(crummy cell phone photo!)

On Tuesday I saw Chicago (the band!) with my mom and grandma. Sort of girls night out, I guess. We had a bite to eat and a few drinks before the concert, and had a lovely evening. Here’s a crappy video I took with my cell phone!

Mom brought over this special gift which she purchased for me at a yard sale for $30! It’s a fun retro Minolta XE-5 35mm camera! It came in this super heavy-duty metal case with lots of extra goodies. I got electronic flash, cleaning kit, polarizing filter, remote shutter release, and telephoto and wide-angle lenses, as well as the original manuals. I have some old film in the fridge just waiting to get loaded into this baby.

I’m working on cleaning up my craft room today! As I was returning some fabric to the guest room closet (fabric closet!), I happened to glance out the window and see this under the eave:

This carefully-built nest appears to have four fluffy baby robins in it! I pulled the screen out and perched my camera on the edge of the window. I sat there for an eternity waiting for the mama to return. She sat in the big locust tree, flicking her tail, obviously a bit perturbed about my presence. I remained, as still as possible, one eye on her, and one looking through the viewfinder. Finally, she must’ve decided I wasn’t a threat, and allowed me a few photos.

Blast! I wish I had purchased a nice zoom lens already! I’d love to get right in there, and see more of the textures. These photos had to be cropped in quite a bit. Click on either for a larger view!

I didn’t get a chance to get outside and take photos, but I wanted to play with the new camera this evening, so I wandered around the house and took shots of random stuff. Bad lighting at night… I’m anti-flash. I’ll have to buy a nice lighting kit sometime. I have to say I am in love with this camera. It is so nice to be able to crop a photo quite a bit and still be able to print at a large size in high resolution. Such a difference compared to my previous camera.

And now I’m going to sleeeep. Good night internet!

Yay! I finally got a new camera! After much comparing of features and prices, I decided on the Canon EOS Rebel XSi! It weighs in with a whoppin’ 12.2 megapixels! It has a 3in LCD screen! It’s lightweight and quick on the draw! I’m so excited to have so much more resolution to work with. My old camera was only 3.1mp, so this is a big leap for me! I can’t wait to get better acquainted with all its features.

I used to get kinda mad at my husband for “stealing” my old camera, but he can just hang on to it now. haha I’m hoping I’ll have some time to take nice outdoor photos soon.

In other news… my iPod died! It’s a 40gb 4th gen iPod, and it was giving me the “sad iPod” icon and a URL for Apple service. It wouldn’t connect to PC or play any songs. I sure as heck wasn’t going to send it in for service. I found a post somewhere about loose cables inside causing this problem, and that a proper slam could bring the iPod back to life. It couldn’t get any worse, so I bashed it on my desk a few times. Sure enough, it’s back to its old self again! So I saved a couple hundred bucks there by not getting a new iPod. haha More money for new camera lenses!

Here are a few more pages from the Girl Scout Scrapbook!

When I first glanced through this scrapbook I had a tough time understanding it until I realized that the author’s lowercase “t” looks a lot like an “r” with the crossbar only on the right side.

I’m working furiously on a cool dynamic Flash viewer for my scrapbooks that will load up the images and info using XML. It will allow navigation through the books using the “page flip” and hopefully zooming! It might not be done for a little while, but I have big plans!

As for physical preservation of the books, I think I am going to try a de-acidifying spray to stop the breakdown of the pages. I’m going to take apart the books and put each page into a sleeve made of Dura-lar (an archival clear mylar-type material) and then reassemble. Hopefully, this will reinforce the pages and protect from handling damage. Also, in the Family Trip Scrapbook, there is a lot of icky old tape holding in the postcards and things, so I’m going to try to carefully remove it as it causes yellowing (and it doesn’t stick anymore anyway!). I’ll use photo corners or an archival adhesive to reattach the goodies.