A busy day already

It's been a busy day already, and it's just past noon. Usually I'm not even finished having coffee and reading the paper by this time.

At 9:30 am I had an appointment at Upstairs for Hair, where my favorite hairdresser Darcy gave me a good shearing. At 10:30 I was at Bread & Circuses having a cranberry-orange-almond scone and a cup of coffee. Then FoodFare for some groceries... then PharmaPlus for some Poise undergarments and no-sugar-added chocolates, both on sale... then the bank, where I deposited the latest MM cheque and got a money order for the storage unit where my mother's stuff is kept... then to Pack & Post to fax a medical note to Ipsos-Reid... then to 7-Eleven to pick up a couple of Canada scarves for my HB editors (they have some lovely ones that don't cost an arm and a leg)... then to Starbucks for a sugar-free Cinnamon Dolce Latte... then, finally, back home, latte in hand.

This afternoon George has to go downtown to get his glasses. He'll also be picking up a Canon Powershot A560, which is on sale at Don's Photo, as are the SD cards necessary to make it fully functional. We should be able to get both for under $200. This is our joint Christmas present to each other, since we've really been feeling the lack of a digital camera since George lost our last one a couple of months ago.

I feel tired, yet strangely energized. Darcy told me this morning that he finds my energy "so calming", which I find a little bit amusing.

Time to knuckle down to work on HB.

The camera of DOOM

Actually, it's more like the camera of AWESOME!

George just got home with his glasses, the camera... and something else. More about that later.

The glasses look great; they literally take about fifteen years of off George's face. And now he can watch TV without getting a headache, as well as see the numbers on buses, read street signs, and other such things. Hee.

The camera, which as I mentioned in my last entry is a Canon Powershot A560, is flippin' amazing. For an entry-level digital camera, this thing does everything except make coffee. Among the cool features: it allows you to play with the ISO settings and it takes decent movies WITH sound. Among the not-so-cool features: it only has one level of Macro setting for close-up photography, and in order to download photos to a computer you have to turn the camera on, thus eating up battery life. That's what I know so far. George is in the living room pouring over the manual, so I expect regular dispatches from him throughout the evening concerning the exact details of the camera's many functions.

We took three test photos with it before even cracking the manual, which produced two portrait shots with decent skin tones, sharp focus, and crazy levels of detail, and one shot of a magazine on the light table which was also hella crisp. Considering that the camera plus SanDisk card only cost about $180, I'm a very happy camper right now.

As for the "something else", it turned out that Don's Photo has a special on right now where you buy a digital camera and get a printer for free. George and I chose an Epson All-In-One CX7450, which is both a printer and a scanner. It cost us $80... yes, the "free" in this case means "buy it now and get a full rebate in two months", which we can certainly live with. We have a friend whose printer recently died, and were thinking of her when we elected to pick it up.

I am so very, very happy that we have a camera again. I'd missed it terribly.

EDITED TO ADD: It actually has special Snow, Beach, Aquarium, and Fireworks settings. Fireworks! *squeeeeeeeeeee!*