Grownup toys

The camera, a Nikon D50 digital SLR, is a birthday gift from my husband. I thought my Nikon Coolpix 5700 was a great camera...and it is, but digital SLR rocks! No more lag when I take the shot. You can fire off shot after shot in rapid succession. I wish I'd had this camera at Le Mans! There would have been more pictures of cars and less of empty track (since the car was long out of the frame when I snapped the picture, even when I tried to time it). The SLR has a manual focus as well as automatic so I no longer have to wait for ever for the Coolpix to figure out what to focus on. This will help tremendously with close up shots because I had many times where the Coolpix just refused to focus at all.

The only problem is that I'm back to toting a camera bag containing multiple lenses! I enjoy point and shoot cameras for their portability but when you want quality pictures and control over your shots, then I guess you have to live with extra gear. At least I don't have to tote around rolls and rolls of film. And pay for the processing. (camera photo from Macworld.com by the way)

The truck replaces a 16 year-old F-250 diesel. My husband said the truck was old enough to get a learner's permit and drive itself. And no, I did not take that picture of the truck with my new camera. I found the photo on internetautoguide.com.

I never liked driving the F-250 beast - not that I did drive it. I drove it once for a very short time when we were tugging a cargo trailer (empty at the time) on a cross country trip to retrieve stuff from my mom's basement. About 250 miles from my mom's house the transmission failed. Fortunately a friend lived nearby and came to rescue us. We left the truck and trailer at a gas station garage, rented a car, and continued to mom's house to work on cleaning out the basement while the truck was worked on. The mechanic thought he could "save" us money by replacing one part, despite our request and his agreement to rebuild it. Yeah, thanks buddy. The transmission still leaked but we made it to my mom's house where we then had to scramble to find a place to rebuild the transmission in short order as we were already running out of vacation time. The transmission held for the 3000 mile trip home but the spedometer and odometer didn't work and the passenger power window failed somewhere in Missouri. We had the transmission worked on two more times after we got home. In addition to the unreliable transmssion, the window seals leak, and the air conditioner doesn't work. Then someone broke in through the back sliding window and stole the radio (it was a fairly inexpensive one we installed, but still...).

So it was time for a new truck. We've been remodeling our house and do the work ourselves, so we do need a truck for all those Home Depot and dump runs. And I might actually enjoy driving it!