And now a word from our sponsor. . .

I know I've been promising photos since forever, putting it off due to technical difficulties - needing a new cable from the camera to the PC as well as just procrastination in general. Until came the day when I had 888 photographs on the camera. And despite a new cable, despite having the actual time to sit down and do it, nothing happened. It just seemed like the number of new photos (350+) was just more than EasyShare (total misnomer) could handle. Without photos, a blog becomes a blah-g rather quickly, at least mine does.

BTW: If anyone has a better photo manager, I'm all ears. I also have close to 3,000 pictures that would need to be transferred,

So today, while the kids were with Steve, off to visit his mother, I set out to copy the memory card onto a CD. No luck at FedEx Office (formerly FedEx Kinkos, formerly Kinkos), it's device was out of service. So on to ShopRite, where I selected the whole contents of the card to copy on to a CD (and having no clue as to how many photos a CD actually can store), no go. Then I selected 388 photos to copy from the card, and onto two CDs. Except that ShopRite only had ONE Kodak photo CD left in the entire store, and the non-food items manager was away and this could not be rectified until his return in a week or so. Bite me, ShopRite - especially after I invested 30 minutes or so in figuring out how to use the Kodak kiosk.

There was a part of me that said, "Bag it, this is just not in the cards today." And there was the part of me that was hell bent and determined that I WOULD prevail. So I went to Wegman's since I had coupons for a free 50 ounce bottle of 2X strength store-brand detergent and another for eight ounces of basting oil (whatever that is, but it was free and sounded interesting.) The Kodak kiosk here is a remnant from the dark ages of digital photography. It moved at the pace of that Tim Conway character from the old Carol Burnett Show, and there was only one. So my need for one CD of 200 photos and another of 188 and the anemic pace of the copying irritated at least one customer (who had previoiusly tried CVS and found its machine out of service), but that machine was mine, mine, mine. I skipped copying another smaller memory card because I didn't want to completely monopolize the kiosk, and I was bored to tears waiting. I could have never accomplished this on a week day with Micah in tow. He would have completely dismantled the displays of disposable cameras and picture frames or wandered off to find someone more interesting than his mother to hang with.

So, the bottom line is photos are coming, you should enjoy each and every one because of the cost involved, not in terms of monetary expenditure (Wegman's $2.99 per CD was $2 cheaper than ShopRite), but what it cost in terms of my time and patience. And my Sunday afternoon communing with the New York Times crossword never even got off the ground, though Wegman's did redeem itself by having a few papers left at 4 pm so I didn't have to go to WaWa or Speedy Mart or wherever to track a copy down.