Happy Birthday Anna!

She's my favorite big sister, the ideal big sister, really. All you little sisters out there may contend with me, but for me and who I am, I need Anna for my big sister... no one else will do. She's talented and beautful, but she makes me feel talented and beautiful, too. She's inspiring! Funny, happy when things are hectic, a natural leader, creative, quick to laugh... she's Anna, and she'll tell you so in everything she does.

Here she is looking down at an infant Zuki last summer.

Anna's FIRST NIGHT home she went upstairs "just for a minute." I had to come looking for her, camera in hand, of course. I wish I were filming when she woke up...or I should say when I woke her up. I earned the punches I recieved.

Here she is, with pretty much her whole body in the bush, tying her camera to a limb in an attempt to get the perfect shot of us around the New Year's fire.

And here she is giving Zukiswa her first piano lesson. Who would ever think that we would be old enough to be holding a sister's little one on our lap? I like this picture...look at their faces, each is totally absorbed in what is going on with the keyboard.


Happy Birthday, Fee-fee!
(or is it Foo-foo? I forget.)

Good Times at FHE

Okay, okay, the video didn't work yesterday. I tried again this morning. It should work now....and it does! I hope you people like it...I hope it makes you laugh!

I don’t attend FHE very faithfully. I go to the ones I think will be fun, or when I remember to go, or if I had a Bishop’s interview the Sunday before and been admonished to attend… but when I heard that last week’s FHE was going to be filmmaking, there was no question that I would be there. And I was. And I had the best time!
First we had a quick lesson on script writing. We were told to come up with a story in 6 sentences, with NO dialog. I couldn’t come up with anything right away, and I began to worry that maybe I’m not a creative person after all…but as he moved on to illustrate the difference between a wide shot and a close-up, and I zoned out, I came up with the perfect idea. I didn’t have any trouble selling it to my group, and off we went to the Bel-Air parking lot. Here is the result:

Whahoo! I’m prodigiously proud of it. And of Whitney. She was an incredibly good sport. I don’t know if I would have sprawled on the asphalt for an FHE activity, but she did it with good grace…despite the bruises she was giving herself. She showed them to me yesterday. Bruises all over her knees. I feel sooo bad! I think Justine had the easiest job out of the rest of us…she got up in a shopping cart and sat in it for most of the process. Girl with camera in shopping cart…when you don’t have a dolly, it’s the next best thing. (oy, my back!) Chrystal gets producing credit because those are her shopping bags filled with odds and ends from her trunk. (One of the bags has an 8 inch ceramic gargoyle in it. Talk about odd.) A producer's job is to make what the script calls for possible, and with all that stuff in her trunk, she did. Not to mention that one of us would have gone over budget spending enough money on junk to fill three shopping bags. I had total fun. My only regret is that we had to film it in the evening; its too dark. I think it would have been more funny if it was high noon and we could've made Whitney sweat. I've had a blast editing it, too, upstairs, cracking myself up in my room... I wanna do another one! Tomorrow!

Yay! I finally got a video posted! The trick? Borrow your brother's memory stick and upload the file at work where there is broadband.