Morning visitor

I reached out to get a breakfast plate out of the drainer and Hello – here was this little guy. Click here for the big version – you can really see his cute little face. And fingers! Love the froggie fingers.

My recently stated intention to start posting more photos is still in effect ... I'm working up to it. I did finally get a new phone, and this one has a camera, so I'm taking a lot more pictures again now. What I'm finding is that I do love having a nice, higher-end camera for planned shots (or unplanned ones, if the camera happens to be within reach as it was this morning), but the images I most enjoy capturing are the fast & dirty ones I used to take so many of when I had my first SpyCam – the one that only runs on Windows 98. I loved that thing ... back in 1999! I can't even find a picture of it online, or a description of the original one, although the company appears to be still making things like that. It's basically a toy camera, with no display, viewfinder or flash – you just point the pen-shaped object at something and surreptitiously click the top, and then, when you get home and download the images via the highly proprietary software, hopefully you will have gotten a picture of something good.

I used to have (probably still do have, somewhere) a whole small collection of these weird little toy digital cameras, including a purple and green one made by Nickelodeon that I got for $5 on the clearance table at Best Buy or some such place a bunch of years ago. They do not produce museum-quality photographs, but I love the grainy, distorted quality of the images they do make. And it's kind of exciting to have to wait to see exactly what you're going to get, until a little later ... almost like how cameras used to be, when you had to load film (remember film?) and take it in to be developed. Anticipation is half the fun.

Maybe I'll see if I can find those old cameras again, now that I have a computer that's up to date – there must be some kind of adapter that will let me get the photos out of the camera without Windows 98. When I plugged the new phone into the computer it automatically started iPhoto and let me download them without a hitch. I love that about Macs.

One question, however: What is up with the Blogger photo upload utility these days? It's so slow! I have to set the image size to "small" or it takes forever to upload – in fact, it never does upload. Must investigate.