Buried Treasure

You all know that I got this spammy new camera, for which I haven't, as yet, read the instruction manual, but that's a different personality defect and not the subject of today's chat. So, instead of the fat memory cards, it uses the skinny kind (I realize this is all very technical, my apologies if I'm talking over your head). It came packaged with a single skinny chip with so little storage that 10 pics will earn you a premature beep beep beep, out of memory you big loser, before you even get your shutter finger limbered up. But I had an aha moment when I remembered that my camcorder has a skinny chip for the purpose of taking low resolution, pretty poor still photos (probably not the stated purpose Canon had in mind when it added the feature, but the picture quality is lame). I scrounged around the Kitchen Counter of No Return, actually found the camcorder, raided it for parts and we were off to the races. But soon after the girls started gathering the outside eggs on Easter morning, I got another premature beep beep beep, and thought to myself, WTH, I sure did buy a loser camera; couldn't possibly be me, I found the skinny chip and everything, I was so proud.

So I popped the chip into the reader and, X marks the spot, buried treasure. One hundred and sixty-seven still shots were causing the beep beep beep, most of them from YuYu’s adoption trip from 2005. It’s not that I had never seen them, I knew of their existence although good friend Stew was manning the video on that trip and snapped most of these pics. I know I sent waiting parents copies of the snaps of their Guilin cuties I was allowed to photograph on that trip (and the irony, Nora was somewhere in that HTS pre-school room I was too polite to poke my nose into, wouldn’t that have been a trip if I had caught her on film months and months before she became a gleam in my eye? but, sadly, no). Only now do I remember that I took the card reader to my office for a faster connection to send the files (hadn’t ponied up for DSL at home yet) and I never copied the files to my home computer.

This was the last photo from that trip on the camcorder. It is a photo of three very tired (and apparently hot, see how Ellie rolled up her pants past her knees?) sisters on the last leg of the trip on the morning flight from LAX to our fair city. To them, it is the middle of the night, China time, and they are toast. We drove straight from the airport to grandma’s house, crossing no rivers, for Thanksgiving dinner with hordes of Hansons. When I read all the carefully planned transition plans adoptive parents devise for their new additions: no one but mom and dad holds baby for first 37 days, no one allowed in home, grandparents eat grit, for first 75 to 115 hours after arrival, baby only allowed to be fed by mom or dad until age four, etc., I just bet those folks want to report me to DCFS for pulling YuYu off the plane and dumping her into an overheated house full of thirty new uncles, aunts and cousins and the delicious, but to YuYu, decidedly strange smell of roast turkey. Hey, my motto is sink or swim, baby, sink or swim. She did great, no one needs to worry because I disregarded conventional wisdom. YuYu was off my lap and running with her cousins after only an hour of careful observation, then she wanted to be part of the fun. She’s still an excellent, but cautious, social swimmer. My little gal is not a sinker.
It was very enjoyable to rediscover those memories. So glad my new camera requires skinny chips.