My Hands Are All Cramped Up, But...

So here's a lesson...

When your husband insists on holding your beloved Canon Powershot in the pocket of his life jacket, insist...insist...that you buckle the buckle yourself.

And when you head into the dock and you hear a plop followed by a stream of obscenities, don't even look. Because your PowerShot and all of your photos just hit the lake and it's going to take every ounce of lip-biting you have not to burst into tears right there at the pier with the kids and all your neighbors watching.

Later, when His Jackassedness has apologized a thousand times, fished your camera out of the drink, and you've called Canon on the phone and they've told you it's just shot, cross your fingers. Be nice. Tell him it's not the end of the world, even though your heart is breaking because you took some gorgeous shots of your kids on the water that morning and some great ones last week, and they're probably all gone. Don't curse at him like you want to. Don't kick him in the crotch because you never liked boats anyway and this just sucks. SUCKS DO YOU HEAR ME?

And then quietly nod when he offers to take you to Wal Mart right now. Don't jump up and down when you find a fantastic model for a way-impossibly-cheap price, and don't totally flip with joy when you find out it has no--NO--shutter lag. Just buy it, quietly thank him, and move on.

When you get home several hours later, after mini golf and dinner and ice cream, and you finally get up the guts to put the memory card from the drowned camera (which is still deader than Princess Diana) and it very slowly reads, try to just hold your breath without anyone knowing.

But when all but one of your photos pops up on the screen and you type like lightening to get them on your hard drive and save them as fast as you possibly can before the fluke ends and it zaps out again, and it works?

You can sigh and thank God out loud and clap your hands and be ecstatic...and enjoy the new way-nicer camera...and promise yourself that you will never ever EVER again let 300 shots pile up on your memory card without saving them to CD. Ever, do you hear me??!! And then quietly put the new camera in not one, but two Ziploc bags, and silently remind yourself to hold on to your own stuff on the stupid godforsaken boat no matter how nicely he offers or how bumpy the ride is. It's always safer in your own hands.

And uncross your fingers. It worked. My some miracle, it worked.