Someday I'll Get My Act Together. (This is Probably a Lie.)

Maybe I ought to put this behind an LJ cut in hopes that fewer people will read it, but what the hell- it's fun to read about other people's screw-ups, isn't it?

So everybody knows that I bought a point-and-shoot camera a few months ago because the old camera had started taking blurry pictures. I was impatient. I might have saved up a bit more money and bought a better camera, but noooo. So, I get the new camera, and it's sort of cranky, and doesn't like to focus on certain subjects. Its little autofocus device is easily confused, it seems. I look in the user manual to see if I can get a clue about what to do. One of the things it suggests is keeping the window the autofocus device looks through clean. The little light goes on in my head.

I get out the old camera, which still has a roll of film in it with a dozen or so frames unexposed. I clean the window. I shoot the film. I take it to KMart and get their cheapest deal, single prints and an Internet upload for $3.99. I get the pictures back. The early ones are blurry. Those taken after I cleaned the window are perfectly clear. So, it turns out that cleanliness is next to not spending money on something you don't actually need.

Anyway.

Don't get the intenet upload from KMart, by the way, or from any other store that uses the Kodak Picture Center. Not only is the site a major butt-pain to use, but they only let you download the pictures in some form that doesn't seem to be compatible with any image viewer program other than Kodak's. Stupid near-monopoly! I finally had to get them by right-clicking on the pictures in the largest size they display on the site, and those aren't very big.

At this point, I was going to post a picture from that batch. One of Sluggo, in fact. But even though the picture is still there at Picture Trail, and I know they do allow remote loading to LJ, and I'm sure I did the HTML commands right and all that, when I tested the post, the picture would not come up. I diddled with it for an hour, and it still wouldn't work. SLUGGO IS BEHIND THIS! I'M SURE OF IT! Anyway, it is late, and I'm groggy, and I'm going to sleep. Maybe there will be a picture of Sluggo this afternoon. Maybe there will never be a picture of Sluggo. I don't know. Right now, I'm too tired to care. Good (day)night.

(no subject)

Today was the first day of the year when it was too hot to go for an afternoon walk. I hope to find some time this evening, after the sun moves a bit north and allows some shade on the long, baked street that runs eastward to the last ridge, where the breezes rise up the canyon from the river. I suspect that we are in for a hot summer, given the mildness of last winter and the dryness of spring.

For now, I'm just spending a bit of time in the shade of the mulberry tree in the front yard. As the sun declines, I can see the light caught on the tops of small bits of the big, shiny leaves, and they flash brightly as they move in what little breeze has reached us. Only a few minutes of rest here, and then I must get back to the daily tasks. They refuse to wait, and so will the day, and the summer. Time at times is unkind.