END OF THE YEAR CELEBRATION!

Santa came back to town and took me to Best Buy this afternoon for my late Christmas/ early Birthday present... a new Nikon. Then the Jolly Ol' Elf took Art and me to Famous Dave's BBQ where we enjoyed our last meal of the year... 4 different types of barbecue served on a trash can lid. Let me tell you, that food was soooo good, there was no place in the whole world I would rather have been at that time than right there eating off of that trash can lid! Pulled pork, brisket, ribs and chicken, with corn muffins, potato wedges, corn on the cob, cole slaw and baked beans. What a way to end the year. Seriously! I was so excited about my new camera, which I took into the restaurant with me, but I put it down long enough to absolutely pig out on bbq!

The after shot of the meal wasn't pretty. I still can't believe how much I ate. Even more unbelievable still is the fact that we actually had left overs and brought home a doggy bag! I know what my first meal for the new year will be... Yay!

Now, back to the camera... I can't tell you how depressing it was to work with my old faithful second hand Nikon, knowing that it was slowly dying. Well, not really dying, but it's auto focus motor is burning out. With my eye sight being as lousy as it is I rely heavily on the auto focus although I do most of the other settings manually so it was frustrating to say the least to have to manually focus my shots only to find out later that most of them out of focus. The new camera, a D5000, isn't a heavy duty camera like it's bigger cousins the D80, D90 or my dream camera the D2, but it is amazing and has so many cool little bells and whistles... like a tilt screen and video! But most of all it has a working auto focus. Yay²!

It was dark by the time I was able to get it outside to play and the battery only had a factory charge so I wasn't able to really mess around like I would have liked to. I do know that I love the camera and I hate that I have to go in to work tomorrow because there is nothing I would like better than to just play with the camera and all it's cool settings all day long!

Warning: heavy photo swarming may follow!

Happy New Year to all of my wonderful friends and family.

Thank you Santa, you rock!