(A.K.A. The Longest Blog Post Ever!)
I can’t believe it’s Monday night already. The past few days have been packed with so much craziness I’ve barely had time to think, let alone blog!
So, to sum up…
The new toy:
I bought myself a refurbished Kodak V550 camera to upgrade my Canon SD400. This is my carry-it-everywhere camera. It will definitely not replace my digital SLR, but I think after a weekend of playing with it I’m comfortable with it being at least a few steps up from the other camera. The video is incredibly better, the outdoor shots are also better. The inside shots…not so much. They’re probably better, but not so much of an improvement that it would be worth the upgrade. However, the shot-to-shot time and the initial shot time are incredible in comparison. It would literally take my other camera 30 seconds to start up, and then 10 seconds to recycle the flash in between shots – I timed it. Not to mention shutter lag. The new camera – if I didn’t have the D-SLR to compare it to I’d say there was no shutter lag, and the flash recycle time is just a couple of seconds.
Here’s a picture of Carrie I took with it indoors, using the camera’s built-in red-eye removal. There would have been major red-eye in this picture with the old camera, but if I zoom in a bit (to the original, this one’s been resized for the web) I can see a lot of noise in the background. For a snapshot camera, though, this will work just fine!
The back-breaking labor:
We started staining the deck this weekend. We’re completely changing the color, from weathered gray to cedar. You can see a corner of the weathered gray in this picture. All we have to show, after approximately 18 person-hours of work (12 of which were all Denis), is the railing going around the deck – inside and out.
The crafts:
I finished the woven tumbling blocks table runner! I love the colors, and the construction was interesting. It wasn’t very complicated, but the instruction packet I got from the class is…well, terrible. I don’t think I’d be able to make another based on those instructions, which is too bad. Since there’s no actual quilting it could be a fairly quick gift to make. I also started another pair of socks. They’re out of Koigu, which is always super yummy to work with. I started them Wednesday night and finished the first one this afternoon, so the pattern’s pretty quick too.