Roll with the punches

Greetings from the Melbourne, Florida airport, where I am waiting for a flight. (It would seem my name is fine today, and the only issue now is that the flight is delayed. I am under a curse, but am working hard not to care.)

I would seem, little butterflies, that I was entirely premature with the “broken camera” statement. It turns out that the camera itself works just fine – it is the the screen, and only the screen that is broken, and the screen really is broken. As you can see, the only display the camera gives me is this one:

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(I took that picture just now with my computer camera.) See that? White screen, with black blotches and tiny black, red and blue lines. (I bet you can’t see those, but they are there. Clearly, very, very broken. Now, since this camera doesn’t have a viewfinder, just a screen, this means that I really can’t see what I’m taking pictures of, and this really, really upset me until I realized that the camera is still taking pictures. It’s taking them perfectly. I just don’t know what they look like until I download them on the computer and look at them. I discovered this while talking with Rachel H on the phone at the airport yesterday, and she cheered me right up by pointing out that this is now a perfect camera for Kinnearing. The minute she said it, I realized she was right. This is now entirely a Kinnear Camera. If the purpose of Kinnearing is to take a picture of someone without looking so that they don’t notice, then this is now perfect, because now it is impossible to look. I could be taking a picture of anything! It could be out of focus, it might not have the subject in it, it could be crooked, I mean, it’s totally a crap shoot now. I can keep taking pictures, but there is nothing in it but the element of surprise. Now, I sort of like surprises.. so this is what I did. I kept taking pictures anyway. I took pictures of Joe’s sister Kelly when she came to visit me yesterday at the time of the great airport waiting (she works at the airport):

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I took pictures of the sweater in the bathroom – because heck. Maybe they would work out…

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but they didn’t. Fortunately for me, I didn’t know that they didn’t work out until just now, which means that I went boldly forth taking pictures between then and now, and didn’t give it another thought. There was nothing I could do, so I did nothing. I arrived in Vero Beach last night at 2:30am and fell into the bed without getting undressed. In the 13 seconds of consiousness I had before I was asleep, I thought I heard the sea… so this morning when I got up, I went over to the window and looked out, and this is what I saw:

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(See that? I kinneared the ocean. Worked great.) I took a bath, I packed my stuff back up, I drank a quick cup of coffee, checked email, pulled out my notes for where to go and what to do, and realized that I had an extra 15 minutes to spare, so I walked to the sea.

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What a beautiful place… and hot and sunny (really hot, really sunny) and I rolled up my pants and walked along the beach until my 9 remaining minutes were up, then went back inside, grabbed my suitcase and went off to speak at Vero Beach Books for 11:00, with my jeans soaked with seawater from the knees down. (I like to think that people understood. It was the ocean.)

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I tried to take a sock picture with the knitters there, but it turns out that didn’t go as well –

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since I only got some of them in. (Sorry. The sock looks bad too.) Then I took a picture of Tracy and Sarah:

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(That one went really well, didn’t it?)

and I totally kinneared Lisa and her first socks (one of which is a ladies large, and the other child sized)

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but I only got the socks and her lovely daughter in the picture. Sorry Tracy. If it’s any consolation, the parts of your body that I got in that picture look really great.

In any event, I’m going to be making lemonade of of lemons. The kinnear camera is on the road. Next stop,

Foxtale Books.