Music: Iron and Wine. There is a vaguely psychedelic commercial for M&Ms that is backed by a quiet song that talks about “the freckles in our eyes”. The song is “Such Great Heights” and the version is a cover by Iron and Wine. Sam Beam, the solo talent behind Iron and Wine, sings in a whispery, softly seductive voice which makes you want to close your eyes and sink into the music. Caitlin keeps promising to lend me her Iron and Wine CDs so that I can put them on iTunes, but I think she’s just weirded out by having her mother ask to borrow her music.

My digital camera is an Olympus C750 (this becomes an important detail later). In order to download pictures from the camera to the computer, you need either a cable to allow the exchange of electronic bodily fluids or a card reader for the memory card in the camera. The camera came with a cable, which I kept carefully tucked into a plastic case along with all the other photographic accoutrements. Somehow the cable escaped into the wild and cannot be located. (I don’t think it’s important to note that in my prior camera’s life I went through 3 cables.) Because I only have one memory card and the pictures were backing up on it, my camera was beginning to feel a bit, um, irregular.

After looking online for a replacement cable, I elected to get a USB thumb driver with a built-in card reader instead because 1) it was cheaper and 2) I have a belief that it will not go missing as quickly (that’s the excellent thing about beliefs – you can base them on completely irrational thought patterns and criticism just rolls off your back). The same site was advertising a 1 MB card which is enough space to store about a million pictures of the dogs (with a few spaces left over for the cats, who are still cowering in the basement). Now, the card reader was $29.95, which is about what I expected to pay for the cable, and the card was $99.95, which was not budgeted but seemed so very desirable. I made sure to check that the card was compatible with my camera, the C750, and happily entered my credit card number.

The USB card reader works exceptionally well and is even better than the cable (you only need the card and not the camera itself to download the pictures). The new memory card, however, did not seem to want to format itself in the camera. When I went back and checked the compatibility grid, I was stunned, STUNNED, to learn that the card is compatible with the C755 and the C760, but not the C750. Damn grids in small print that I can’t read. And speaking of fine print, the 2-point font on the back of the invoice informs me that any “perishable” media, including, but not limited to, memory cards is not, under any circumstances, returnable. So now I have an Olympus 1 MB xD memory card and no camera with which it is compatible. Perhaps it’s time to start selling on eBay.