The camera she had been using was my old Fuji FinePix S3100
which we bought on mark down at Target just before we made the journey with
three dogs, nine cats and the Long Sufferin in an RV over Donner
Pass and into Oregon.
The little camera served us well and lived to struggle on for
two years after we settled in Coos Bay,
and then I got a better camera and the Long Sufferin got my little Fuji.
The Long Sufferin being the Chancellor of the Exchequer
never allows a spot of waste or a dollar spent when it isn’t absolutely
necessary and that is a very good thing cause the Ole Trawler would easily
fritter away all of our money and have us living in a cardboard box and eating
dry cat food, so it isn’t a bad thing that the Long Sufferin keeps a tight hand
on the tiller and the draw-strings of the family purse pulled tight.
So she got the old Fuji
and lived happily with it until last year when the little devil made a break
for it and fell, tragically three and a half feet to its untimely death.
In the meantime I was on to my next camera and so there was
a spare and she took that one, but hated it and wouldn’t let go of any of the
vast Trawler fortune to get another so there I was feeling extremely guilty and
needing to do something to make myself feel better about having a camera while
the Long Sufferin had none, you didn’t think this was motivated by unselfish
desires, didja?
Fortunately in all of the years the Ole Trawler has been
kicking around the photography world he has discovered one important fact,
okay, maybe two or even three but this is the important one for this story so
we’ll ignore the other two and go on to the heart of the beast, electronics
work or they don’t.
Now this may not seem terribly important to you but it comes
in handy when you are planning to do something which requires money not in the
budget and you know that spending money not properly allocated without prior
authorization is likely to have you sleeping on the deck and in this climate
that is a rather frosty prospect and not wishing to wind up with frost on my
pumpkins I tread carefully with non-budgeted items, so the knowledge that
electronics either work or they don’t comes in pretty handy.
This means that you do not have to buy the electronic goody
new and in the box, a reasonably treated vintage item will do the job and
ninety percent of the time it will work just the same as the one in the box and
you do not have to decide if recycling the box and all of the packing is the
responsible thing to do or maybe this once you could just chuck it all in the
compactor, but then the Long Sufferin would get you by the ear and drag you back
to the compactor and wonder aloud what in the hell you think you are doing tossing
recyclable materials in the compactor so it is best to just go ahead and put
them in the right bin in the first place and save all of that drama.
So not having the packaging is a good thing and eliminates
one more chance for you to screw the pooch and so doing the responsible thing
and buying vintage is best all around.
And it happens that here in beautiful, downtown Coos
Bay, (and North Bend);
we have two great places to find that vintage item, Goodwill and The South
Coast Hospice Thrift Store.
So off I went and as luck would have it I found a camera
that looked like it might do and so I grabbed it and headed home.
It took only a day and a half to collect all of the
necessary and missing parts to restore the Olympus Stylus 600 to prefect
working order and get a snazzy, green, (The Long Sufferin’s favorite color)
gift bag and the Ole Trawler was set for Christmas!
And you know what happens when you make plans without
consulting the Fates? Yeppers, I got sick.
I’m sure you are sick to death of hearing how I fought with
the Quack and the Croakers for my very life and that was just over the bills
and had nothing to do with what was making me sick and so insert time-lapse, it
was a year later, okay ten months if you want to be picky and there on the
shelf was that green gift bag and on one had touched it in a year.
The situation hadn’t changed, I had a camera, the Long
Sufferin didn’t and the budget still was shut down by House Republicans.
I fished out the camera and powered it up. It started after
sitting on a shelf for almost a year without touch up charging! That’s some
battery life.
I took the little plucker out for a spin and it does a good
job for being smaller than the average Iphone and having no viewfinder just an
LCD which is a pain and the camera makers should be ashamed that they would
eliminate the viewfinder to cut costs and make people ruin their eyes squinting
at the LCD any time the sun comes out but seeing as how this is Oregon that isn’t
as big a problem as it would have been in Texas and that is why the little
camera work out so well.
Now the point of this story is that if you don’t have a
camera you can stick in your shirt pocket or if you are a non-shirt-wearing
female lady type of person and would not want a camera banging around like a
bell on a cat, you can stick it in a jean pocket and not look like one of those
horror movie girls who get infested with the bug that ate Cleveland and have
bulges sticking out every which way and you want one or maybe you just want
something inexpensive which you can stick in the glove box so that you actually
have it when you see the herd of elk cross the road and you have nothing but a
silly grin or maybe you have a kid or relative or pal serving in that big
sandbox and you’d like to get them reconnected with the homeland but you don’t
want to spend an arm and a leg cause they might have to duck under a Humvee
cause the folks over here are shooting at them, this is a way you can do it and
not wind up in a long-term budget battle and have the shutdown loam or a
default hanging over your head and that is a good thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment