johanna with her husband, Bill

Day 5 Hawaii cruise

Next stop, Kona. We had booked a snorkel excursion and I almost cancelled it for fear it would be another rainy miserable day and I didn't want to be out on a small boat for hours. But Jim said, no, we need to get in the water at least once! 

Sure enough when we woke up and looked outside we couldn't see much for all the clouds and rain. Apparently the water was quite rough as well and delayed the tenders from starting their shuttle service to shore. They never did catch up all day long and everyone complained about spending much of their day standing in line for the tender .

Our excursion was scheduled for noon, so we had plenty of time. I took a hula class at 9. What fun. It was all about the hand gestures for 2 songs: ..shells, and Going to the HukiLau. Hula skills are divided into top half and bottom half. The top half tells a story with the hands while the bottom half does dance steps and hip motions with bent knees. The basic step is 2 steps left and 2 steps right with gently swinging hips - that movement is called 'Kaholo'. Then there is standing still and rotating hips in a circle- that movement is called umi. Our teacher told us "Don't do kaholo and umi at the same time" Sounds like words to live by to me! 😂

I learned that the fancy hip movements are from Tahitian dancing, not Hawaiian hula. Aha!

After hula it was time to get in line for our tender to shore and our snorkel trip. The sun was coming out and it turned into a gorgeous, hot, day.

Before going to the snorkel spot, the boat crew said we could spend a little bit of time looking for whales. Some call it whale watching, they call it whale finding. And they did! What a treat. We didn't see a breach, but the tail slaps we're impressive. 🤙

Then it was time for snorkeling. They had to get in the water in order to tie up to the submerged buoy, interesting. We brought our own masks and used their tiny flippers and then a snorkel. The water was 77 degrees we were told. Not as warm as I normally like it (over 80), but not bad. I was cold when we first jumped in but warmed up ok. Visibility was wonderful, very clear. Saw plenty of small tropicals '- lots of yellow tangs, black trigger fish, one giant trumpet fish and small cantina made up of volcanic rock with a little bit of coral growing in them. It felt great to be in the water! 

Then it was back to the line for the tenders to the ship. It was hot and the line was probably 200 people. NCL personnel we're hanging out cold towels with tongs, just like you get the hot towels to wash your hands at dinner, these were ice water soaked wash cloths to put in your head. 

I was SOO glad that Jim didn't let me cancel this excursion! What a fantastic day!