happy may everyone, hope its going good so far for you, or it went well for you if you happen to be reading this after may has passed. yeah it's only two days in but hey, optimism right? well my may has been pretty decent so far! me and sky took a nice walk today in the blazing sun and stiff breeze, which wasn't as horrible as you would expect. honestly today has been great overall aside from our bedroom being a literal sauna all day. its nighttime now so thankfully its gotten a lot more bearable, but still a bit muggy.
yesterday was a pretty good day for me as well, too. i traveled an hour out to frederick, maryland to pick up this beautiful little camera, a panasonic lumix DMC-FZ7. i was a bit miffed after bringing it to the wendy's in town that it wasn't what the seller listed it as, a DMC-FZ28. that little mistake costed me about 6 megapixels lol. but it truly doesn't matter to me, because what i'm after is actually more in line with what this specific camera does. see, i do enjoy taking pictures on my phone and frequently do, but what i really want to go after is the look of the 2000s digital camera vibe. i think this sort of thing is a bit less mainstream in the gen z "2000s nostalgia craze", especially compared to the niche of people using 2000s era camcorders to record footage. and what that means is that i was able to get this "decent-for-its-time" camera with a ton of features packed in, for a mere 15 dollars on facebook marketplace. 15!!! the way i saw it, if the thing was totally broken after i got it, it literally wouldn't matter cause the other outcomes vastly outweighed any downsides to me.
the only downside is that it didn't come with a lens cap, and my SD cards were all too big for the poor little CPU of this guy. so i got a 2GB sd card and a replacement lens cover coming in tomorrow from amazon. which by the way, panasonic REALLY didn't expect their customers to lose the lens cap it seems. i scoured through the manual for like 30-40 minutes trying to figure out the size of the lens cap so i can get the right one and there was zero mention of it anywhere in the manual. and when looking up the leica lens on the camera, i couldn't find any information about diameter. i had to look up the model numbers of the filters that panasonic provided through mail-order, in order to find out what the actual diameter of this lens was. what a pain in the ass.
when i do get it running though, i'm gonna try and make some fun out of it and use it to put images on this website of just random stuff. its only 6 megapixels so its not like super high quality even on its best settings. so i feel like this camera will be perfect for my ultra-stripped down, basic static website i modeled after similar sites from the era this camera came from. its got a bit of a learning curve though, cause there's a LOT of options and settings within it. so i'll have to go to school on the manual to figure it all out. i've wanted to do niche photography for a while, primarily shooting on film. but unfortunately i have to pay rent, so that will have to take a backseat. this camera will be able to teach me all the basics i would need to learn anyways with a 35mm SLR, with the convenience of an LCD and instant photo access. technology is a beautiful thing sometimes.... sometimes.
since its may, me and sky now have 3 months to find ourselves an apartment to move into when the lease is up after july. still looking to move to hagerstown as that's where they work, and eventually i'll work too. maryland seems like the safest option to be as a queer person in trump's america that doesn't require us to up and go out west all the sudden. i don't think we're gonna struggle to find a place, but i think we've both been procrastinating hard on it. and we gotta really get on this if we are going to meet our deadline. i'm sure it will work itself out. still working on getting transferred to the hagerstown store right now, and hopefully that will happen in the coming weeks. just paid rent so i'm still running low on money, but i got a month to recoup. i think things will work themselves out eventually, but damn does it hurt to keep waiting. seems like a lot of my life is just stuck waiting on things to just work out.
and on the topic of this website itself, i've moved away from my old neocities host and now host this site on github pages. there's a couple reasons for this, but the main was finding out that neocities is ran by literally one person and one person only. and given that site deletions happen often enough to get posts about it fairly often on reddit, i don't wanna have to worry about my site being the next up. the other being that i want to eventually add a page to my site deciated to my transition timeline. every month (except last month cause i was lazy) since i started estrogen, i've taken pictures of my body to document my development and changes i've gone through while on HRT. and while neocities doesn't have clear rules on tasteful/educational nudity, a big chunk of the userbase for neocities are minors. and i don't think its fair for me to post nude pictures of me onto a site where kids could easily access them. so by hosting this on github, which has specific rules allowing this sort of thing, it gives me more freedom to put on here what i feel is important to share. setting up my github repository and the DNS records with my registrar was a fucking headache to get configured, but now that i have the workflow in place i see the benefits in this approach. i now got a reliable way of editing locally and pushing online when i'm sure of it. feels more professional, even though no one pays me to do this lol.
that's about all for now, past couple days have been nice and mostly anxiety free. i got blood work to do on monday which will be nervewracking, but my doctor hooked me up with some nice anxiety meds to take before i go. so here's hoping i don't have another panic attack at the labs. hope you all reading are doing well, and remember to drink plenty of water. have you drank water in the past couple hours? if not, do it now. go on, i'll wait. nope, not leaving til you do. come on now, you're holding up the line. theeeere you go, doesn't that feel so much better?