I am very tired of not knowing how to use this camera! I've used it so little that it usually takes me some fussing about to remember how to turn it on. I can never remember how to activate the flip-out viewfinder (it does not come on automatically). My old model 20D was intuitive and easy and fun to use. This 80D, which is not even the latest incarnation in this Canon line, is a fussy chore to use.

I have a book about the camera that I keep meaning to read. How many years has that been now? Three? Four? A quick online glance indicates this model was introduced in 2016, so I probably purchased both the camera and the book sometime in mid-2017, so five years ago!

Today I decided, yet again, to make another attempt at learning to use this obsolete boat anchor of a DSLR. I got out the camera, I charged the batteries, and I found the how-to book. But I also ran across another book, a novel I started reading, what, like, six or nine months ago? Rather than starting on the camera book, I decided to finish reading the novel, because I was over halfway through it.

[NOTE: Son of Rhubarb (1967) by H. Allen Smith, if you are curious.]

Also, I got new eyeglasses, so I can see again. They're not fancy eyeglasses, they are just cheap plastic reading glasses (3 pair for $9) off a spinner rack at a drug store, but when I put them on... I could see again! It was remarkable, like a veil had been lifted. My previous pair of cheap reading glasses had become so scratched up from daily use that, well, actually, I did not realize how hazy everything had been looking. I had learned to look around the most badly scuffed parts. It felt quite astonishing to have a completely clear field of vision.

I've been making do with the scuffed eyeglasses for a long time, which is probably why I have not read an entire book since last June, three or more months ago. I was able to add another book to my book list -- I've now read two books in 2022, yay me!

I'm hoping that will be three books soon, and that I can add David Busch's Canon EOS 80D Photography Guide to my completed reading list. My plan is to sit down with the book and the camera and read the book completely through, cover to cover, without getting distracted; and then read it again and actually tinker with the camera as I go. When I've tried to read the book a few times before, I got distracted fussing with buttons on the camera, and then I started looking up details online, and once I go online I'm lost.

Today's pic was snapped with a point-n-shoot camera. Usually the little Panasonic does a decent job, but today's pic is plagued by one of my pet peeves: blown-out highlights! When the scene is overly dark, the camera's light meter compensates, resulting in highlights that are overex-posed. There's nothing that can be done to fix overex-posed images. The data in the overex-posed areas is lost. There's literally nothing there to tone down. I probably could have compensated for the ex-treme contrast range by manually notching the ex-posure down by a stop or so, but I didn't do that, so the photo sucks, but I'm hoping that soon I'll be able to take similarly sucky photos using a much larger and more ex-pensive camera so I can feel even more frustrated when my photos suck.

One more sucky thing, seeing as how I'm ranting about petty things that suck: The Dal House forum is either off-line, or for some reason it will not load on my computer. It's not just The Dal House; two of the action figure forums (both hosted by a company called Forumotion) are not loading. Yet other sites, including Flickr, Dollieh Sanctuary, Doll Dreaming, and another action figure site, pop right up slick as can be. Either some of the forum hosting sites are temporarily (I hope) offline, or there's a "node" somewhere in the Internet network that is down.