Not Impulse Buying...

Yesterday I was watching one of my new chipmunk friends making a spectacle of himself on my back porch mere feet from me. He couldn't see me through the glass window of the French door so the first thought that came to mind was to grab my digital camera and snap a few shots of him, but then I sighed and said "why bother, the pictures won't come out well anyways."

My old Kodak DC3800 had become a real disappointment. It was a good camera in its day but as with all electronics these days, "Its day" didn't last very long. It had a whopping 2 mega pixels, an 8 meg memory card, and no zoom capabilities, that pretty much makes it about as good as any camera phone these days. It really wasn't all that expensive of a camera to begin with and I have really wanted to get a better one, but I'm just not a spender. I'm the person who always worries about the "what ifs". What if the car breaks down? What if I loose my job? So consequently I'm always saving my money.

I had finally had it with that camera and after the chipmunk incident, immediately hopped into the karaoke battlewagon and headed off to the store. Now this does not qualify (in my mind) as impulse buying, as I had thought about it for a long time, and it wasn't like I was at the store right when the "desire to purchase" came over me. Ok, so a new camera wasn't high on my list of "needed things" to get, it was more like on a separate wish list. There certainly are much more important things that I could have kept saving my money for. The thing is, I have been working a lot of overtime lately, and saving every dime (can you hear me convincing myself in my head), and haven't splurged on anything in quite some time, and so don't I deserve a "little" extravagance for myself?

Looking over the cameras in the store it pretty quickly came down to two, an Olympus and a Canon (their most expensive models). The best part was I had two of the girls in the camera department helping me out and it turned out one girl owned the Olympus and one owned the Canon and I managed to get them to argue over who's camera was better. The girl who owned the Canon (the slightly less expensive model) did admit that the other girls camera was better, but proceeded to rattle off a list of reasons why her camera was better, and she put up a pretty convincing argument, the best of which was that the Canon had a fold out LCD screen that you could point downward and shoot while holding the camera high over your head (she showed me a picture she took at a concert by using just such a method). The part of that which I liked the best was that you folded the screen face against the camera body protecting it; the Olympus' screen was affixed to the back of the camera, leaving it exposed. The Canon finally won out (I never buy the most or least expensive of anything and I was maybe feeling a little guilty about the money I was spending).

So after picking out a few peripherals, I left the store with my new "Canon Power Shot S3 IS" with 6.0 Mega Pixels, 1.0 gig memory card, 12X zoom and 0.1 second between shots (I missed a shot of some deer in my backyard the other day with my old camera because it took too long to be ready to fire again) in hand and also a DVD copy of "Apocalypto" by Mel Gibson (another thing I didn't need, but it was an excellent movie especially if you like Mayan and Aztec cultures like I do) and thereafter proceeded to go shutter happy (how was that for a run-on sentence?). I've spent most of the weekend (except stopping to watch the movie) taking shots, loading and playing with the software that came with it, and reading the plethora of materials that came with this complicated machine. There are a lot of different settings, which I am just starting to learn what they all do. I was very happy to find that it has a "Diopter Adjustment Dial" that allows you to focus in the view finder, just like focusing a pair of binoculars, because while I was in the store I was unable to admit that all the little icons in the view finders were blurry, and I thought it was just because I need a new pair of glasses (another thing on the list), and the girls might chuckle at my poor eyesight (you think about these things when you're a guy and you get... older).

So from now on my blogger posts should contain more and better pictures even though I still have to edit them for size (the pictures, not the posts), as no one wants to have to wait to download a 3 meg picture. I've included in this post new pictures of "Tunneler" the chipmunk who dug a tunnel under my sidewalk to my flower bed and has an amazing ability to "dive" into the bark in the flower bed and pop up somewhere else, also some better pictures of "Chubby" the groundhog and "Oscar" the red squirrel who live in my shed. I hope you all have had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend, I'm just glad to go back to work tomorrow so that I can pay for this shopping spree...


Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

-Sydney J. Harris