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Friday, November 10, 2017

The Memoirs of an Eighty year Old- Episode XXV

Episode: Grandma’s 75th Birthday

Hello readers! I couldn’t post in October because I had other things to work on and also because grandpa and grandma were busy and my stock of episodes was over. This month I’ll be posting only one episode (pre-written).

So it was our dear grandma’s birthday in October and she was turning 75! It had to be something special, right? But well you guys know her so you also know how tough it is to convince her to celebrate her own birthday. Sigh!

But we just couldn’t sit idle now, could we? So I hit upon a plan which was of course executed by granddaughter NS. She is currently staying with them, how lucky for us!
For grandpa’s birthday a scrapbook was made with handwritten messages, but.. but.. grandma will not read all those pages. And also giving both a similar gift, not really innovative. ;)

Then flashed the idea of audio and video messages in the brain. We could make her sit and listen to those, right? Haha.. joke…

We asked for messages and got a few audios and many texts. The audios were, of course, amazing, the one by their daughter Sj (3rd child) was the first we received and the best, in my opinion. (She’s a teacher!)
So albums were searched, pictures collected and constant reminders were posted in the Whatsapp group. But we needed icing on the cake. It was grandpa’s message. When the video version had the voice too low, we shifted to the audio version. He was such a sport, recording a 4-minute message for almost 5 times isn’t really interesting but he did it with enthusiasm.

Now it was the job of Sj to make a video out of all those. We had 3 voice messages (the other was from grandson A) and a good number of text messages, not to forget a good load of pictures.

She toiled for hours to finally get a 19-minute video ready. The problem here- 690MB sized video. We compressed it twice and brought it down to 60MB. Uff! After sending it to the family members (drive link) we played it on the telly( Chrome cast, Thank God for that). Granny would have never seen the video otherwise, she hates mobile phones.
Here comes the main part. Making her sit that long was tough but to actually make her listen to the messages was impossible. She kept delivering her famous one-liners and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Though I am tempted to write here a few of those I am not going to do it, just to be on the safe side. Next, I played the video I made for her. Here’s a collage of it. (The idea was planted in my mind by granddaughter Ap, thanks girl).

The highlight of course, was the cutest video of grandma thanking her kids for the lovely wishes. I could see that she hated it (her message video), but well a mother doesn’t disappoint. J

So finally the day ended with everyone watching the video and thinking about the sweet memories as they recognized the pictures that scrolled by on the screen.


Meet you again in December, hopefully with the continuation of their story. Till then, be happy, be good. 

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