For all of those faithful readers out there, here’s the scoop on our first anniversary celebration! Weeks and weeks of planning and it was finally time to unveil my latest DVD creation. Okay so I didn’t quite get it onto a DVD, but it was a good effort (grrr you Movie Maker!) Awhile back I ha asked my folks and Susan’s parents to scan in bunches of pictures of us when we were kids. I wanted to create a digital photo album on a DVD with music and all sorts of neato special effects. Susan’s mom almost took the surprise out of it, but I managed to dodge that bullet and Susan was still unsuspecting. After editing all the photos and creating a project in Movie Maker I thought I was all set. Apparently there’s a bug in the code which makes it very difficult to create movie projects greater than 20 minutes. This was all very annoying. I found this out after importing all those pictures (a lot!) I should have known something was up when it took like 45 minutes before my final project file would actually open up in Movie Maker… my movie was just over an hour long. And this was without any background music. Not wanting to redo all my hardwork, I fought with that program to the bitter end. I managed to encode a WMV file from Movie Maker and thought I was set. This file was about 250 megs and easily fit on my flash drive (I was doing this at work while I had free time… which was a lot of the time). Getting home I tried and tried to get that dumb file to encode to a DVD compatible format. For some reason the audio wasn’t working. I figured it had something to do with the WMV file. So using my work computer, I encoded an AVI file thinking the sound would work. One problem with that is the AVI file was only about 14.7 gigs. Not easily transferable… Anyway, back to two nights before our anniversary… I stopped by Meijer on the way home and bought some really expensive orange juice and some not-so expensive champagne. After our fancy dinner at the Doubletree Hotel I told Susan I had a surprise for her. I set up our round chairs in front of my computer, popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and made some mimosa’s. I fired up the WMV file I had (even though the compression made it a little fuzzy) and played through our “DVD”. Susan seemed to like it and I recently managed to get it onto a DVD (there was a bug in the script I was using to create the DVD structure, a fairly easy fix, but annoying as heck!

The next day I had another big surprise for Susan. We headed to the west side of Michigan to a place known as Silver Lake. If you haven’t been there, you should check it out! We stayed at a Jellystone Campground and didn’t even have too many arguments putting the tent up (it was close though…) I was pretty disappointed as we didn’t even get to see Yogi (probably because we didn’t have a picnic basket…) The campground was really nice and they had a lot of things going on… My plan was to check out the Sand Dunes. If you think that’s boring, guess again… they have four-wheelers and dune buggies to rent that you can take all over the dunes. Feeling a little hungry before we hit the sand, we went over to Whippy Dip. Although it’s famous for their hotdogs we ended up getting subs there. Be warned they come on garlic bread (just ask Susan how good mustard goes with that =P). After fueling ourselves up, it was dune buggy time! We headed over to the rental place and watched a really cheesy video about riding in the Sand Dunes. We then got escorted out to the dunes and were ready to get going. The guy told me to keep a good speed going up the entrance ramp and don’t slow down or I’ll get stuck. So, after making it up the mile-long entrance ramp, we met up with the guy again and he gave us some tips about driving around. “Just gun it!” stuck in my mind as I attempted to climb my first hill. Well we made it about 3/4 the way up and sure enough got stuck. A little wiggling and we managed to get free. The guy asked me how that went, and I said not so hot. Some more advice and we were off again (and stuck again not too long after). After getting stuck a couple more times and helping some other people get unstuck (at least I wasn’t the only one, heh!) we had one heck of a time! The time seemed to fly by and we needed to get the buggy back in. Only one problem… we didn’t know where the exit ramp was. After riding around, we did manage to find it and get the buggy back in time, whew! Man that was awesome.

Later that night we went over to Craig’s Cruiser’s. It’s a pretty neat place that has an arcade, go-karts, and mini-golf. Lucky us after paying for a round of mini-golf we got stuck behind a group that went really slow. The line just kept getting longer and longer behind us. It was funny though, we ran into some Yoopers, as they recognized the Miners shirt Susan was wearing. Oh yeah, we also started playing the last hole before the group ahead of us was done (whoops!). We hit up the arcade for a little video game action, as well as a workout. They had this jump-roping game I tried really hard to win the jack-pot, but couldn’t manage to keep up with the machine. We managed to feed some fish that day, but it was pretty dark and you couldn’t seem them very well. There was a ton of bluegill in the area, too bad there was no fishing from the dock, we could have had fish for dinner…

Later that night I had yet another surprise for Susan. By chance I had found out Dave Matthews Band was coming to Michigan in August (to the DTE Energy Music Theatre in Clarkston). Being sneaky I had picked up a couple of tickets and a shirt for Susan. I gave her the shirt that said, “Dave Matthews Band 2007 Spring Tour” on it. She looked at it and had the exact reaction I was hoping for… why the heck did he give me this shirt… we didn’t go to the concert. I then pulled out the tickets and told her, “maybe you’d want to wear it to the concert?” She seemed pretty happy about that! Before tearing down camp I had one more surprise in store for Susan… a canoe trip! I asked the person at the desk where we could rent a canoe for a short trip. He gave me a couple brochure’s and we were off. The river we found wasn’t too far away and the guy we rented from was really nice. And no… we didn’t even tip over, thought it was close. During the process of getting the canoe in the water, we found out the particular canoe we had chose was quite tippy, and we almost ended up in the drink! The guy said the river was pretty lame but I beg to differ as there was lots of foliage down in the river and it was quite the challenge to get through some of it All and all it was a pretty excellent anniversary, Susan’s planning the next one, though I set the bar pretty high ;). We did manage to get a couple shirts as a souvenir and had a fairly uneventful trip on the way home.