I am having an out of money experience.
Shit, I *am* a RebelThe wife and I were coming back from a movie two nights ago, the same day I bought my new-to-me camera, and on the overly-hilly road that gets us into the neighborhood we saw a Harvest Moon on the horizon. Well, what else am I going to do with a new camera, eh? So I got the tripod out when we got home and went out front only to be saddened that no place on the street would let me see the moon because of the houses and the trees. No matter, I thought, we’re on one of those hills and surely I can go to the downslope of the hill and catch it. So I got into my car and drove (because I’m lazy) to the end of the street and then down the main street a bit until I came to the downslope. I parked on a side street and went to the corner, camera on the tripod already, and started to setup when I noticed a patrol car whiz by on the opposite side of the street. My very first response in my head was “Oh crap, he’s going to bug the crap out of me, isn’t he?” He kept going for a bit and then turned around and whizzed by me again, this time heading to my right. Then his lights (all of his lights) turned off and he parked on the side of the street, maybe 50 ft. from me. Meanwhile, I’m fighting the camera’s program modes to try and get a wide aperture and fast shutter even though everything else is dark (I’d yet to read the manual, so I completely failed to get any decent photo out of this). I notice that he’s sitting there and I smile and wave and go back to the camera. He sits there for several more minutes and we maintain a seeming “You don’t see me” attitude with each other. Then, suddenly, he speeds off and then turns his headlights back on (yep, that order), and hurries around a corner down the street. It appears that a guy taking photos of the frickin’ moon is suspicious these days. Part of me really wanted him to talk to me. The other part of me enjoys the freedom I retain from not having smart-assed a cop in the middle of the night. It’s a balance, to be sure. 
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Quotes
“There is something odd in the fact that when we reproduce the Middle Ages it is always some such rough and half-grotesque part of them that we reproduce . . . Why is it that we mainly remember the Middle Ages by absurd things? . . . Few modern people know what a mass of illuminating philosophy, delicate metaphysics, clear and dignified social morality exists in the serious scholastic writers of mediaeval times. But we seem to have grasped somehow that the ruder and more clownish elements in the Middle Ages have a human and poetical interest. We are delighted to know about the ignorance of mediaevalism; we are contented to be ignorant about its knowledge. When we talk of something mediaeval, we mean something quaint. We remember that alchemy was mediaeval, or that heraldry was mediaeval. We forget that Parliaments are mediaeval, that all our Universities are mediaeval, that city corporations are mediaeval, that gunpowder and printing are mediaeval, that half the things by which we now live, and to which we look for progress, are mediaeval.”“ — “The True Middle Ages,” The Illustrated London News, 14 July 1906 – G. K. Chesterton
Hahaha! Been there, done that, don’t want the t-shirt! And I finally sat down and read part of the manual for my digital camera that I got a Christmas. Canon Rebel XTI since I’ve been taking pictures of the moon and my jack-o-lantern and halloween decorations recently.
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