Still ugh.

Looks like we're headed for either Plan B or plan G, as the person who offered to send an unused but functional camera (Plan D) has not responded to e-mail asking if the offer was still open. As it was a generous offer when first made, and I felt a little uncomfortable about considering it then, I feel like it would be bad of me to pester them with more inquiries, so I'm just going to let that option die, scratch my head about what happened, and hope that the person in question is okay.

Amazon is still claiming that my order (for the Olympus which would exactly replace the camera that just died; this was Plan C) is being processed, and I should expect it to be delivered by October 12. I don't care about the order still being open in and of itself: clearly there is no camera, and my credit card hasn't been charged and it feels safe to assume that it won't be. However, I'm really pissed about the order still being open, because while it's open, I can't rate the seller. And I really, really want to rate the seller.

Saturday is the last day I could return the Canon to Target. In theory, I could still work my way through the other four to six models of camera in my price range that Target sells, using each one for two or three weeks and then returning it until I luck on a camera I like, but if I'm honest with myself about it, I don't actually believe that I'm likely to find a camera I like better than the current Canon, even if I don't actually like the current Canon. And the idea of dragging this out for another three months because maybe one of the unexplored options is exactly what I'm looking for, is just . . . I can't. I don't have the energy to keep caring about this. Caring about things is exhausting. The amount of time and energy the stupid camera replacement has taken from me already is ridiculous; why through good energy after bad?

So Plan G (end blog, become Amish, die in threshing accident) is looking better and better all the time.

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UPDATE 10/22/17: A reader e-mail made me realize that I've been keeping you in suspense, which I didn't mean to.

Elected to keep the Canon. Didn't really expect another camera to be any better, didn't have the emotional energy to keep trying and returning them anyway, and didn't have the physical energy to return one even if I'd decided to. It's been a rough month.

I've also realized, kinda, that the timing (camera dies right as we're headed into Schlumbergera season again: camera died on September 19, first Schlumbergera bloom was 069A Sweetie Darling, on September 25) made this all much harder to deal with than it would have been if the camera had died in, say, June. If there's any time a person needs a camera with accurate color reproduction, it's at the beginning of Schlumbergera season.

The newer photos have been better than the earlier ones, partly because I found the color-balance settings menu (none of those options seem to work by themselves, but some may give more easily-edited images than the default automatic white balance) and partly because I figured out that the camera has been trying to tell me that images aren't in focus all along, it's just that it did so with a rectangle in a different shade of green than the green rectangle that means the photo is in focus. (The Olympus used orange-red and green for the same messages.)

So. Not going to begin my farrier training right away, I guess, though I'm not ruling it out, either.

Blog posting will likely resume soonish, though I do need a little time yet to get my feet under me again. There have been sixteen (!) new Anthurium blooms and one new (?) Schlumbergera just since the camera died, so I have a lot of catching up to do. You'll never guess what color the Schlumbergera is.



Kidding. Of course it's orange.