I had grand ideas today. Grand ideas indeed. This PaD thing may be rekindling a smoldering coal of creativity in me that was almost extinguished. I had ideas for at least three shots that I was going to try for today. I loaded up my camera and headed off to work. I haven’t taken my camera to work with me in at least a year. But today, today I was motivated.

I grab my camera, ready to tackle my PaD and immediately notice the dreaded [-E-] on the top display. Since I knew what I needed and only brought my camera without the bag, there was no fixing this. I stared at it for a few seconds, my mind in overdrive thinking about how I can get around this. My life, for as chaotic as it gets, seems to work out all of the problems that the universe throws at me. When a crisis hits me I slow down. I don’t necessarily think “How can I fix this” but rather “OK, how am I getting out of this right now.” I may not always fix my problems, but I usually get out of them, at least long enough to come up with a real solution. I have always been blessed with not panicking. In dealing with problems if you attack the main problem first, everything thing else just kinda falls into place.

First I thought, “I will just go to the store and get a new card.” A solution, no doubt, but an expensive one. Eight hours from that moment I would not need that card anymore. Then I thought “Internal memory.” It then occurred to me that this was not my first 1.3 MP Epson digital camera. No, that wasn’t going to work.

Finally I thought “iPhone.” My main problem here was not the lack of the card, it was the fact that I couldn’t take a photo. My PaD documents my life and this, with any luck, would be my biggest crisis of the day. I really enjoy iPhone photography but it has it’s place, and that place is called Instagram. Part of my renewed pledge to my camera is that I actually use my camera. It will be few and far between that I will use my iPhone for my PaD. In fact, I was just yelling at a friend of mine who would even consider being so lazy and disrespectful as to use his iPhone in such an endeavor. John, my humble apologies, but as you can see this was an emergency. My iPhone solved my most pressing problem.

Once again I managed to get out of a jam just long enough to fix the entire problem. That’s just kind of how I roll. I don’t feel bad about this at all. It is my life. Always on the edge. The edge of being late. The edge of catastrophe. The edge of perfectly balanced chaos tumbling down all around me. I wouldn’t change a thing.

“The older I get, the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first- a process which often reduces the most complex human problems to manageable proportions.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower