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Catherine's policy of keeping pets out of the Cunningham household should be an easy one to keep - she hopes!

Now I know how Spielberg must feel

Spaghetti For Breakfast

BY Catherine Cunningham, Humour Columnist January 13, 2010 16:01

I think I'm obsessed.

I know that's never a good word to use in a sentence about yourself, but it's true.

No I'm not referring to my all-encompassing euphoric love of chocolate (which by the way is not an obsession; it is a natural state of being).

My obsession is with Microsoft.

I can't stop using Windows Movie Maker.

A few years ago I found it in a misguided attempt at opening Windows Photo Gallery. A natural mistake. They both start with the same word. The program came on the screen and I quickly discovered that I could import any of my photos into it, put them in any order, play music over top of them and burn them onto a DVD.

I must say I was intrigued by this discovery.

My first project was a collection of photos of my Girls Night Out gals and me through the years in honour of our 40th birthdays.

I accidentally used one photo twice in the video, and inserted the much overused song "Time of Your Life" by Green Day, but still, it turned out. I loved it. And the girls loved it. I was hooked.

Next I used portions of all the video I had of our daughter dancing from the ages two to six. I chose the perennially happy song "You Make Me Feel like Dancing" by Leo Sawyer as the background music.

Then Gord got in on the game. He made photo videos of ski vacations, cottage trips and family gatherings. The only difference between our creations was in our choice of music. As the background to a series of clips from a family gathering at Gord's brother's cottage, Gord chose "Love You Madly" by Cake.

Gord may not be a big Leo Sawyer fan but no matter what he says I know he's heard of him. I, on the other hand, had never heard of his song choice before nor had I ever heard of the group that sings it.

In my mind, if you're going to call yourself Cake, you had better be some kind of baked good.

This Christmas, I decided I would surprise Gord with a homemade movie of our 21 years together. I began digging out pictures at the end of November and had them all scanned into the computer a week later. Then I started organizing and choosing which pictures best represented us.

It went faster than I thought. Probably because when you are compiling photos of two people and only one of those two people is picking between two almost identical pictures except that in one his hair is sticking up a bit and in the other one she is showing what could be construed as a second chin; there really isn't going to be a big debate about which shot gets chosen.

Despite the many hints that something was going on - Annabelle walking around the house for three weeks singing a Peter Gabriel ballad, me throwing myself in front of the computer screen whenever Gord walked in the room unexpectedly, and the sudden presence of boxes of family photos previously entombed in the basement - Gord was suitably surprised on Christmas morning when I handed him his gift.

I had condensed 21 years into eight-and-a-half minutes. It was fast but it was thorough. I think he quite enjoyed it.

Whether all the other Devlin and Cunningham family members who were forced to watch it liked it as much, I'm not really sure.

But I'm not going to obsess about it.

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