Second thoughts on family channel

Having second thoughts on the YouTube channel we've been planning.

Weer back

We've never really kept up on this blog, and I'm hoping this return will be the one in which we start adding here regularly.

I skimmed over the previous posts to make a couple of necessary changes and realized how much didn't turn out as we planned or expected. Most obviously, Conan has mostly chosen to go to public school. I have continued my concerns, as voiced in earlier posts, however my commitment to student-driven education has made it hard not to follow her lead on this.

And the genders of my fellow crazee family members have all gone somewhere. Rae has stopped going by Kim or Kimberly and identifies as genderqueer (or non-binary) and Conan has come out as a transgender girl. I skimmed through the previous entries largely to update their names/pronouns and hope I succeeded at getting them all.

The most obvious change I've seen in both since their coming out is how obviously more comfortable and happy both of them are in their own skins since their respective acknowledgments. That's especially noticeable considering all the potential stress and difficulty we've hit.

In May, I left my job, so Rae could work full time at a job they were very excited to be starting. I was going to work on my creative endeavors as well as work toward beginning a homeschool program with Conan. It was only a very short time later that Rae had an accident on the bus home, breaking their arm, up near the shoulder. Not only that, but the pre-surgery scans revealed a cancerous tumor in the bone that was being operated on, complicating the surgery as well as raising our anxiety by a fair degree.

We have a GoFundMe set up around that, if anyone is interested in helping out. We have also set up a Patreon for this video series, if you'd like to be a part of that.

We are on our way to the other end. I'm back to work, Rae is recovering well and is looking to get back to work part time as well. Conan is ready to go back to school this year. She is nervous about coming out to her classmates, but is excited about the programs at her school, and we've been assured other students have previously made this transition there and they are prepared to work with her on any issues that due come up. We'll be watching it closely, especially me who is suspicious of schools to start with.

Not only that, Rae and I are working on a creative project together, as well as discussing the possibility of collaborating on later things, depending on how we feel.

So, while we are still recovering from recent events, we are feeling optimistic.

We are also working to start a series of videos of us a family. I thought we had enough eccentricities among us to make it possibly interesting and fun. I did this one above to sort of see if I could make anything out of my trip to the Museum of Flight with Conan. I kind of enjoyed the process and think it worked reasonably well with what I was working with. Admittedly, there will continue to be a fair amount of those issues, so long as we're assembling footage from our phones and such, which is what we're looking at, by both necessity and preference. I suspect I'll work out some tricks for my lack of coverage and inconsistent sound... It does make one see why Reality TV has so much nonsense.

I've started my own channel, Rise of the Flying Guillotine, along with an accompanying blog, also Rise of the Flying Guillotine. My intentions are more modest with that, just a place for serving real rant again, for whatever it might be worth.

I'm sure I've missed more than I've gotten, but I expect to be back to cover that later.