lend me your baseball bat?

i hope i have a future as a writer, because i certainly dont stand a chance as an electronics repair man. the last 3 hours have more than proven my inadequacies in the diy camera repair department. two weeks ago in bregenz my camera got dropped twice, the first time near-fatal, the and the second time finished it off. of course, being the resourceful man i am, i took it upon myself to see if i could fix it. i still believe it can be repaired--albeit by somebody more savvy than i will ever be (did anyone ever notice that savvy is spelled with a double v? are there any other words like that--with multiple v's in a row? other than vvvroom that is...). the lens housing doesn't quite run like it should. its like it thinks about popping out and focusing, and then decides to flip me the bird and go back to bed, all while making an ominous growling sound that one would more readily associate with waking up to find a tiger in the bathroom of your Cesare's palace villa.

i spent the last ~3 hours patiently taking it apart, tinkering, cleaning, aligning gears, learning about ccd chips, cussing under my breath, reading online how-to instructions, putting things back together, cussing out loud, and finally, three and a half cd's later, opening a beer and giving up. if a camera costs $150 dollars, and i can fix it in 3 hours, that sort of translates into $50 per hour. but, realistically speaking, by the time i get this right (or more likely, stab my screwdriver through the motherboard inside...) i will be earning McDonald's wages and about to cash my first social security check.

so i now have a great decoy camera to give to muggers if i walk down the wrong street in vienna. whoopie! time to invest in a new picture-taking, soul-stealing magic box so i can keep documenting my austrian experience. Yay.