Things Fall Apart

The first hour of a seven-day-long outer island trip is a bad time to lose your wide angle lens’s autofocussing capability.  I had to shoot the rest of it on manual.  But I wasn’t upset; it breaking was no surprise.  The lens had been with me to more than twenty countries, it had been dropped on the floor and tossed around a handbag, and it had spent two years in what the camera shop guy described to me as camera hell: our ultra high humidity is rusting my camera’s rust-resistant screws, and sand has crept into the gears.  I could have kept it off the beach, but then I would have lost so many great photo opportunities.  We live here in the acceptance that Tonga is just the place where electronics go to die.    

I had the choice of editing my outer island photos on one of two screens: (1) my attached old, desaturated CRT monitor purloined from the school computer lab that replaced my dead flat screen sent from the states and (2) my laptop screen that has a growing half-dollar sized disc of dead pixels at the bottom of the screen, streaks of green pixels in the upper left of the screen, and, depending on the position of Venus in the night sky or something, a haze of green across the entire screen.  If the haze is gone, I edit on the laptop. 

My SD card reader doesn’t like to give back the card.  My disc drive is dead.  ITunes pops to the front window at random times and won’t autofill my IPod shuffle. 

I could only hear high frequency noises on my headphones on my outer island trip until I used a pocket knife to scrape off the dirt that had plugged the holes (along with lots of plastic).

My fourth electric teapot broke recently, so Juleigh has provided me hers.  It leaks. 

My wall-mounted gas shower heater broke the day I returned from my outer island trip, and it took removing all the safety mechanisms and bypassing thermocouples to get it working again.  It’s dangerous – it removed some of my wrist hair — but a hot shower is so worth it.

I’d be surprised if my bicycle survives the next 20 days. 

None of these inconveniences are anything to get upset over.  It’s just Tonga (and additionally for the teapot, the bicycle, and the shower heater, it’s just China).  Of all my things, however, I hope the computer and camera body return to the states fully functioning.  Fingers crossed.