(no subject)

I go home in t-minus two weeks! If there is a God, he'll give me thunderstorms while I'm down there. Then I can go chasing with Kayla as my medic. ;) Well, not only to go chasing. I just really miss seeing the huge thunderheads roll in from miles away. Iowa's an entirely different environment, and they just aren't the same. Plus, you're surrounded by trees and hills up here, so even if there were a really good storm, you wouldn't be able to see it. Although, all the lightning I've seen up here has been some of the most spectacular I've ever seen, so I guess there's a trade-off.

And you know...I think I've complained about this before. The withdrawal must be bad.

(no subject)

Fuck. It's decision time boys and girls. I called the local photography place to get an estimate on repairing my camera, and he told me it would probably run about $100 to fix it, but it's $20 just to send it in and get an actual estimate. I can purchase a new body for the camera for around $100 off of Ebay. The interesting thing to note is that I can purchase a complete camera (body and lens, some with other accesories) for between $50 and $80 off of Ebay as well. The cameras just appear to be well used, but still work. Then I could sell my camera body for $20 or so as is and bring the expense down even more.

I could also just do some looking around on the net and fix it myself with a little bit of help from people who know what they're doing. Anyone know someone I could send it to who could fix it for cheaper than $100?

Here's where the real decision comes in. I've been wanting a digital camera for some time now. If I were to sell every camera accessory, lens, filter, body, flash, thing I have seperately on Ebay and somehow managed to get the going rate out of them all, I could make between $175 and $200 total. Since I'm a new seller, I'd probably make no more than $140, but since I got the original camera body and lens for free, I don't think I'd be losing much compared to what I paid for everything else. I can get a decent digital camera for between $180 and $200. I'm not talking about the $800 digital SLRs with all the bells and whistles (although that would be nice). I'm talking about the small Sony Cybershots and Nikon Coolpixes and whatnot. I'll probably greatly miss the ability to do long exposures and to use filters and other fun gadgets, but I'd be saving a hell of a lot of money on developing film that doesn't turn out the way I want. There's a problem with digital cameras, though. They depreciate in value far FAR worse than the manual film stuff I have now. There's no way in hell I could ever sell it for what I buy it for, and I'd have to constistently spend $200-$300 dollars to upgrade to the newer, better cameras every couple of years. My little K1000? Yeah, it'll probably worth the same 5 or 10 years down the road that it is now, and there's always a huge plethora of accessories and parts for it on Ebay.

So, here are my choices:

a) Send my camera body in to be repaired for $100.
b) Buy a new camera body off Ebay for $100 and sell mine for $20.
c) Buy a used, complete camera off Ebay for $50-$80 and sell mine for $20.
d) Fix the damn thing myself.
e) Sell the whole shebang and get a digital camera.

Hm?