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I'M GOING TO SPARE you more photos of gray weather, although the opportunities have been abundant here in my neck of the woods (and meadows) for too many days now. Today's weather was interesting, complete with showers, complex fast-moving cloud formations and a tornado watch. But it's really not the weather I'm about to discuss. Although here's a coincidence...like the clouds, my subject, too, is complex and fast-moving. That's precisely what bothers me about it.

Technology.

It's running way out ahead of me...leaving me in the dust. And it's going berserk! Just wait'll you hear!

There were items I had to fetch from the Home Depot store (a light fixture and stove burner plates for Apartment #57, just so you know, and how I despise going to the Home Depot store... but that's enough about that.) I only mention that store because it sits beside a Circuit City store and, aha...the perfect opportunity to pick up a new media card for my camera. It'd be a nice little digital camera were it not for the bad habit of saying..."Memory Card Full!"

So into the store I go, determined to cross this one thing off my agenda with dispatch. Straight to the service desk, where the first person I talk to escorts me directly to a knowledgeable employee in the camera department. Wow. How impressive. But then...I show my camera, I show the media card, and things immediately start slipping downhill.

It appears my camera is too old! Yes, that's just what I hear..."Your camera is too old." Poor old camera, it's been around four, maybe five years, and already technology's consigned it to the dustbin...it's fat, it's tiny-screened and it doesn't have enough memory! Yikes. Fat and not enough memory?!

But hey! The clerk happily points out that there are plenty of new cameras that are sleek and large-screened. On sale now! And just let me show you what all they can do, she says. That is when I see technology's backside, far in the distance! I cringed at the intricacies. My mind boggled as Beth (the clerk) ran down the list of modes...the snow mode, fireworks mode, kids and pets mode, underwater mode, beach mode, foliage mode (I think it puts the leaves back on the trees), the food mode, no less! And get this...she explained that the camera could learn to know one's grandchildren and keep track of their ages. I shudder to think I would ever need a camera with that much memory!

And then she got to this feature, which made me clutch my dear old camera to my chest and flee from the store... Look here, she said with delight. This camera can detect the curvature of your subject's mouth. It reads the facial structure of your loved ones...won't take a shot without a smile. Isn't that terrific?

Oh, I gasped. It's terrifying! What if I want to take a picture of them sad?! It will turn them all into technological Pollyannas!

She laughed. And I left.

And just before I got into my car in the parking lot, I used my trusty old camera to take this comforting shot...an oasis of nature amid the roaring technology.



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