Role Reversal...

yesterday I found this message on my answering machine...

"Mom, this is Zach. I have been calling you for two days, but nobody answers...call me sometime and let me know if anyone is still alive."

Um...I thought I was the one that was supposed to be making those kinds of phone calls...

(edited to add...I did call him. He was calling to tell me his girlfriend was really excited about helping buy a blazer. Which is cool with me -- one less thing for me to do next week!)

Reactions to my camera tossing...

No cameras were damaged in the birth of my camera tossing photos.

I am with Lou on this, my camera is too valuable and beloved and precious to me to risk the toss. So my new plan is that I buy my husband a new camera -- one that has the very important shutter priority setting -- and then use that to take camera toss photos. I doubt he will be thrilled with this idea, but he travels, so he may never know. (By the way, honey, I know you read my blog sometimes, and I would never ever do this for real...completely changing the subject, your camera's memory doesn't hold enough pictures, right? So maybe we should get you a new one.... ... ...)

And Patsy -- I cannot wait to try this out with a candle. My pyromania and my new camera tossing obsession...This could be very very fun. Dangerous to life, limb, camera, household furnishings and well, the house, but fun. Too bad it is now 10 am and the sun is finally coming up! But sunset is at 3:30, so I only have to wait six hours or so for it to be dark again. Another advantage to living in Alaska!

Thanks for all the comments...I am glad you thought the shots were interesting, because you will be seeing more of them. For sure.

And yet another shot of Tess buried in the snow. I am beginning to wonder about this girl, because she really seems to like being buried.

an explanation of the camera tossing.

Lou is right. I didn't throw my camera. Yet.

I was logging onto my flickr account and noticed this cool photo, which I followed to a blog about camera tossing. Which is what it sounds like. You point your camera at a light of some kind, trip the shutter and toss it. Hopefully to land on something very soft.

Since I was trying this out in front of my kids, and I knew they would want to try it as well, I opted to modify it a bit. We used the shutter priority setting, set the shutter speed to five seconds, and pointed it at the Christmas tree. Then we flipped it around, spun it, zoomed in and out, whatever WITHOUT ACTUALLY THROWING THE CAMERA. I love my camera. I would be more willing to throw one of my children, they heal. I know at some point I will GENTLY toss my camera, but not when my kids are around to get the wacky idea that it is okay to hurl Mom's precious across the room.

We ended up with what look like a lot of really bad shots of a Christmas tree, but an intriguing idea.

Much much more experimentation is required...

camera tossing!

My auto's warranty has expired!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Did I mean to let my auto's warranty expire? I can speak to one of their representatives and get it re-instated...

Yeah. I am always tempted to push one to speak to one of their representatives and ask about a warranty for my vehicle. I don't think it would do me much good though, since I have a almost 13 year old Suburban with 150,000+ miles on it.

Or maybe they would like to warranty Mark's Jeep, because it's only ten years old, or Zach's car, which is eleven years old...

That's right, we have no vehicle made in this century. Maybe next year we will replace the Jeep, or not, because Mark still likes it, and we are thinking of getting a sedan so that Thor doesn't have to learn to drive in the Suburban.

Why does my spellcheck think doesn't isn't a word? Or isn't? Is spellcheck an elitist snob what thinks people shouldn't use contractions? Plus it doesn't recognize spellcheck as a word, either. What a snobby elitist program. That I can no longer live without, and I find myself ocassionally writing a word WITH A PEN AND PAPER and then watching to see if the little red line appears because I am not sure if I spelled it correctly.

I also want to TIVO my world -- I find myself wanting to rewind radio programs and conversations, the way I can rewind TV shows on my DVR.

There are portions of life and conversations I would be thrilled to fast forward through, the way we rush through commercials to get back to the show...dentist's appointments would take place at 4X speed and last about a minute. Washing dishes would be over in seconds. A visit from awkward friends and relatives would be hours long, rather than days and weeks and months and eons (come on, everyone has had a house guest that made every minute feel like hours.)

Right. Thor and the Suburban. I had to scroll back up to see what the hell I was talking about in the first place...

I think it will be good for Thor to learn big vehicles. I learned to drive in a 70's station wagon, probably with those fake wood panels on the side. I remember driving it once with the back seat down, and when I twisted around to look behind as I reversed, thinking that it felt like I was driving a lumber wagon, it was so far from me to the back door.

Now my parents drive a sporty little Lincoln, a great car, fun to drive, and isn't a geezermobile like the series of Grand Marquis that they used to drive, and before that those big station wagons.

Any way, I learned to drive in a big car, and I have no problem with driving big things. I love driving my Suburban, and I loved our F150 pickup. In Europe we rented big vans, nine passenger vans, sometimes, and even in the insanely narrow streets and crazy drivers of the Netherlands, I liked driving those big vans. Parking them, no. European parking lots are designed for teeny little fuel efficient cars.

But the Suburban is kinda big for Thor to start in...so we are thinking that we should get some older sedan for him. There's no hurry though, Thor isn't really thrilled with the idea of learning to drive in the middle of winter when there is snowpack and ice on every road...

I was happy about changing phone numbers, because we got so many telemarketer calls on our Tucson phone. Unfortunately somebody named Barbara had our number before us, and apparently not only was she a bad driver -- we kept getting phone calls telling us "someone at this number may have a pending court date", and when I pressed one to talk to a court representative, she didn't believe I wasn't Barbara, and we kept getting those phone calls for a long time -- but she was a deadbeat as well, apparently, because we kept getting cranky collection calls.

I realize it's the oldest trick in the book to claim you are not the person they are looking for, but damn it, I am not Barbara. My name is Julie. I didn't get a traffic ticket and then ignore it. I didn't run up a big credit card bill and then not make the payments. I am not a scofflaw and a bad credit risk. The calls seem to have stopped, but since I don't answer the phone if I don't recognize the number, maybe there are still people on the other end of the line hoping Barbara will answer...

And finally, because I can, another random photo of snow. This one was taken by Thor, while I was shoveling the deck in our back yard...