Last night for Test#4 of EVER NEW, my coach Roger D. Noriega, couldn’t make it. (Feel better soon, Roger!  We missed you!!!)

 

Luckily, I already had a guest lined up for the evening, and she did a good job under trying circumstances (“Guess what, Hannah?  You’re no longer a guest tonight, you’re my CO-HOST! SURPRISE!!!”  But NO PRESSURE, RIGHT?!), so I’m keeping her!   She will be co-hosting anytime she can make it when the podcast debuts on January 15th and every other Saturday thereafter at 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time.  She will also be in the next one or two tests before the podcast debuts.  Test #5 will be this coming Thursday at 7 p.m. Pacific Time, and Test #6 (if we feel we need one) will be on the following Thursday, the 13th of January at the same time.

 

INTRODUCING HANNAH McCRANE

 

My co-host’s name is Hannah McCrane. She lives in south New Jersey, the land of farms and other lovely places. (North New Jersey has the factories and larger cities we think of when we outsiders think of New Jersey, she tells me.)

 

Hannah and I first connected after she discovered and read my first book about DeForest Kelley. (She has since read nearly all of my De books; she’s well into the six-part series Kelley Phone Tag. We’d  enjoyed a couple of face-to-face IM video interactions already on Facebook, and I knew she had a background in show biz (her parents are involved in show biz, so she grew up in it), so when she expressed an interest in engaging LIVE on yesterday’s show (Test#4) as a guest, I asked her to login to Streamyard a half hour ahead of time so I could show her the back end and she’d see how most things work there.

 

Just a few minutes before the podcast was set to go live, Roger sent an apologetic message saying he couldn’t attend, so I wished him a speedy recovery and private messaged Hannah “Break a leg!” — the show biz phrase for “Go get ’em, Tiger!”  And with that, she performed as though she had been a co-host a hundred times already. She looked and sounded confident. It was a joy to hang with her.

 

BACKING UP A MOMENT

 

As the moment came for the podcast to start, I hit the 30-second countdown video, and when it reached zero, I clicked on the GO LIVE button, but apparently there is an  additional step after that which I didn’t see (I made the mistake once before, but Roger was there to correct me) because we were seven minutes and some odd seconds into the show when I got a message from Roger (who thankfully, although sick, was waiting  and watching to make sure I got underway okay) saying I’d better go live soon or the podcast would be automatically cancelled at 10 minutes!

 

So I looked up and sure enough, we weren’t live!  I immediately did the additional fancy footwork and we went live at that point, with me looking decidedly nonplussed. (Definition: “surprised and confused so much that you are unsure how to react.”)

 

I apologized for the false start and we backed up a bit. I had Hannah introduce herself (again, LIVE this time!) and then we “took it from the top” again, saying what we’d been saying during the mysterious missing first seven minutes.  You can catch the hour here, if you want.  I encourage you to do so!

 

It was a lot of fun. Hannah and I did well together; our chemistry is good. She had a noisy glitch happen with her laptop and microphone for about a minute (it sounded like she was wrestling with a gorilla), and my green screen fell on top of me at one point, but hey… expecting perfection is just wrong.  LOL! (“This is a test. This is ONLY a test!  Had it been an actual podcast, it would have been utterly FLAWLESS… Or, maybe not..” ) We just had fun with the circumstances.

 

I have since fixed my greenscreen so it won’t collapse on me again! I had the lower part of the greenscreen draped over the back of my chair because the back is so high that without doing that, the high part above my shoulders was causing glitchy problems, but during some of my gyrations, I pulled the whole thing over on top of me.  So last night I cut the my (smaller) greenscreen carrier bag apart (which is also green)  and draped it over the upper part of my chair so I no longer have to use the hem of the greenscreen to make the greenscreen do its thing without hitch or hiccup.  I’m very pleased with myself. We primates are very clever, we are! We adapt. We figure things out!

 

I would tell you more about Remarkable Hannah, but I’ll let her do that as the weeks unfold, because I don’t know how much she wants to divulge beyond what I’ve already shared with you. She has met a number of challenges that could encourage and inspire you, but they are not my stories to tell; they are hers.

 

WATCHERS/LISTENERS MAKE EVER NEW THE GREAT SHOW IT IS

 

The folks who tuned in live last night and let me know they were on (Ross Trowbridge, Jano–pronounced Jayno — and cookiesword) helped tremendously.

 

Ross Trowbridge in Utah has tuned in to all four tests so far (he’s an NDB Media regular on Roger’s sports podcasts) and has been crucial in helping me learn the ropes for posting his comments, all of which are humorous, entertaining and/or fascinating.

 

Turns out Ross is a critter lover, too. He has rescued burros, wild horses, and even a Chincoteague pony. His brief comments about HIS critter corral makes me want to get him on the show as a guest sometime to show us pictures of his lively brood of rescues.  Bravo, Ross. If I had the land, I’d be doing that, too. 

 

His comments also reminded me to share my personal experience with wild burros.

 

So, see? It’s the synergy that we get as a result of having LIVE engaged listeners that makes the show go as well as it does. LIVE LISTENERS AND RIVETING GUESTS ARE WHAT WILL DRIVE THE ULTIMATE SUCCESS OF THIS PODCAST!!!

 

At the tail end of the our time together last night, Amy Ulen reached us in the studio saying she was on my FB page, so I quickly “introduced” her (as a great teacher and as having appeared in OF GODS AND MEN, but I left out the parts about her being a Shakespeare lover and actor, scrapbook maven, and so many other good things!) and I hope to have her on the podcast as a guest and even as an additional co-host if she’s available and amenable. She’s going to have her time freed up at the end of the school year, because she’s retiring (I’m sad for students, but delighted for her!), so maybe I’ll get lucky and we can have her from time to time.  That would be HUGE!

 

FAREWELL TO THE LAST DAY OF 2021

 

One of these years (probably not anytime soon, sadly) we’ll put this pandemic behind us and return to some semblance of normalcy. I hope you and yours get vaccinated and boosted and that you stay safe. The pros are recommending N95 masks again (actually, the pros always have) so I’m back to wearing them when I have to venture out in public. I sincerely hope you are, too, because I want you to stick around and not risk falling victim to Omicron or the dreaded “long-haul” symptoms that have utterly ruined millions of peoples’ lives.  Surviving the virus is one thing; living with chronic fatigue, dizziness, organ damage, and other long-haul effects is no fun at all. I’m still saddled with more fatigue than I ever have been before, nearly two years AFTER having COVID. I’m good for about two or three hours until I start feeling tired, even after a good night’s sleep, so I nap some, too.   If I were still employed full-time, I don’t know how I’d keep up.  I feel almost the same way I did when my thyroid went south on me and I become hypothyroid, but there’s no pill to take away COVID fatigue.  It’s been with me ever since. Because I’m semi-retired and only work abot ten hours a week, I can handle it.  I have no idea how others do who aren’t retired.

 

TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOURSELF AND YOUR LOVED ONES.

THIS VIRUS IS VERY REAL, AND CAN BE VERY DEBILITATING EVEN IF IT DOESN’T KILL YOU!