Goodbye, Cruel World

Those frighteningly cheerful strangers waving farewell are a harbinger of the following announcement. (Anyone who knows my flighty self may have been anticipating this for some time.)

Shotsnaps is dead.

Well, not dead, really, but certainly mortally wounded.
You see, I've lost the camera, and there is little chance of a successful recovery.

The long story, shortened a tad, is as follows.
John and I left the house yesterday for a bit of shopping, and we stopped by the Galleria Mall for the first time in nearly a year. We did this not for shopping, but for the samples scattered throughout. We stayed a long time, nibbled lots of samples, looked at a selection of kayaks (John wants one), and snapped some incredible pictures (since they're irrevocably lost, you can't dispute the fact that they were the most amazing pictures you'll never see).

After leaving the mall, we bought dull things at a dull store in a dull plaza. We splurged on dollar hot dogs in the parking lot, and as we drove past the cheap movie theater in the plaza ($1.50 movies on Wednesdays, $3.00 all other days), John noticed that a movie his coworker Doug raves about was playing. It's not a film John would normally be interested in, but it's a feel good film, suitable for two parents and three girls who were four hours behind on napping, so we decided on a whim that we would see it if the showing times cooperated. Then, we made The Giant Mistake. John stayed in the running car and asked me to jog in to find out the showtimes. I had left my glasses at home, but, with squinting, I discovered that the movie was showing at three o'clock. It was 2:56. Perfect!

We freed the children from their carseats, scurried into the theater, bought tickets, and flopped down in a darkened back row for what we thought would be an enjoyable two and a half hours. Half an hour later, the credits rolled. Yep. The movie had started at 1:15, and the ticket girl was mum, probably because people who are crazy enough to bring three young children to a non-animated movie not marketed for young children (which we do on the rare occasions that we see a movie) are also crazy enough to pay full price for the movie's climax minus its build-up.

I had looked at the wrong column. I was so very ashamed. This shame was only compounded once we arrived home by my discovery that somewhere in our travels, the camera had escaped from the diaper bag. Oh, Abigail! The only place I can determine it jumped ship was in the darkened movie theater; the bag tipped over when we removed the rumpled hot dogs for the girls. (They'd had no lunch, and we hadn't gone shopping at Aldi yet, hence no bananas. What else were we to do?)

So, John left home to retrace our steps, and he gave our number to many people who probably discarded that number in the garbage minutes after he departed, little realizing that in this camera's fate rests the balance of the world.

There you have it.

John is a gracious man, and to make me feel even worse, he let me sleep in this morning. I awoke to bacon, fresh-from-the-stovetop home fries, and scrambled eggs. Then, after church, he made dunchlupper. (You know, the meal that replaces lunch and supper/dinner.) It's the cruelty of inducing even more guilt with goodness.

And now I offer a public apology to all shotsnaps readers. Remember in the last post when I implied that one of you "squealed on me?" I take it back. John's the one who egged on that old man in the laundromat. (I realized this while munching the crisp bacon that he so conveniently prepared for me to drown my sorrows in.) The proof is not in the pudding, after all; it's in the bacon. He must prefer dolphins.

Lastly, I should announce shotsnaps' new policy, John's own brainchild. Every time each faithful reader loads the shotsnaps page, a "viewing fee" of one dollar will be charged to said reader. This will be in effect until we make enough cash to buy a new camera.

That will be all.
Thank you very much.

Signed most respectfully,
Abigail Joy Owen