Treasures

This past weekend we were in Alexandria visiting my parents. I know my mom wants me to go through the junk (I mean, treasures) that fills the dresser in my old bedroom. One whole drawer is mostly photos and most of those are crap. Any of the decent or funny ones I have scanned into flickr already. But what do I do with the originals? They are all stored in the photo store envelopes or boxes. (Ritz was giving out boxes for a while. Do they still do that?)

I can't believe it never occured to me to scan some of my earliest diary pages. According to some people, the old entries are clearly written by me, but I'm pretty sure they sound like the rantings of any annoying kid.

I also found my mother's old Konica. I have no recollection of her giving it to me, but somehow it wound up in that drawer. Sadly, a battery was left in it and it corroded. I picked up a new one, but the meter only jumps a tiny bit. I did read something online about how it takes a 1.4v battery, not a 1.5v, except that 1.4 is not readily available at Radio Shack after all. I was hoping 1.5v would make do. So now I don't know if it's just the wrong battery or if the corrosion affected it.

Both my parents instilled in me a (debatably) great habit of meticulously saving all manuals. Sure enough, the manual on the Konica was in another drawer in the same dresser. Unfortunately, it is totally unhelpful. It goes into great detail on how to use the camera on the automatic setting, but doesn't explain at all how to use the manual settings. And it's kind of hard to mess with it when the light meter isn't working properly.