Our digital camera broke down this weekend, so we found ourselves "emergency" shopping for a new one. I bring this up for two reasons:
1) It's amazing how large a part our digital camera has played in our family's life. We bring it everywhere, take thousands of pictures, log and save many of the photos. You can see our life fairly completely by looking at our pictures over the past four years. It's really great.
2) We shopped at both Best Buy and National Camera Exchange. While our experience after the wait at Best Buy was good, it was nothing compared to National Camera. The place was "packed," but I still got helped right away. The person helping me knew so much about all different cameras, ended up showing me the same camera that the guy at Best Buy settled on as the best camera for us, but she gave us information as to why that particular camera is pushed at places like Best Buy and why it's no better than cameras $100 less than it. I was so impressed. Heather noticed that most everybody leaving that place had purchased something--as did we.

We went officially 24 hours without a digital camera--whew, that was a close one!


I know this isn't going to be popular, but the bridge collapse last week is going to go down as a not-so-big disaster by history standards. I say this because other than the 5 to 13 people who died, and the 70 or so that were injured, this disaster didn't affect the livelihood of those most intimately involved. That's not to minimize the bridge's affect on those people and their families, but for the community, it's not a catastrophic disaster. In fact, I would argue a large apartment fire holds more damaging affects to families' livelihoods than this bridge collapse did.

The unfortunate part of the collapse long term is going to be traffic. Not that we needed any help in that regard.

I think we're fooling ourselves if we think we can have the bridge built in less than two years. We still have to clean up the bridge, we still have to determine what went wrong, we still have to come up with a structural and aesthetic design, we still have to come up with a transit/road design, and we're going to have to make this a memorial bridge--all of which lead me to believe we'll be lucky if we get it built in 5 years! MnDot has a formidable task to undertake, as do our legislators and other federal leadership.