New gadgets make getting picture more complicated

I got dear Don a telescope for Christmas. The company claims it will enable us to see the rings around Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. That’s great considering neither one of us can see across our den well enough to be able to read the TV screen.

So far the only thing we have seen we think, is the light of the silvery moon, but it could just as easily be the security light in the front yard. We can’t even focus in on anything well enough to even see if the man’s in the moon.

We are both so inept, so technically challenged that we may never get the hang of this thing.

Gosh, we just recently figured out the bells and whistles on our TV remote control device and we’ve had that for four years.

To make matters worse, Don got me a digital camera that takes videos as well. It’s still in the box. That pretty little silver picture taker just intimidates the fire out of me. I used my old reliable 35mm to take Christmas pictures instead.

Now considering the things we could be seeing with all these newfangled-gadgets, one would think we would be trying to figure them out.

The telescope came with an instructional CD but we aren’t quite sure how to do that.

We took the telescope out last night. It was unseasonably warm and the sky was black with no cloud cover. I found the quarter moon right off in the first little eyepiece. Then I moved to the other eyepiece and didn’t see a thing. Well clever Don takes it away from me giving me the idea that he knows what he’s doing and I do not.

He fumbles and moves around and says a few scientific sounding words and then yelled "Well I had it but I lost it."

"How can you lose the moon?" I asked. "It’s so big and so bright." "It’s the only thing up there to look at!"

"There’s too much light out here," he claimed. "I’m moving it to the back porch."

"Then you will have to look through the screen," I protested.

He didn’t hesitate to keep on moving that big awkward contraption onto the back porch. We got back there and with all the furniture there was no room to maneuver the tripod. He got frustrated. We moved back into the house and he declared that "waiting until the moon is at ‘full phase’ will give us optimum viewing." At least he sounds like he knows what we are doing.

There should be a class offered at the beginning of every year for people who get electronics and gadgets for Christmas and don’t know how to use them. I would certainly be there for that. Maybe then I can find out why our microwave oven keeps coming on all by itself and running empty for several minutes before cutting off. We have started leaving the door open so that it can’t repeat that little trick. Now if I could just figure out why my answering machine tries to talk to me in the middle of the night.

Well now at least I have plenty of gadgets to "get the picture."