New camera

I got a new camera this week, a Canon SX10IS. It is a pretty nifty toy, and I look forward to learning how to use it. Here are a couple of shots from the first day, mostly playing around with the 20x zoom while sitting at the kitchen table. Here is a rare shot of Joseph looking at the camera.

The camera arrived on Wednesday, day of the snowstorm that shut down every school district except Cleveland, East Cleveland, Shaker Heights and Cleveland Hts. Our children were not too happy to have to go to school. The interim superintendent even recorded a message that went to all the phones that evening explaining why she didn't close the schools. Evidently, 8 to 10 inches in a couples hours wasn't quite enough snow. Jacob said she must have looked on Google Maps street view decided that the weather looked fine. My work sent us home early, so that gave me a little more time to play with the camera (and shovel the walks and get the minivan unstuck from the street and try and pick up kids from school). The roads were a mess, but the parking lots at the schools were worse. Also, the kids that walked use the streets since sidewalks were buried by the mounds of snow pushed on them by the plows. We survived, and we are fortunate that this storm did not knock out power in this area.

Abby is my most enthusiastic model. She found the lens shade, and apparently, this is how to use it. One of the days I'll have to take the camera outside at some point today and see if the shade makes a difference. Today, the sky is clear and the sun is shining. It's really beautiful and a nice respite from the gray clouds that normally fill the sky over Cleveland this time of the year.
Emma also enjoys posing for the camera, but I caught her in a pouting moment here. She had a writing assignment to do, and it was making her very sad. Her topic was to write on something fun from Christmas vacation, but she didn't know how to start it. Over the course of the evening, we narrowed it down to "making candy" and then ended up composing an essay on making caramel. It took about five hours to work up to a ten-minute writing assignment. I ended up interviewing her and putting her thoughts on paper, then she transposed them into a final document. Writing can be more fun as a team, especially on the brainstorming part. Our children have this idea that the first things to write should be perfect (just like their parents), but that's not good writing, and it ends up stressing us all out and leads to writer's block. Anyway, if we had tried the interview strategy earlier, it would have saved us five hours of grief.