Minor Disaster Photoblogging

The camera in my cell phone, the one that always takes such blurry photos, has given up the ghost.  Well, not entirely … if you take the back of the phone off, remove the battery, then remove and reinsert the SIM card, it’ll take one or two photos before failing again.

Using a cell phone to take a photo is an impulse thing, and photo opportunities are fleeting, so having to disassemble and reassemble the phone first is a non-starter.  The fun of taking a photo and instantly sharing it with friends and family on Facebook or Twitter, though, has surprisingly grown on me, and I’m not sure I can live without a working cell phone camera.  So you know where I’ll be later this morning.  Right.  Over at Costco, finding out what it’ll cost to replace my cell phone.

Wow.  Talk about a totally unnecessary product worming its way onto consumers’ must-have lists. The folks at Apple and Google* must be so proud!

Last week, during a sudden monsoon rainstorm, a microburst hit the neighborhood.  The whole house moved, just for a split second.  It wasn’t until a day later, backing out of the garage, that we noticed a big palo verde tree beside the house had been broken in half.  And another day before we discovered a completely separated palo verde limb threaded through the branches of another tree.

The house in the background is my neighbor’s. Technically, the damage is on his side of the property line, but it’s only visible from our side. Looks like there’ll be another chainsaw massacre at Casa Paul this weekend. A quick scan of said casa reveals no other damage; I was particularly concerned about the shingles on the roof but they seem okay. Someone told me a portion of the roof of a house in an adjoining neighborhood is missing, and I believe it. Microbursts are nothing to mess with. Sure glad I never hit one on final approach back in my flying days!

Schatzi the dachshund is slowly getting better. We’re certain now she hurt her back, probably trying to leap up onto the new recliner but falling back on her tailbone instead. The new chair is right at the limit of her leaping abilities, and I’m going to have to put something in front of it so that she can get up on it in two shorter jumps. Dachshunds are prone to back injuries and shouldn’t be allowed to leap on or off furniture, but some people (and you know who I’m talking about) shouldn’t be allowed to breed either, and how are you gonna stop ’em? Anyway, though she’s still conserving energy she’s getting her spirit back, and I expect she’ll recover. God, I love that dog.

I told myself I was going to post some book reviews this morning, maybe some DVD reviews as well, so I’d better get to it.

BTW, those nice crisp focused photos of the microburst mayhem? Taken with a REAL camera, by me, right in the middle of writing this post.

p.s. Know how Dick Tracy died? Wrist tumor.

* Apple=iPhone; Google=Android.