Welcome Home

Our camera is back home! It would seem that life has continued on without it.

While the camera was away my husband had a brief moment of anxiety that the technician responsible for gutting our camera and righting whatever was wrong with it might come across the picture that my husband used for the startup screen.


*We would like to thank the people at Nikon for making this post possible; Grammy and Pop-pop for the use of their camera, which takes less-blurry natural light shots, during this difficult time; and the marketing folks associated with Nacho Libre who are responsible for releasing the DVD with a frighteningly freaky mask that begs to be worn by adult men who should be doing things like taking out the garbage instead of strutting around the house and taking pictures of themselves while wearing said mask.

Love Hurts Sometimes

The camera repair has been authorized. With taxes and shipping the grand total comes to one hundred and sixty five dollars. The thing better take pictures by itself now.

You Can't Put a Price Tag on Love

The Nikon people emailed me an estimate for the repair work needing to be done on my precious camera. So now I’m trying to decide if it would be more prudent to have the repair made or to use the $135 toward the purchase of a new camera; with the cost of shipping and the need to procure a new memory card, the total cost will probably be closer to the region of an even two hundred buckeronies.

I love my camera even though natural light shots tend to be a little blurry and the camera sometimes has a hard time focusing. The time it takes for the camera to power-up is excessive at times as well. But generally it takes great shots, and I know how to operate almost all of the functions. There are certain things about my grandparents’ camera that work better than mine, but I don’t know if that is enough to entice me into the new-camera-market.

Shopping for these types of products is overwhelming for me. I spend hours researching and reading reviews, only to buy a product that isn’t right for me. What kind of batteries does the camera take? Do I need to spend an extra fifty dollars to buy it/them separately? And then the camera dies a couple of years from now anyway. What to do, what to do. Spend the money on a piece of equipment I know and can (mostly) depend on, or buy a new bottom of the line camera (with twice as many mega pixels)?

Sigh. These are the questions that plague me. They just don’t make things like they used to. Whoever “they” are. “They” have gotten quite enough money out of me for one year with all of the replacement of technology that has been going on around here. Which reminds me: we still haven’t gone stove shopping. Because of the level of importance I put on my camera, my oven falls a little bit lower on the list. That may mean that I’m a slightly negligent person. Possible range explosion, or no camera… hmmm. Maybe I just like to live dangerously. Or maybe I’m just dumb.

Grammy and Pop-pop to the Rescue!

My grandparents have come to my rescue by offering me the use of their camera until mine is safely returned. I don’t have the software I need to download the photos from the camera onto the computer, so I still will not be posting pictures as of right now. At least my life has returned to a certain level of normalcy.

Woe is Me

My camera is off to Melville, New York, swaddled in bubble wrap with a note attached pleading with a person I have never met to please, please fix it quickly and send my camera back to my so that I can get on with my life. The whole ordeal has me quite agitated. I have become like a person obsessed. Every time a child sticks a finger up its nose, I find myself woeful over a lost picture; a sweetly sleeping baby with a smile teasing the corners of her mouth sends me into fit of wretchedness at a snapshot squandered. I am positive that my little girl will take her first steps while our beloved camera is sitting on a shelf somewhere in Melville waiting its turn to be tweaked and tuned. I suppose I shall have to bust out the half-dead video camera more often. Hopefully the still camera will be back home before the video camera decides to quit on us. There is just too much cuteness around here for our exhausted electronic recording devices to keep up with.

The Lamentation of a Camera-less Mommy

I am camera-less for an undetermined amount of time. That word- undetermined- scares the wits out of me. The camera had some trouble reading the memory card from time to time; then all of a sudden it decided that the thousands of pictures we take every couple of months was just too much for it to handle and it gave its notice by displaying the words “system failure 10” on the LCD screen. The camera would have been three years old next month. Of course these things happen on holidays when help-desks everywhere are closed. I have the faultiest memory ever, and I rely heavily on still pictures to preserve all of those once-in-a-lifetime moments that happen multiple times a day at our house. A dull sense of all-pervading dread settles on me when I see one of the kids about to do something funny or contort their features into a funny face: I feel as though they should put all cuteness and silliness on hold until I have the means to take snapshots again. At one point the strain became too great and I decided that I needed to bake homemade brownies to facilitate some stress eating. They didn’t last too long.