Truly "on the road..."

Well, this weekend Dave and I were truly on the road, traveling. I was able to go with him to Hayward, WI to a wedding of a former co-worker.

Dave creates slide shows for friends and family members (and co-workers, or anyone who askes usually). For weddings, these slide shows include pictures of the bride as a baby, through growing up years, the groom as a baby through growing up years… then each of them as individuals as adults, then a section of them as a couple. Then he sets it up in a program, timed out to music. Once the program is all set, he goes to the wedding, takes pictures there, then runs to the reception area, and starts plugging them into the end of the slide show. He renders the video, burns it to DVD and plays it at the reception, then gives a copy to the bride and groom and their parents.

That is when things go well. From the beginning of this project, Dave has had problems. Two weeks ago, Dave took a week of vacation to give him the opportunity to get the main part of the slide show done. He commented the weekend before his vacation that his main computer was acting glitchy.

So, he decided to wipe the hard drive and just reload Windows and all his programs. He figured out a way of being able to do this without having to go through the laborious process of backing up a 120 GB hard drive. Of course, something went wrong, and he wiped the whole hard drive, losing some of the info that he hadn’t backed up previously.

Then the computer showed up with a virus, that took 3-4 virus scans, and 3-4 re-loading of Windows operating systems… and lots of extra time. By the middle of his week off, he was just about back to the starting point again, and then found out that he lost some of the photos for the slide show. One thing led to another, and the slide show got to a point where he could stop… the day before the wedding.

We got to the wedding and shot a bunch of pictures through the service, then raced to the reception hall, and started picking, cleaning up, and plugging in the pictures. Ok, well, Dave did that on my laptop while I prayed next to him that he would get it done in time. (There was an exceptionally short amount of time between the wedding and reception)
After finally getting the program to start rendering the audio and video to a movie file, we ate… or rather I did… Dave was too nervous. Then, of course, you KNOW something else went wrong!!! No matter what we tried, we couldn’t get the movie to burn to DVD. Sigh.

So we managed to save it as a file to the desktop of my laptop, and then from there just hooked into the projector, and played the file.

It took us about an hour after actually playing it to get the slide show actually burned to DVD. After doing that, we were too tired to do anything else but go back to the hotel and rest and watch a movie on TV. We took a slow, leisurely drive home, and just had a good time together.

It was a nice time on the road, talking and sharing. It just provided us with some time to connect, and relax together. If I had needed to stay home with the kids and send Dave up alone, I would have had a hard weekend, and Dave later told me that he wouldn’t have nearly had as much fun, and probably been more stressed if I hadn’t been there.

It was good to ride with him, to talk. To be silly. To laugh. To take our time coming home, knowing our kids were safe, and knowing that we could just be real together. It was so nice to have this time together. It helped us re-connect even a little bit. It made me feel less alone.

Thank you for those of you who were praying for us for this weekend. I think it helped. Who knows what else might have gone wrong!