Mad Times

Same box as last week (different cat).

The ribbon (actually the webbing from an old bike helmet) attached to the stick is Theo’s current favorite toy. His pillow is a spiky “zoom groom” brush, also a current fave.

Peaches was my sister’s cat, given to her by her room mate/landlord when she was a little kitten. Sis moved home and then back out again and as often happens in such situations, Peaches stayed with my folks. They had the sad duty today of deciding that Peaches’ health had gotten bad enough that she wasn’t going to get better.

You were kind of a psycho, Peaches, but we’ll miss you anyway.

artEAST, the local arts booster organization is having a fund raiser silent auction of 100+ one-foot-square pieces donated by local artists. We were enticed into bidding on more than we can afford to win so you should really go take a look. It’s hanging in the back room of the "Up Front" gallery on Front Street until next Friday. Plus you can bid online starting on Monday at the artEAST website: www.arteast.org/ Becky has a piece in there. $300 bid takes stuff home so if you want to see them, go soon.

As funny as this looks, it’s even funnier accompanied by the sound of her rubbing rubbing rubbing her front paws on the back of the bookshelf. I have no idea what is so fun about this, but apparently it’s quite engrossing.

Rachel wanted me to blog this so she’d have the opportunity to ridicule me in public. Those are all the digital cameras we have in the house at the moment. They are (left-right, top-bottom):

Largan Chameleon
Used for the beginning of my photo-a-day project in 2002. The camera that took the first eleven lost glove pictures. Whopping 640×480 resolution, fixed focus, no on-camera review.

Pentax Optio S4
My beloved teensy camera. Got it in 2003. Took something like 5000 pictures with it. Still the tiniest of the batch (the fx30 is a half inch longer and a smidge thicker). Really miss having its excellent audio recorder function in my pocket all the time.

Fuji FinePix F20
Decent little camera, especially for low-light indoor shots (pictures aren’t stellar (as evidenced by the last couple months on the blog and flickr), but it can take them unlike the Optio that gives up as soon as the world gets a little dim). Pocketable but a little boxy.

Kodak EasyShare Z730
Becky’s camera. Takes very nice pictures and incredibly feature rich for its price range (the only camera here with aperture and shutter priority for example). Really big, though (relatively speaking).

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX30
28mm equivalent Leica lens. Back-filling crystal clear LCD. Fast. Will take pictures in low light (if you don’t mind them looking like something from Monet’s cataract period when you look at them too closely) Almost as tiny as my Optio.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3
10x optical zoom. 28mm equivalent all the way out to 280mm. In a package just a little bigger than the Fuji. Leica. Huge LCD. Did I mention the Leica 28-280 zoom?

Of course I won’t be keeping all of them. The Chameleon is really just a toy and has been sitting in a drawer for a few years. The Optio is getting wonky and I’ll probably just keep it around as an audio recorder. The Fuji and the Kodak will be finding new homes. The fx30 will be in my pocket and the tz3 will be somewhere near Becky. That is once I’m done doing side-by-side experiments with the lot of them.

This has always been one of Alice’s favorite games. It’s so good to see her playing again.