Christmas Eve(s)

This Christmas week has been glorious – gloriously busy, gloriously blessed, and gloriously frustrating.  I can only begin to skim the surface in telling you how much joy and delight filled our Monday night, when we opened our family Christmas gifts… there’s nothing more satisfying than giving gifts to family, and we were so blessed in our giving this year.  As usual, however, Paul had the most fun of all.  When I opened the one gift from him, I found a gorgeous new 18-135mm lens for my camera… only it seemed he had forgotten that my camera is a Nikon, and spent way too much money on a Canon lens.

Oh well, I reassured him, I can always exchange it. I was quite choked up that he would have thought to give me something so nice – even if it wasn’t quite the right fit!

Then he said wait — maybe I have something else for you.  So he went out to the shed and came back in with another box.  Inside, I found another gorgeous lens – a macro – but again, a Canon mount, totally wrong for my D3100.  I was feeling really bad for him at that point, and and staying up-beat so he wouldn’t be bummed that he’d forgotten something so critical as my camera make and model when shopping for me.

Finally he said WAIT wait wait, I might have something else back there…. by now, everyone was laughing and asking just HOW many more things he might have stashed away, to which he replied “Oh I don’t know, it’s hard to say…”

So he comes back in with yet another box, and I open it.  Inside I find …. a Canon Rebel T5i Digital SLR Camera!!! And a few other nifty additions, not the least of which (and boy will I need this) — the Canon EOS Rebel T5i/700D For Dummies.  

I was completely destroyed.  I cried my face off. (I deleted the picture of the streaming mascara… a little more candid than I could handle!) It was too much.  Not merely the expense – I’m used to my beloved spending extravagantly on me by this time.  It is just that thing they tell you about “love languages” — well, my sweetie speaks mine fluently.  And the name of my love language is: Camera! 😀

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You’d think this would have been the climax of the evening – but there were some post-scripts.  When he said he didn’t know how many more presents there might be, it was because once he had delivered all of mine, he had to then deliver my entire Nikon kit to Megan, our young photography student… and then deliver Megan’s Panasonic Lumix to Geneva, and then Geneva’s Sony Cyber-shot to Jacob.  Now everybody in the family has a better camera than they did before, and that is AWESOME because man, we take a lot of pictures. 😀

And here’s the proof: The next day, we met Grandma and Grandpa at Steele Indian School Park and had a photo-walkabout/portrait session.  It was only much later when I started to attempt to process the portraits for Grandma that I realized I had failed in the first task of camera ownership: setting the date-time-stamp.  And ever since then I have been trying to re-organize the disaster of several hundred photos that came off the camera in utter random disorder.  Because I felt an obligation to get the portraits done for the Grands (it was meant to be their Christmas present) I first lumped each kid into his or her own set of pix; after that I kept categorizing because I could not remember the order of the photo walk any more.  So I here have documented our photo walk, that encompassed the aforementioned park and Arizona Falls, broken down into subjects such as kids, flora, fauna, people and places.  I absolutely love this new camera, and have already learned a few tidbits from my Dummies book (in the few odd moments I’ve had to read this week).  Looking forward to ever better results with study and practice! 🙂

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