May 23, 2008

Things here have been fairly quiet the last couple of days. Emily has been working everyday this week from 9-4. Danny volunteers to feed the fish at Mahoney's now and is very pleased with himself. Sadly our camera died on Monday so I've been unable to catalog our activities with as much thoroughness as I've grown accustomed. Mike took the old camera to work yesterday in hopes of fixing the infamous E18 error. After removing more the 75 pieces he declared it inflexible. My thought for the next camera was that it should be decent but super small and cheap. I'm pretty rough on our camera and I take it EVERYWHERE, the playground, the beach, hiking, letter boxing, out to eat, on the boat...not exactly great environments for an expensive piece of machinery. Mike wanted something comparable to what we had (Canon A620 PowerShot) Since he has an Amazon gift card left over from Christmas he thought that he'd do some research and order it online. My immediate thought was that the 17 year periodic Cicada emergence that I've been waiting for is just a few days away. The webmaster from my favorite Massachusetts Cicada website http://www.mechaworx.com/Cicada/masscic1.asp is coming by tomorrow so I can show him all the activity we have going on right here in Pimlico Pines and he wants to order a camera ?!?!? Rationally I know just about every adult in our neighborhood has a digital camera they would let me borrow, so I mention that I'm willing to wait for ours and I'll just borrow one from someone else.
It's Friday so we pack Dan up and head over to Green Briar for Critter Capers. Ms Mary brought the corral out and Mike and I helped her catch Peter, Teddy and Eddy (The rabbits) and put them in the corral. Afterwards we watched the Swans with the only two cygnets that were left swim over to the dock just 10 feet from where we were standing. The swans started out with 10 babies. Apparently there's a mean, old, snapping turtle that lives in the Smiling Pool and chomps the feet off the baby birds, so that they drown. Sometimes nature is vicious, I've learned. Anyway, the cygnets were very cute and I mentioned that I'd love to have the camera, and Mike says....let's go to Best buy and pick one up. Off to the mall we went and within minutes decided on the Canon PowerShot A590IS. I realize now after writing the name that Mike got closer to what he was looking for. It's a little bit smaller then the one we had, cost $164 and has some great new features. We decided that if we wanted this camera to last we were going to have to splurge on a case for it, so $20 later we have a hard case with a zipper to protect it.
So now I have the camera, Mike and Danny are napping and I just came back from my second Cicada nymph excavation of the day. Really, I just needed more dirt for the 2 Cicada nymphs I found this morning but in the process found a third. Many of the members of the Yahoo Cicada group I belong too are raising Cicada nymphs in captivity and I thought, that'd be cool (much to Mike's unhappiness) So I cut off the top of two juice bottles filled one with dirt, made three holes running down the sides of the bottles so I can view each of them from the outside. I took a length of pantyhose and put it over one of the bottles. I had Mike drill air holes all around the second bottle, inverted it so the opening is sitting on top of the other bottle and pulled the pantyhose up over the second to seal the two together. Pretty ingenious I thought. As soon as the nymphs start to turn dark, I'll add a few sticks so the Cicada nymphs can climb up and molt. All very exciting. And I'd post pictures that I just took, however I can't get our computer to see our new camera, so I put in the nice little disk that comes with it, and after 5 minutes of running, humming, next and finishes it tells me it doesn't like windows 98 - MIKE ?!?!? Oh yeah...he's napping.