Still Putting Off the WIP, Creatively

Last week when I boasted to you all about my new landless gardening efforts I wanted to show you the actual garden. Alas! my old camera, one of those flat little guys you can put in your back pocket, was malfunctioning. My phone, while it does take pictures, won't email them, but sends them only to other phones. And so I was reduced to stealing images from other people's sites for my container garden piece.

What I took away from this experience was that we needed a new camera.

Being a child of the twenty-first century (or an old lady of the twenty-first century) I went at once to the internet to see what we would like that we could afford. Hurrah! Amazon was offering a Canon PowerShot SX130IS for $159.00, which came to $200 after adding a 32 gigabite flash memory card, an eight-pack of rechargeable nickel-cadmium AA batteries, and a case. (I should also get a lens cap, I think.) This was exactly what I made on Tuesday by working at the polls from 5:15 in the morning until 8:15 at night; as soon as I get the money from the county I'll turn it over to Amazon. But I have the wonderful camera in hand and now I'm in business.

First I took some pictures of my actual container garden.

Then Harold and I went downtown for a bite to eat and a cup of coffee. We stopped in Karen's, AKA Ennis's, on Union Street. The day was so fine that she had the door propped open, inviting the breezes. As we were sitting there a dragonfly the size of a small helicopter came in, buzzed around, and flew back into the window, where it got stuck. The creature had a wingspan of seven or eight inches, too big for that maneuver one does with the paper cup and the cardboard to save it and let it out.

All I could think to do was to take a movie of it with the camera. I would show you how amazing the telephoto lens is (of course I used the long lens. What, you thought I would get close to a terrifying bug?) but it turns out that the camera consumes so much battery life that the batteries die before you can finish uploading a movie to YouTube. So you'll just have to imagine a fantastic movie featuring a huge bug. In case I want to do that again I'm getting a power cord for the camera. It clearly needs a power cord for downloading and uploading.

Maybe tomorrow I'll get back to work on my book.

Kate Gallison