new camera, new (life) format

Taken 2/26/07, during the last snowfall we had which we had thought (ha, ha) was going to be the last one of the season.

This photo is courtesy of my new pet -- aka the SONY cyber-shot DSC-H5. It's the closest I'll probably get to having an SLR. The reason is inane but true. As much as I aspire to hunting with the high-brow amateur-yet-serious photographers out there, I am so myopic that I've a hard time looking through the small viewfinder with one eye shut. The Nikon does have an LCD panel you can shoot from -- as opposed to viewing from an LCD panel only after the shot has been taken, which is what 99.99 percent of SLRs have. But this Nikon is apparently heavy both on your arms and on your wallet, so I'm sticking with this SLR-like SONY puppy that got good reviews from dpreview.

The up side: I can finally take macro shots where the background is blurry but the foreground is clear, like the one above. Plus I get to play with SLR settings like varying ISO ranges and shutter speeds.

The down side: Not having an oh-so-fiiiiine SLR camera. Boo hoo to me, but only a very small one. I always end up fully appreciating what I have.

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Stuff about today (my new format for this p-blog is to have this as the category to fill in):

- Snow/sleet/rain still going on, several inches already accumulated outside.

- both of us now have the very bad cold but hubby forced himself to run the snow blower outside, which I hope didn't make him worse. Ended up also helping our neighbor whose snowblower died.

- our favorite little person, the mighty K, still has pneumonia. But hope is not lost. "Do you want to talk to Auntie?" her mom asked. "No!" the little one answered. She then added in a small voice, "But I'm feeling better now..."

- It's Mama's (my maternal grandma's) birthday today. She passed on in 1988. Mom braved the snow and wind during her lunch hour to go to mass to light candles for her and for Kayla's health. She said that she was slipping and sliding so much that she kept grabbing men's arms whenever she was about to cross the street and asking them if they could escort her across. Good lord. I told her those guys probably felt so good afterwards for helping a little old lady cross the street, which is the classic feel-good thing to do.

- Started a reader's journal in which I'm writing all my reactions to whatever the heck I'm currently reading. I have GOT to find out if I'm genuinely interested in writing literary fiction, in reading literary fiction, or if I only think I do. Or it could also be that what I liked when I was younger (what Wayne Dyer calls the morning of your life) is no longer as interesting to me now (in the afternoon of my life). So far the journal has been so helpful. I start writing on it and end up writing about all kinds of stuff not even related to what I've read. It's the perfect situation of letting my mind open to one thing to get to all sorts of other goodies roaming around in my head. I finally found a new way to have fun doing what I'm doing again.