You may have noticed some posting irregularity lately. We've been struggling a bit during the past few weeks here at the NtJS house. Everything seemed fine, then whammo! We were hit. It had happened before and supposedly would not happen again, but it did. I was really bummed. Thankfully, my folks bailed us out temporarily. We took it reluctantly, thinking it would get us by and help us weather this storm.

It didn't. We thought we had a plan, but now we are looking at each other thinking, "What do we do?!"

Here is how it all went down:


So the other day, our camera died. Wait, what? Oh.... no, no, no. You thought I was talking about our finances? No. Technology has been giving us fits lately - specifically our camera.

Our camera is great. Correction: was great. Took great photos, ultra compact size, trouble-free internally articulating lens. But it has software problems. It started freezing up on the splash screen a few weeks ago. What really burned me was that this had happened before, and we had payed to have it fixed. My suspicions that they didn't totally grasp the problem held true when we started having the exact same problems. It progressed to the point where it was unusable.

Knowing this, my folks brought us their old camera during a recent visit. It wasn't the best but it worked. We hesitated for two reasons:

1. I hate borrowing other people's stuff
2. We used to have this same camera and got rid of it because of it's poor performance as well as it's own eventual failure.

Still we knew we needed a camera, and took it. We used it a handful of times, only to find out that the battery would last only about 30 minutes. Then, in the irony of all ironies - it broke! The same way that our's had broke a few years ago! Lens was irreversibly jammed.

We've tried the quick fixes to no avail. Fail. We were back to no camera.

This may not seem like a big deal, but you know that saying, "don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"? Yeah, it's like that. The kids are constantly doing things that we'd love to capture and send to the family. Plus we have this blog thing and like to use our own photography when possible. Actually, it has made the Mrs's ReUse It! series a tad difficult. Fortunately, we were able to borrow the neighbor's camera to get the Rice Pack post up this week. Trust me - we used it very gingerly.

The point is that initially we just wanted a new camera. We didn't need one - we had my mother's old one. There were a number of other capital expenditures that were quickly taking priority over the camera. But now, with the second-stringer on the stretcher, we are left like a coach on the sidelines looking at what is left on the bench.

Our video camera takes still images, but they are just as crummy as you could imagine - 1MP and no flash, no white balance.... Pictures, unless taken in daylight, come out a little creepy. Beyond that, they are still pretty low-res.

Now we are thinking.... "Do we need a camera?"

What to do?