I finally found a program that I could use to crop my video, but for some reason, the cropping is designed to slowly widen the screen until everything that you want cropped out is visible. I’ve been hunting through my dad’s CDs (which come from computer mags and always have free or demo programs to try), but nothing so far. Really, a two minute job is now turning into a week-long saga.

Good news is that last night I sat down and made a puppet to photograph for my pattern; the pattern should be finished and ready for publishing in the next two days. I’m hoping to get a few more patterns finished by the end of the week, so I can fully relaunch the store with a lot more products.

I do apologise for the lack of puppetry-related postings, but until I get this stuff done, I’m pretty preoccupied. I’ve got one very major hurdle to fix for the store - the shipping methods, which currently don’t do proper calculations in the backend - which means that the generator may be offline for longer than I planned.

Although I enjoy the opportunity to learn and to do everything myself, it does mean that things get time consuming. And as you can see from the above, sometimes things that should take a short amount of time end up taking forever. I’d cave in and buy a video editing program, but when the cheap ones go for at least $100, it doesn’t seem feasible for a one-time use thing.

But hey… I can say that I’m looking forward to getting all the products ready, and that I’ve got a lot of great stuff planned. And that thank god I bought some Bugs Bunny cartoons before I went to Perth; I don’t know why, but cartoons always cheer me up, no matter what they are. I bought a DVD though that has a sort of retrospective of WB Looney Tunes, and watched them the other night at 3am until I fell asleep. Never underestimate the power of a good cartoon. :lol: 

In other good news, my parents have decided to take the family overseas next year, and it looks as though we’ll all be heading to Europe for three weeks. Yay, free travel! Even better: having gone to Perth, I now know that I can handle travel much better than I thought, so I’ll actually get to have fun while I’m there… Although, I’m sure I’ll end up needing a holiday from my family when I get back  

But the bad news of the week is that my cat - who is about 13 or 14 - has a heart murmour. It could be just an inflamed thyroid, but it’s still sad to realise that he’s getting old. I love cats, and I adore my little cat. (Right now, it’s synchronised sleeping; the cat is on my sister’s blue fur bean bag, and the dog is in his bed next to him)

… Right, well I’m going back to hunting for a way to get this video done. Before I pull my hair out.