If it isn't completely obvious yet, Diana and I have been talking about moving in together. It's funny that we don't talk about curtains and furniture (God knows I have enough of that), but boy does she like to think about kitchen stuff. See, her kitchen is tiny, and mine is not. So last night we were hanging out in Crate & Barrel, and I realized that the way to her heart is through kitchen gadgets. We stopped in a Viking store and I actually started looking at the $3,000 stoves thinking about how cool they are. That's obviously love.
What's interesting about our relationship though is just how honest we are about everything, and how effortless that makes everything. Sure it helps that we have similar feelings about how to conduct our time together (like it's OK to just stay home), but we also don't feel the need to entertain each other or set expectations.
It's easy to fall in the trap of being with someone for the comfort. I did that several times earlier this year, and that's a bullshit way to be. But when you can have the comfort and it doesn't feel like you're compromising something, that's pretty amazing. Diana has lived pretty independently most of her adult life, and for her to be willing to make that leap says something. Frankly I started to enjoy solo time too, but I don't feel like her sleeping in the same bed interferes with that.
Anyway, I spent some of the evening researching camcorders, and settled on a new Panasonic that records to SD cards in the AVCHD (H.264) format. I thought long and hard about what my needs were. Obviously I'm not going to tote around the HVX200 on vacations or to volleyball tournaments, but I miss having video. My old DV camera from 1999 hasn't been very reliable the last few times I used it (seems to be a power problem), and of course it's not HD either. The time was right after eight years to finally buy a new one. Circuit City had it in stock locally and well priced, so I ordered it and will pick it up tomorrow.
The HDC-SD5 is freakin' tiny. As much as the HDV tape format cameras are small, they're not that small. While recording solid state to AVCHD is highly compressed, and that makes editing a quasi-issue, I'm not going to edit much with this camera. The compression isn't good for noisy low light stuff either, but also not a big issue. What ultimately sells me on this is the size. I can carry it in a pocket, and that's a big deal when you want to hop on a roller coaster.
And finally, in other news, Gmail finally has IMAP access, which means I can use my popw.com e-mail account, hosted with Google Apps, on my iPhone's native e-mail client. Yay!