We bought a digital camera last weekend.

We’d been looking ever since we got our child tax credit in the mail. Office Depot had it on sale and then had a back to school sale where they offered teachers 10% off everything. We decided that was too good a deal to pass up.

I love it on so many different levels.

My DearHusband is incapable of taking a good picture of anything or anyone. I think he has some kind of block. He can not take a picture without cutting off someone’s head, having something growing out of someone’s head, so small you can’t tell who it is or at some kind of weird angle that looks like you hit the “take picture” button when it was falling out of your purse. I think he honestly tries but somehow, somewhere there is just something missing, so when you stick a camera into his hand he goes deaf, dumb and blind. I’m hoping (digital is so easy ya know) that the WYSIWYG and the ability to view what he’s taken may improve his picture taking abilities.

The GirlChild absolutely loves to take pictures. I was getting so tired of taking a camera to be developed only to find it held 25 pictures of the StupidDog and the floor and 2 pictures that I took. Now she can take pictures to her hearts desire. I can put them on the computer for her to look at and then we can delete them. All without having to spend another dime on pictures no one actually wants or needs. I’m not sure she actually understands that what you see in the little window is actually the picture you get but she’s young and trainable.

I had a 36mm Waterproof camera I bought the summer I spent in American Samoa. It was like the energizer bunny. It kept going, and going and going. I didn’t think it would ever give up the ghost. I was actually disappointed when it did finally die because it and I had been a lot of marvelous places over the years. It was nifty but you know you can only have so many pictures of fish before they all begin to look alike. Fish in Hawaii, pretty swell. Fish in St. Thomas, pretty dandy. Fish from oh I don’t know, St. Thomas, Hawaii or maybe the Bahamas it’s hard to tell. Here, where most of the lake water is red, it was pretty worthless except to the extent you could take it to the lake and get it wet and not worry.

It finally quit working a couple of years ago and the DearHusband bought me an ABS camera. I wasn’t particularly inspired by the ABS. It required expensive film. Which was expensive to develop. And the only impressive thing it did was take wide shots. Frankly I didn’t have that much call for wide pictures and they developed some as wide shots when I didn’t mean for them to.

We’d taken to buying those disposable cameras. They were actually pretty neat. Take it to a soccer game, drop it in the mud, oh well it only cost $4.99. And besides that there were probably only two pictures on it that were actually any good because the rest had been taken by the GirlChild or the DearHusband.

Now the digital camera is wonderful! It satisfies that instant gratification thirst I seem to have. Take a picture. Don’t like it? Delete it and take another. Download it to your computer and enlarge it, reduce it, get rid of the red eye, the possibilities are limitless.

The only problem is: I think I have the capability to become a menace with it.