And I've taken thousands of pictures during that time, many of which have shown up on my blog.
In fact I'll admit that my writing is often inspired by whatever photos I have at hand, and my main weapon for fighting my chronic and ubiquitous writer's block is looking at the pictures I've taken of whatever I want to write about, one picture being, if not worth a thousand words, maybe a couple hundred at least.
But about halfway through Tom's and my second Camino walk last fall (see "...And Lighten Your Pack" at www.andlightenyourpack.com) the zoom-out on my camera seemed to be malfunctioning as grey spots would often show up on magnified shots, ruining what would have been some really awesome scenes:
So I figured I'd do the best I could with my now-annoying - yet somehow still beloved - little camera, and buy a new one when I got back to the States.
Yet after I returned home my intention to buy a new camera remained merely an intention.
See, I wanted to buy a better camera than my little Canon, but how much better a one I needed I wasn't sure. So I guess it was a combination of indecision, lack of knowledge, not feeling like doing the research to educate myself, and how much easier it was to bee-atch about my camera wrecking my shots than to do something about it, that left me in a protracted state of inertia. Hence I continued to use my aggravating little pink camera.
But then one day about three months ago while grocery shopping at Meijer's I made an impulse-turn down the electronics aisle to the camera section where I sought the assistance of the salesperson, a post-adolescent youngster who appeared to know as little about cameras as I did. So I thought, aw, heck and just pointed to a black Canon camera behind the glass display case, $215.99 reduced to $149.99, figuring that if it had to be locked behind a glass case it must be good.
But if only I had procrastinated for one week less, if I had pulled out my new camera and sat down with the instruction manual one week sooner and started using my black Canon before my pink Canon, already banged and battered by my cavalier klutziness, had entered its death spiral last weekend during a visit to mother, then surely I wouldn't have fallen into the camera-panic that caused me to take the impulsive - and, ultimately foolish - action that caused me to lose every photograph I've taken over the past year, over 7,000 irreplaceable pictures.
To be continued.