Shopping Sprees

Last day! Last day I say to visit my wonderful renter Winsome. Todays post is called “The Hearts of Men” and you should read it.

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How does a trip out to the store to buy some rechargeable batteries and a recharger for my Pentax digital camera end up being a three or four hour long buying spree?

That shopping trip happened about a week and a half ago. On the 3rd of August to be exact.

Now you don’t think I’d be telling you about my shopping trip if all we did that day was purchase a battery recharger and the batteries to go along with it do you? Of course not. We got some milk too.

We also ended up buying me a brand new digital camera! I’d been looking dreamily at several new digital cameras for the last year or so. There is nothing wrong with my tiny little Pentax Optio 330 GS 3.2 mp. I’ve enjoyed taking photos with it and if I do say so myself I think many of the photos turn out fairly well. But, I just wanted a new camera. One with more bells and whistles, one that could take even better macro shots and good night or low light shots.

I was leaning towards a digital SLR camera, but the price and the learning curve held me back in the end. I’m sure that when the time comes my next digital will be an SLR.

Back to what I did buy! I’m so excited about this camera. I’ve been reading information on the various products out there, but you never know how you are going to like something such as a camera or even a laptop until you get it in your hands and try it out.

I got a Sony Cybershot DSC-H5 7.2 Megapixels. A few of the photos that I’ve put up on my sites in the last week were taken by this camera. Unfortunately my latest Green Thumb entry below was not taken by the new cybershot or else the reds would look more realistic. My Pentax always has trouble with very vibrant colors such as reds and oranges, but not this little baby. Almost all of the photos so far have come out pretty much as I’ve seen them in real life.

I’m still playing with my new toy. I had some great opportunities to play from Thursday last week onward. We went to a Hindu wedding on Thursday, a Catholic Wedding and the wedding reception of Friday, and then on Saturday we spent time with family visiting some great Toronto sights. I just need to upload all of the photos onto my computer and I’ll start telling you about some of the events of the past few days.

Oh, best news of all. They didn’t have any new cameras in stock. They only had an open box. The camera appeared to be brand spanking new and they were selling it with the full warrenty gauranteed. So that’s the one I took. They gave me $50 off the price. Then they gave me another $50 store coupon that was used immediately against my purchase, THEN they took $30 off the price of the 2 gig memory stick that I was buying. Deal!

In other shopping news …

Last Monday my husband and I had to go out and look for a new keyboard since our lovely boarder fried the one in her room, see my non venom post for more info on this if you really care.

Before we went to the store I looked at my husband and said, “You know how I’ve been talking about wanting to get a laptop for oh, the last five or six years?” He looked at me and nodded his head. he knew what was coming.

I went on to say “Well, why don’t we look at them while we are out? I bet there are a lot of sales right now since it’s “back to school” time.” He ended up agreeing because he knows that if I got a laptop I’d be able to slouch on the couch with it when I’m not feeling well, or take it out to the garden to write from the yard. A shoppin’ we did go.

Now I have a brand new laptop. We also purchased a wireless Linksys - we had had a wired network prior to this for our two computers, but now that we’ve added a laptop to the mix the only way to go was wireless so that I could use it where ever and when ever.

The laptop is an HP Pavilion dv 5000 (dv5240 ca actually) and it’s fantastic! I won’t bore you with the details but I’m happy with all of it’s features. I just have to get used to the keyboard. it feels so smooth compared to my desktop keyboard. The tappad is another thing that I’m slowly getting used to as well. I bought an optical mouse that I can use with it, and I bought a webcam to (but I haven’t attached it yet).

The shopping sprees are definitely over for now. Neither was in the budget.