Fauna, Flora

With Humpy on the way, we're spending like fiends these days. Car seat, bassinet, stroller, Baby's First Tranquilizer--all the essentials. And on top of this other stuff, we decided to get a new camera. Our last one was an absolute POS that got worse with age. If you took a picture, and you had the audacity to want to take another soon afterward, and God forbid if you actually used the flash, you waited forever for that damn thing to be ready for the next photo. I can't count the number of times I'd heard Sarah say, "I hate this camera!" Actually, the full line is, "Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! I hate this fucking camera!" Because Sarah is a big fan of onomatopoeic sounds, and also she was raised by pirates.

Our new camera is a Fuji Finepix S100 FS. Camera smarts is among the many types of smarts that I lack, but Sarah's dad is the camera guru and he directed us to this one. It's a bridge camera so it's not full on SLR, but it has film simulation mode, extended dynamic range, and a half dozen other great features I only half understand.

But seeing as we haven't really travelled much since picking it up and the baby's months away, I've only really taken pictures inside my own home. Aside from the photos of Sarah, I've also got twenty-two thousand photos of the cats, because I'm that guy. And beyond that, the only additional photos of interest were the pumpkins I carved for Halloween. Sarah took on the glamorous job of pulling out pumpkin guts, and I made with the stabby-stabby. I'm sure ninety-five percent of the word already knew this, but carving these guys made me realize why pumpkin faces are traditionally filled with triangular and zigzagy shapes: because pumpkins are goddamn thick and it's hard to finesse a knife into it. You just stab and stab and stab and hope that you end up with something face-like by the end. Leftmost pumpkin is a fine example of that. For the one on the right, I tried to get fancy. Tools included three different knives, a pencil, and a screwdriver. It came out looking like Sloth from The Goonies, which wasn't exactly the intent but worked well enough. And it gave me an excuse to holler "Heeeeey, yooooooou guuuuuuuuys!" at least four times a day.