Tony’s Guatemala

Well, I have a limited budget, but there are a few things that I need to get before I go down to Guate.

One of the things that I’ve really needed to get for a while, is a new camera bag. The bag I’ve been using holds one camera body, the charger and maybe 2 lenses, but nothing else, it also isn’t padded, and it doesn’t have any dividers, so it works okay as far as just carrying a camera around in my car, but the idea of traveling down bumpy roads in Central America, it just wont cut it.

I Decided that if I’m gonna get a new camera bag, I want it to meet a few requirements, so I won’t feel the need to upgrade again shortly.

I want a camera bag that will:
Not Scream “I’M A CAMERA, STEAL ME!”
Hold at least 2 bodies and a plethora of lenses, including my 70-210mm F2.8
Be padded and have dividers
Carry a laptop with accessories
Probably be a backpack

I looked around at the camera shops here, and found a few bags that fit the bill, that was when I realized I needed to add another qualifier to me list: It needs to be under $100

Well, that last bit pretty much tossed anything available locally out of the contest.

I looked online and found a lot of great bags, but most of them were out of my price range as well.

I looked on Ebay and found that there’s a lot of decent bags that are pretty close to the price range that I wanted, and some of them look like they’re the same bags with different tags on ‘em. The one I opted for is one of the larger ones in the range, and I picked it up for about $60 shipped. It should be getting here next week, and I’ll write again and tell you what I think about the bag. From the pictures I have high hopes that it’ll be big enough to hold everything. It has the Laptop pocket, and should hold 2 bodies and 7-8 lenses, a flash or two, and the rest of my accessories.

Here are a few photos of it:

Well, About a month ago Lloyd Monroe asked me if I might be able to locate a small integrated circuit board for an amplifier that they use in the ministry down In Pana, and in spite of the fact that several companies that I’ve dealt with before have websites that say they have them in stock, no-one has gotten back to me with a price.

I really need to send something off this week to be evaluated so I might be able to sell it, but I can’t afford the evaluation!

Little things that are right there but still inaccessible, I feel there might be a life lesson somewhere in this, maybe it’ll be more clear after the little things are taken care of…

Well, I’m a little late wishing everyone a happy easter, but I figure, better late than never!

I was out of town over the weekend, and made it back in town just in time to go to the easter service at the church that one of Rachel’s friends is very involved in, okay involved might be an understatement, her husband is the pastor.

They had the service at a local nightclub, called the moon, and it was an interesting experience.

Otherwise, the drive was relatively un-eventful, although, I probably looked like an idiot driving down the interstate with strips of duct tape holding th front of my hood down.

You see; on Friday I decided I was gonna try and fix something that had been bothering me for a while. My hood didn’t latch properly, ever since a kid backed over the front of my car with his pickup truck last year. I’d replaced the hood, but the core support that the hood latch is atached to was depressed. ever since then, the only thing holding the hood down was the safety catch, which isn’t very safe, but it was a tight fit, at least until Friday when I decided to “fix” it with a screwdriver.

Well, the only thing I managed to do on Friday was to bend the latch up a little bit, and make the safety catch fit very loosely, but the hood latch was still too low, so now I had the hood rising with every gust of wind, and I was scared of the hood flying open, crushing the windshield etc. so I added a few strips of duct tape, I looked stupid, but I felt a lot safer with the tape.

I fixed the hood properly today (well, I don’t now if the technique was the “proper” one…) by using an engine hoist and a padlock to bend the core support back up. I used a padlock, because the shackle is about the same diameter as the latch bar on the hood, and it was the only thing I could find. My Method: close the lock, press the shackle into the hood latch until it latches, hook the engine hoist to the lock, and pump the hydraulic handle until it’s bent up.

I was lucky and got it at about the right level on my first try, but I wouldn’t want to try and do that for someone else’s car!

I’m also working with a local company to help them sell some stuff online by taking good photographs for them to use in ads, and I went and worked on that some today…

Well, I’m about to leave on my last driving trip for a little while.

Tomorrow I’ll be leaving for Tampa, seeing a bunch of Rachel’s Friends (and several of them are my friends now)

It’ll be a good trip, but Probably another 10 hours of driving in like a 24 hour period.

I hope we make it back in time for church since it’s Easter Sunday!

Well, I got a new pre-paid phone, I went with cingular pre-paid, and I’m using my Dad’s old Motorola Razr.

I should be able to get the phone unlocked, and use it in Guatemala as well.

Cingular has a decent pre-paid plan, and I got minutes at about $0.10 a minute, and nights and weekends for $20 a month, along with $10 a month for 1000 text messages.

Driving is getting kind of old by this point. I’ve been sick for the last 2 weeks, and driven about 2,000 miles in the same time.

After getting back from Atlanta late Sunday evening, I got a little bit of sleep, and then took back off for Jacksonville on Monday, and back Monday evening. I had a blow-out of the passenger rear tire on the way back, and had to drive the rest of the trip on the donut. I lost about 25mph in speed, and it took a lot longer to get back. I ended up getting home about 6am.

One more trip, and then I’ll be done driving for a while, I look forward to that.

Well, I’m writing this in Atlanta, but I’ll have to publish it when I get back, since I’ve got no internet up here.

Rachel and I had planned to leave Tallahassee at about 5 pm, which would have put us in Atlanta at about 10pm. We ended up spending a little more time in Tallahassee, we ate dinner before we left, and did just a little bit of other stuff, and ended up leaving a little closer to 8pm, putting us through Atlanta more like 12:30-1:00 am.

There was a tornado that tore through downtown Atlanta between 10 and 11 pm. We would have been driving through right in the midst of the tornado if we hadn’t been a little late leaving.

Sometimes God really does work in mysterious ways. We ended up getting in late, and therefore not getting as much sleep as we would have liked before Rachel’s conference the next morning, but we missed the tornadoes without even knowing they existed.

Well, I’m sitting here, about to leave on another weekend trip.

Rachel has a conference in Atlanta for the job she just started, and we’re going to stay with one of my best friends, Dave, while we’re there. It’s always good to see Dave.

I look forward to seeing Dave, but I’m not looking forward to the drive. Especially after driving a total of 18 hours last weekend.

I need a vacation I think, I mean, I’ll be out of town 3 weekends in a row, none of them with less than 10 hours of driving on a 2 day weekend, yikes!

Well today has been kind of interesting, I’ve had another possibility as far as my phones go, since I found my Dad’s phone.

My Dad had a Motorola Razr v3 phone, which conveniently is pretty useable for pre-paid services, I’ve still got to research what carriers it’ll work with, but it gives me another option.

I pulled all the photos off of my Dad’s phone and loaded them onto my Mac powerbook via bluetooth. There where a lot of photos of the family vacation he and my mom went on with my sister last summer, and the first picture he took was of my mom.

The last pictures my Dad took on his phone where actually of me while I was doing a photo shoot for their church.

Well, This week is a busy one, or should be anyways.

I’ve been dealing with the lingering flu symptoms I came down with last week, but hopefully I’ll be a little more productive this week than I was last.

I’ve got to do a lot of work in the shop, as well as getting everything done that’s specifically related to the trip. All in all that means it’s like working 2 jobs!

Things to figure out this week:

Cell Phone, I still haven’t decided, and now I’m without service, which is bad!

Pass-port, Mine expired recently, and I need a new one quickly!

Getting started raising support.