Humility on the 20th

I've always been someone who was either too arrogant or too cheap to pay someone else to fix something I really thought I ought to be able to fix myself. Today, I learned that humility -- that someone can do something better for a few bucks than I could do on my own (and potentially screw it up) -- is an important thing to learn.

The first picture is a photo of the sky I took this morning outside of Peace Camera. There has been some form of dirt on some part of the camera's internal parts that I could not get off. Not with a lens pen. Not with a can of air. Not with being frustrated and trying to curse it out of the interior of the camera's mysterious lady parts (reference to Talledega Nights -- if you haven't seen it or don't think it's funny, I'll just move on...).

So after a nice catch-up breakfast with an old friend in downtown Raleigh, I succumbed to the reality that I did not know what I was doing and took my camera into my favorite camera crackhouse. After enduring the "well, you do have some pretty significant lines on your lens" comments (power line humor is really not what it used to be), it was a new experience. In just five minutes, he removed two big pieces I had seen, and about 15 others that I hadn't. So now, humility will need to become a hallmark of my dealings with things I only think I can fix.

Was thinking this morning that pretty much everyone important in my life in the last ten years has a birthday on the 20th. That was a pretty weird thing to realize. But now I am off to finish the last of "The Girl who..." books on audio. I really have enjoyed them immensely.