Breakfast with Amber

December 2022: A Real Camera!

We return once again to Christmas break. Normally, I take the Vonlane back home for Christmas as well, but we got a little surprise this spring.

Remember the trip to Disney World we took over spring break that I skipped writing about because I was more interested in writing about my own barf? Well, on the last day before we went home/to campus, I forgot to check in for my flight right at the 24-hour mark because I was too busy having fun at Epcot. When I did check in to my flight, it was 9 o'clock at night, and I was relegated to standby. My parents would not take this sitting down. I was going to be on a flight to San Antonio if it killed us, so we called Southwest and stayed on hold for an hour going insane and wishing we could go to bed already. When we finally got a person on the line, he was able to find a flight from Orlando to San Antonio for the next day that left earlier than the already-early flight I was on before, but it also arrived earlier, and it was a nonstop flight as opposed to having a connection. In addition, they also gave us some amount of credit which my parents used to buy tickets for flights from San Antonio to Houston and back in what is known as the World's Shortest Round Trip.

The flight to Houston was exactly one hour on December 14, and Mom and Dad picked me up at the airport. The first event of note to happen after that was Tettmas, which was on the 16th. It was at Aunt Suzy and Uncle James's house, and it was my first time visiting even though to my knowledge, the last time they moved was after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. I must not visit the Ainsworths that often.

Much like Alex, they also had two dogs, but they weren't as hyper. The first was Shelby, whom they got as a puppy when I was eight or so but was so old that she spent most of the night resting by the island in the kitchen. The second was Maddie, whom Grant kept warning me was hyper, but she seemed unusually mild for a young golden retriever or yellow lab. I don't know which. Either way, I didn't spend the whole night wanting to hide in the game room.

Besides, it's hard to hide in the game room when your brother and cousins are also in there playing darts. I'd just sit in the leather recliner at the back of the room and watch TV or flip through the binder of Pokemon cards on the endtable.

For dinner, we had a baked potato. I had my potato straight with some butter salt and then ate some shredded beef on the side, but the real star of the night was the fudge squares that Mom brought. I probably ate half of them.

After dinner, we played a game called LCR, or as I like to call it, Fun Gambling for the Whole Family. There are three dice, and each one has a side labeled L, a side labeled C, and a side labeled R. You roll one die for each quarter you have (starts at three but can change). If you roll an L, you pass a quarter to the person on your left, if you roll a C, you place a quarter in the pot in the center, and if you roll R, you pass a quarter to the person on your right. The last person with quarters left wins the whole pot. I won a round and also got a share of Grammy's winnings, so now I had a way to pay for my laundry for the next week once I got back to campus.

But the title, as you might be able to guess, alludes to the presents, so let's get to the presents. We always get showered with gifts each Tettmas, so it's impossible to remember them all. The standouts were a pair of purple Allbirds. In case you don't know what Allbirds are, they are probably the comfiest canvas shoes ever. I already had a pair of gray ones that were my best friends in Germany. In fact, I think I wore the gray Allbirds to Christmas and then took them off to put on the purple ones as soon as I opened them. The second was a camera.

This was no cheap camera, either. It was a Nikon that could take photos and video and came with a lens that could zoom from 16 to 50 millimeters. They also got me an accessory kit that came with a tripod, a microphone, and a Bluetooth remote. As I looked over the box, I thought about how I could incorporate this into my YouTube channel. I remembered how long the lens on my camera was in photography. (Now that I think about it, it was probably only 45 or 50 millimeters. I just remember that it didn't have zoom, so if I wanted to get a closer look at something, I'd have to physically move closer to it.) I was still filming stuff with my phone, which would sit less than a foot away from my Switch or whatever I was filming. If I used this camera in its place, it would turn out all blurry. I'd have to put it somewhere farther away than its subject.