If you go down in the woods today...

...beware of the weird lady with the camera.

Last Friday, my brother called me weird. That's two people I love dearly calling me weird within one week. I don't know what that means, whether I really am weird or whether I just surround myself with really intolerant people. I think the latter, but by all means, judge for yourself.

My brother and I went for a walk in the woods. Since I actually live in the woods, technically, a twenty second walk would be a walk in the woods for me, but that's not the sort of walk I mean. We went for a long walk in the woods. My brother -- let's call him Alex (because that's his name) -- used to live in the cottage I now inhabit, until his lovely Belgian significant other whisked him away to her side of the border. Alex knows the woods quite well. Or so he makes it appear. I'm telling you, it was the longest freaking walk of my life, and it didn't help any that Alex told me every minute or so that he recognised every spot, he just didn't know where it was situated. Every time we came to a bend in the path he'd go, 'Hm. Funny... I wasn't expecting this...' 'I really thought we were closer to... Well I never.'

Seriously though, when we came to a spot that even I recognised he fessed up and admitted that he knew where we had been going all along. The little bastard.

We truly had a terrific time, and I'm so happy that he finally moved back into the neighbourhood. Also because it appears that life in this technological day and age is getting too much for me, and I may need him around to guide me. This was made painfully clear to me when I asked Alex to take a couple of nature pictures with my worthless piece of **** of a camera. Turns out the camera isn't so bad, but the photographer could use a lesson or two in basic photographology. You see, I thought that the '0.3M'/1.0M/2.0M/3.0M' on my little LCD screen referred to the distance between the camera and the object of my photographic desire (as in 0.3 meter/1 meter/2 meters/3 meters). And since I always photograph my stitchy things from up close (roughly 0.3 meters), that's the standard setting of my crappy camera.

'Hm,' said my clever brother once he understood the magnitude of my stupidity. And this is how he looked at me.

(Boy, am I glad I'm not one of his incompetent students!)

Turns out the M doesn't stand for Meter, Meters or even for Metre or Metres. No. M apparently stands for something called 'Megapixel'/some things called Megapixels (I don't know the lingo). Which in turn means I've been taking the crappiest of all possible crappy pictures for the last six years, because I never even used anything but the 0.3 M setting in my life.

So after Alex spent a full twenty minutes explaining the mysteries of the camera to his ageing sister, we took a couple of very nice shots during the rest of our walk in the woods and we had a wonderful time.

Yours ashamedly, but refreshedly,
Annemarie