Camera-less

Well, folks, here I sit—camera-less and teetering on the brink of a full-blown nervous breakdown. Two solid weeks like this. Fourteen whole days in rural America with animals, unpredictable weather, and a daily chance of headline-making chaos. . . and the only thing I’ve got to document it is a dusty old cell phone that should be in a museum.

Jim left for work Monday, which is normal. What’s not normal is that he packed up my camera and my video recorder like he was heading o
ut to film National Geographic: The Untold Squirrel Wars. He’s off to Washington, D.C., for the 8/28 Restoring Honor Rally, and apparently, restoring my sanity didn’t make his to-do list.

Now, I do technically have a phone with a camera. But let’s be honest—it’s a dumb phone with delusions of grandeur. It takes photos that look like they were shot through a potato. And worse, I have no clue how to get those photos into the computer. Does it use a cord? A cloud? Carrier pigeons?

In my moment of desperation, I turned to my grandson—the resident tech guru and the reason the cordless phone system survived instead of meeting a hammer-related fate. He’s the one who figured out the DVD player, the TV with three remotes, and the defrost feature on the microwave. If anyone could help me, it’d be him.

Nope.

He looked at the phone, scratched his head, and said, “Yeah. . . I got nothin’.”

Excuse me? What. Do. You. Mean. You. Got. Nothin’?

This is the same kid who built a gaming PC from scratch and programmed the thermostat to turn the heat up at 6 a.m.—but apparently, getting a photo off this relic is beyond his powers.

To be fair, cell phones don’t really work out here unless you climb a tree, hold a metal bucket over your head, and sweet-talk a passing satellite. So I guess I shouldn’t expect him to work magic with a device that probably runs on coal.

So here I am—technology-challenged and trapped in what can only be described as Polaroid Purgatory. If someone were to ride a goat bareback through the garden wearing my Sunday hat and belting out “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” all I could do is try to remember it later. And given my memory, it might not even last past breakfast.

If anyone out there in the digital ether knows how to coax photos out of an ancient cell phone and into a Windows computer—without sacrificing a floppy disk or firing up a dial-up modem—I’m listening.

At this point, I’d happily mail the phone to someone and have them fax the pictures back to me.

Because, as we all know, Murphy’s Law of Farm Life is crystal clear:
If you don’t have a camera, the pig will dance, the goats will juggle, and the barn cat will give birth to kittens right on top of your best lace tablecloth. . . while wearing a tiara.

And I’ll miss it. Every. Last. Bit.

So until my camera returns, I’ll be documenting life the way our forefathers did—by shouting across the yard, "Hey! Remember this later in case I forget!"

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