Almost Perfect Day

I was going to blog yesterday about how sleep eluded me on Sunday and I had to go to work on Monday feeling like a zombie. BUT, a big but, then I got busy like Monday always is and combine that with the heat, then it's a potent concoction that would definitely render the disinterested useless.

It felt like summer here the past three days where temperatures range in the mid to high 80s with clear blue sky. "Please let's not do gardening and house chores today. The day is so beautiful to waste on cleaning the house." That's what I said to the mister as we drove home from church service on Sunday. We have after all did chores all Saturday including vacuuming the car under the 80-degree heat. I almost melted.

He was crazy not to listen to me. I felt he too needed a little break. So we phoned our friends to see if they were game for a little afternoon out. Turned out they were free.

Thirty minutes later we were all driving towards the beach. Our destination was Rodeo Beach at the Golden Gate National Preserve. And you guessed it, we weren't the only ones who thought the beach was a great place to be that Sunday afternoon.

We packed in some munchies and some cold ones, the husbands laid in warm sand, I was walking up and down in my bare feet trying to soak up the heat from the sand while my upper body is cooled off by the cold breeze. We stayed there for about two hours, did not attempt to dip our toes in the water, because going towards the water the wind was blowing really hard, typical San Francisco Bay Area beach weather, what can I say.

On the drive back home we stopped in Sausalito, parked the car, grabbed some ice cream and coffee (perfect combination) and walked towards the waterfront and did a little browsing at the store windows that we passed. Likewise, Sausalito was packed with tourists, 9 out of 10 was walking around the city licking an ice cream cone. It was definitely a day made for ice cream.

Perfect day wasn't it? Almost but not quite. You see when we left Rodeo Beach we decided to first go to one of the lookout points to gander at the jewel of San Francisco - the Golden Gate Bridge - where clear vistas of the bridge only come rarely. We photographed the bridge and the city with excitement of a first-time visitor, which I'm sure the others with us in the vista point were thinking of us as tourists. We posed with the bridge as the background just like any tourist would.

Here's where the wrinkle happened. When I uploaded the pictures in my computer that night, all my photos taken that day, all 268 of them, were grainy. Grainy!!!!! How could that be? I didn't fiddle with the setting. I made sure the lens is clean and free of fuzz. I checked and rechecked if it's set in auto focus and I always either shoot in landscape or automatic. But apparently the camera had a mind of its own and decided to change the settings on me. The hubs swore he didn't change any setting, and I didn't. So it could only be Buster and Emma (the cats) but knowing their thumbs haven't made an appearance yet, that left me no choice but to say the camera did it.

Apparently, the whole day I was shooting in jpeg instead of RAW as I normally do. I was so frustrated. A whole day's worth of photos wasted. Garbage.

The good thing is I live here. I can wait another season or two to time the perfect clear blue sky over the Golden Gate Bridge and have another try at it. Plus it's not like I've never had opportunities and photos of it before. But still I was so stoked to photograph it on Sunday. Another consolation is the fact that I also brought and use my little point and shoot camera, whose photos turned out okay as usual.