Today is the day the new Nikon D4 arrives, so says B&H and the UPS web site. A cliche, time goes faster as you get older, but when was it I first found out it was to be shipped? Last Wednesday? What happened to all those days in between? Wednesday they seemed forever, this morning they seem to have gone by in a blink. But again, a cliche, but one that keeps validating itself without effort. Hup.

There are May Day events happening downtown starting at noon. I'll talk to the building manager if UPS hasn't arrived this morning before I head out (something that would be nice, of course) but not something that really ever happens, delivery in the mornings, and certainly never when you want it.

I suspect there's a secret rule about it somewhere in The Book of Things: that packages you anticipate receiving will only arrive after all the other possibilites have been exhausted, but we've learned to live with that, have we not? The Book of Things, after all. Not something that will change because we don't like what's hidden written inside, so the only option, really, is to change our attitude. It will come when it comes. Unless of course it doesn't. Q.E.D. say the old men (and now every bit as crazy women) on the mountains.

Later. A bus downtown after leaving a note on the mailbox for UPS to ring the apartment manager to accept any packages (cross our fingers we don't lose the damned thing in some terrible written into our Kismet lesson) to arrive and find people already there before eleven. The bus had been diverted from its usual route along Broadway by City Hall, so obviously (if only from the damned helicopters overhead) something was afoot. And indeed there were people setting up signs and booths and tents and such, a group of demonstrators now arriving, marching down 14th Street and shutting down traffic at the corner of Broadway, another arriving soon thereafter marching from up Broadway and adding to the confusion, a portable disco unit stopping in the middle of the intersection and blaring music with people dancing around it in the middle of the intersection. So far, so good. The cameras have been popping.

Anyway, maybe an hour's shooting before heading over to have coffee in the Rotunda building (they'd locked all their doors in anticipation of problems, but so far the crowd has been mellow - loud, yes, but mellow) and then checking back to see what they were up to now just after noon before leaving.

I was tired, I'd shot a large number of pictures I thought I'd most probably like when I had a chance to review them, so I set out walking up Broadway only to run into another crowd of demonstrators coming around the corner at 20th Street escourted by a large group of policemen on foot and on motorcycles. Hmm. A picture or two to note their passing.

So, a bus - the buses had all pretty much been rerouted, but I was able to catch a 40 bus all the way home - I have no idea where a 40 bus normally runs, but it ran out Grand and let me off right at my usual stop. Now to see what was what up with UPS. Had I hit or missed the bullet?

My, my. There is was, sitting inside the front door in the apartment foyer. And now here it is, its battery charging in the bedroom. This is called a run of luck, let's hope it holds right through the initial testing. Sometimes, I've learned through experience (the old D2h), they can come with issues. Charge that battery, skim the manual (and meanwhile, maybe look at those pictures I took this morning). The day has started better than I could have imagined.

Evening. A long session working with the pictures taken at noon while the D4 battery was charging before taking the new camera along in hand with the 24-120mm lens attached and hopping a bus downtown again to see what the six o'clock demonstration might bring. Another hour or so again of shooting, returning with another two hundred plus photographs in hand, all of them taken with the new camera. Were they wonderful?

Did they convince me I'd done the right thing in purchasing the bugger? Does it really matter in this mad rush to acquisition? I suspect we'll see, but later, under a cooler sun and a more balanced head. So far it's a camera, it shoots pictures, whether is shoots significantly better pictures than any of the other cameras I've owned I have no idea. A boy's toys, in their various and different shades and colors, aren't always the most rational things we've done in this existence.