Dr. Wife and I took a cruise for our honeymoon aboard Royal Caribbean‘s Explorer of the Seas. The artwork impressed, delighted, and even confounded me.
As such, I put together a brief video showcasing some of the art onboard the ship. This video only captures a small fraction of the collages, paintings, photographs, mosaics, etc., aboard Explorer of the Seas. The selections were often odd, but they really fit the atmosphere of the ship, and added a touch of elegance and class to the cruise.
Last Saturday I wrote in detail about the three-soundboard setup I used for a school play. It’s a rather technical topic (although I don’t get overly technical with it), but I made a little video that will either a.) clarify how the setup worked or b.) deepen readers’ confusion.
Let’s find out which!
The cruise bug has latched onto me with its luxurious pincers and won’t let go. Dr. Wife and I enjoyed an amazing honeymoon on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, the Explorer of the Seas, which visited the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas. It was my first cruise, and I loved it.
Naturally, I took the opportunity to film some silly YouTube Shorts, three of which I’m sharing up today:
In my never-ending quest for lo-fi, low-effort YouTube (and blog) content, I make the most of whatever limited assets and time I have to churn out highly-compressed but—I hope—charming content for the masses.
Such is the case with today’s post. I made this video with just one picture I took with my iPhone SE’s camera (mainly to show Dr. Fiancée that I was playing as Blackbeard the Pirate in Civilization VII). I recorded the voiceover with the Voice Memo app on my phone, and used iMovie (again, on my phone) to put in the picture (three times) against the voice message.
Apparently, when I send the finished video file to Telegram, it deeply compresses the video quality (although I think it does the same if I save the video to my phone and upload it to YouTube from there). The most it can muster is 360p, which might as well be a VHS recording that I’ve sloppily converted to a digital format.
Whatever the case, the video was a fun experiment. I hope you agree!
For the first time in awhile, I have a proper, full-sized Phone it in Friday with three videos. It helps that I’ve been recording myself playing hymns a lot more.
Here are three recent videos of yours portly playing hymns; each is played on my maternal grandmother’s Kimball piano, which I had moved to the house this summer:
Yours portly, much like Michael Douglas, struggles with impatience when sitting in traffic, especially construction traffic when there appears to be no construction work taking place.
The South Carolina Department of Transportation has been resurfacing a portion of the highway that I take to get to work every day for over a month. That is fine—I like the smooth roadway. What is not fine is that they have been starting work during morning rush hour.
Indeed, they started the road work the first week that public schools returned to classes—right in front of the elementary school in Lamar! They continued making similarly boneheaded decisions like that throughout August. The first day I reported for teacher workdays, they were doing heavy construction at a busy four-way intersection that is the main thoroughfare for people coming and leaving town.
Last week, I sat for thirty minutes waiting for a worker to turn the sign around to “Slow” so we could get through. I should have been to work five minutes early; instead I was twenty-five minutes late. I was so frustrated, I began shouting at workers—dozens of whom were sitting on equipment gawking at their phones—to “get off your phones and get to work!”
That wasn’t very Christ-like of me, and I have repented for that, but it put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Fortunately, I did not have class first period that day, so I was okay; it just irked me to no end.
I was so livid, in fact, that I called my State Senator and left a message. I never have received a call back, but in my message, I begged him to talk to SCDOT to consider starting their work after morning rush hour—at 8:30 AM instead of 7:30 AM.
I also took a short video of the lazy sign worker ogling his cellphone:
In a sweet attempt to help me cope with the lack of air-conditioning in my car, Dr. Fiancée bought me a little fan in the shape of a robot-boy (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through the link at no additional cost to you). While the little guy can’t put out enough air to be a reasonable replacement for A/C, he’s a fun and whimsical little addition to my car.
He’s a very Dr. Fiancée-style gift. She is very good at finding thoughtful and unique gifts that are both practical and mildly absurd—one of many reasons I love her! She gets it from her mom, who is also a great (and prolific) gift-giver.
But I digress. I made a little video of my robot fanboy, and it’s quite ridiculous:
Yours portly is worn out after the second week of school, so I’m keeping it quick today: I’m sharing a video of some baked potatoes—and the recipe for making them yourself.
It’s been a patriotic couple of weeks, and yours portly has fallen woefully behind on uploading hot new content to YouTube (and this blog).
The solution? Phone it in with an impromptu, live rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the National Anthem of the United States.
My school had a home [American] football game on Friday, 1 November 2024. Yours portly had neglected to recruit a student to sing the Anthem, as is my school’s Friday night custom. I decided instead to play it on my sax once I realized my mistake.
When I got to school that night, it hit me that I’d made a terrible mistake: I’d left my beautiful blue Slade saxophone at home! But yours portly is the king of the last-minute solution, and I remembered that I had a student’s horn in my classroom.
Fortunately, the kid had some good reeds (I owe him one), and after a little warming up, I was ready to roll!
Yours portly was a bit late getting Halloween decorations up this year, but with the Spooktacular looming (it’s tomorrow night!), I had to get things done!
Naturally, that meant partaking in one of my favorite October activities: pumpkin carving! Today, I’m going to share a couple of videos of my pumpkin—and Murphy!
The Portly Politico 