After seeing @Chris Davies and his wonderful art I reached out to him to create a couple of drawings to add to my soon-to-be merch store and branding strategy. The first one will be a sticker. I had no idea how popular stickers were until I showed this to my high school granddaughter, who said she wanted a bunch to pass out to her friends. Chris is incredibly talented. It is wonderful to collaborate with other members of our group. When I can, I love to give shout-outs to our members in my videos. It's the nature of a family. YouTube creation can be a lonely and challenging road. Having this family is a real gift.

I love it, and I have the free version. I have not found to many things I want it to do that it can't do. I started to use it on my old computer and it was a bust. Not enough memory. Then I had an idea. I went out and asked an AI (at the time it was probably ChatGPT) what it recommended for processing power and memory to run the program. Not just the minimum requirements, but recommendations on what I should get. Then things started to happen for me. I discovered Daniel Batal and his videos on Davinci Resolve for Noobs. he is great and I can't say enough good things about him. When I get stuck, often if I type into YouTube search. Davinci Resolve Noob (whatever I am stuck on) Daniel has my answer waiting for me. For instance, say I was looking for DaVinci resolve noobs picture in picture because I wanted to put a picture or video inside another video. YouTube search turned up this one. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JfvZ5_StGTE I then open that video in one window and use Alt-Tab to go between that video and DaVinci to add it to my video. Here is a good overview from him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMCq6Fd-Zas

Before we rush into the next goal, the next upload, the next milestone—let’s pause for a moment. Gratitude for how far you’ve already come. Gratitude for every viewer and subscriber who chose to spend their time with you. Gratitude for YouTube being a free platform where we get to share our thoughts, skills, experiences, and stories—without permission, gatekeepers, or limits. It’s easy to normalize this. But zoom out for a second. We’re living in a time where we can connect with brilliant minds all over the world instantly. Learn from each other. Teach. Build. Create impact from our living rooms. That’s not small. That’s extraordinary. Today, just take a breath and acknowledge it.You’re not behind. You’re participating in something incredibly rare—and powerful. Grateful for this space. Grateful for this community. Grateful for you all and wishing you a happy holiday season.🤍

Since I joined this group the day before I actually launched my channel it seems appropriate to share this here and to thank @Alexa Saarenoja for all of her encouragement and insights in the early days of my channel. Subscribers are only one metric of a channel, but I am pretty excited at hitting 30,000 subscribers. Especially since I started my channel at 80 years old and I only do this part time, with a total of 61 videos and six of them are shorts. Actually, I am more excited about the comments and the shares. The shares, especially indicate word-of-mouth which there is no way you could buy this advertising. It is the secret sauce of a channel’s growth.

Hi everyone and thanks for letting me hang out where the cool kids are. I am a 67 year old, 100% disabled Army veteran. I have been married to my wife Tina for 45 years. I served in the Army as a 31S20 COMSEC repairman. I was trained on 34 different communications scramblers (think Enigma machine). I held a TOP SECRET/CRYPTO/COSMIC clearance. I was offered my choice of White House Communication Staff or Delta Force if I would reup. I decided to get out as so many people who stay in wind up divorced. Since we have made it 45 years so far, I'd say I made a good choice. My YouTube channel is https://www.youtube.com/@rails_and_trails. I have done many different things in my life. As I said, I started out in the Army and got to the rank of Sgt. E5. When I got out, I went to work for NCR repairing equipment in banks called proof machines that handled checks. I went from there to McDonnall Douglas and worked as a distributed numerical control electrician. I got caught up in a huge layoff and went to Nordyne as a testing engineer. I got my degree in computer science and went to work at Lockheed as a software engineer. Then back to McDonnall Douglas as a software engineer. Mac got bought out by Boeing, so then I was a Boeing software engineer. I left there to work at Paylinx as an ecommerce processing software engineer (I worked on bank payment processing stuff). Paylinx got bought out by Cybersource and I got my teaching certificate and my Master Electrician license and taught Electrical Trades at a technical school. Meanwhile I started an auction company. I ran the auction company with my wife and family for 25 years and retired. I started my YouTube channel 19 years ago to promote my auctions, and to get a link from YouTube to my website. I retired from my auction company after the VA put me at 100% disabled. I changed my YouTube channel to be about train travel and bike trails back in Dec. 2024. I started making videos about my hobbies and tried to get a little better with each video. Back in 2023 we were biking at Jeckel Island and I tried tying a handheld Sony minicam to my bicycle handlebars, needless to say, that didn't work worth a darn.