Desert Horses

Welcome to my horse blog, Desert Horses. We live in the desert southwest, near Palm Springs, CA, but board our horses up in our local mountains where it is cooler in the summer. I have 4 horses, all rescues. Here is the ranch up the mountains where the horses stay.

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

The monsoon is HERE!!! and camera woes

For those of you who also live in dusty desert areas, you KNOW how much dust gets into your stuff...your car, your house, your CAMERA!!! So, when I discovered (with HORROR!) a speck of dust on my Canon viewfinder, I tried to blow it off.  Nope.  I cleaned the filter and the lens.  Nope...still there...sigh...Hubby told me to get it to the camera shop PRONTO because it was probably on the mirror.  It didn't show up in the photos I took, but I knew it was there and now he did too  :0-(   So, off to the camera store I went yesterday, expecting to have to pay for a $40.00 cleaning.  Nope.  It turns out they don't do that anymore (and I have NO idea why).  But, the guy at Camera West was very nice and took pity on me (seeing how disheveled I was 5 minutes after my shower at home...yup...it's the humidity...) and he took off my lens, blew out the THING (I think it was a tiny piece of hay!) and then proceeded to show me how to clean my camera myself!  I ended up buying $22 worth of items:  a microfiber cleaning cloth and an air sprayer.  I asked him to PLEASE look over my camera and see how dirty it was (since I take it up to the horse ranch and take photos of the horses during their weekly lesson) and he surprised me by saying it was pretty clean!  He showed me how to take a paint brush (very soft one) and gently swipe off any dust on it.  He also showed me how to gently wipe off the oil from my hands which gets on it.  Fortunately, in both cases, he said my camera was CLEAN!  (I DO try to take good care of her!)  He even sent me an email with an article about how to clean your camera.  Let me know if you would like a copy and I'll email it to you!  So, I was pretty happy.

And, yes, we had a monsoon yesterday.  Apparently it POURED east of us, out on Interstate 10 by the Arizona border.  We had clouds all day and I went outside with my little Nikon Coolpix (which I'll take to my riding lessons from now on...) and took a couple of photos.  It's 82% humidity outside right now with a flash flood alert all day, from 11:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m.  I went outside to feed the birds and I'm soaked already!


Enjoy your day.  I have to sit here at home this morning because the Edison tree trimmers are coming to trim 6 of our trees in the yard since they are growing under or near the Edison lines, so I'll have to keep the dogs inside and I don't want them to tear up the house!

3 comments:

cheyenne jones said...

At last! Someone else is gonna get our rain!Phew!

cindy said...

When I lived in Apache Junction I loved the monsoons. Well except the humidity leading upto them, but the storms were always pheonomonal!!!! (pretty sure that is spelled wrong) I remember as a very young girl my brothers and I would see the wall of dust coming and couldn't wait to throw on our swimming goggles and run out to "Brave the Desert storm" like some sort of Arabian Knights or something! Of course I had my Breyer Arabian Stallion out there with me to give the "full effect". As i grew up, I didn't brave the dust clouds but I always enjoyed the light shows and there has always been something special about an early morning walk in the desert the morning after a monsoon. Good good memories, thanks for sharing those beautiful pictures!

Barb said...

Aren't the boys at Camera West just fabulous? If you ever get bored check them out on Yelp.com.

No rain here :(