I’ve been a little quiet recently – I’m still around, but in all honesty, I’ve been a bit disappointed in my latest blogging entries, mostly due to the fact that I haven’t had a decent camera.

As you may recall, I lost my camera when I was on vacation in November.  I didn’t realize how much I was going to miss having a camera.  My husband had won a camera a few months earlier in a photo contest, and when we returned from vacation, he offered to give me that camera, but we both decided that it would make more sense to sell that camera, and buy another Nikon.  I’ve been a fan of Nikon for many years (I think it runs in the family – my father was a professional photographer, and he favored the Nikons and Hasselblads, the latter being completely out of my price range) and all my husband’s camera equipment is Nikon, so sticking with Nikon made the most sense in terms of versatility (switching lenses, etc.).

The camera I lost was the D50, which was a nice introduction to digital SLR cameras (my previous digital camera was a point & shoot, although many years ago, I did own an SLR film camera – the classic Nikon FM2).  The D50 is no longer being made, so on my husband’s recommendation, I went with the D90, rather than the more smaller D40 or D80.  I picked the camera up earlier in the week, but haven’t had a chance to “play” with it as yet, so I’m hoping to get some practice over the weekend.

One of the cool features that everyone seems to be talking about is something that wasn’t really even a consideration for me in choosing this camera, but it sounds like it might be a nice feature.  It’s the world’s first Digital SLR camera that allows you to shoot HD movies… Cool, huh? – maybe I can figure out how to add some movies to my blog!

Anyway, while I was taking a break from blogging due to the camera issue, I also started to give some more thought to my blog in general.  I’d love to do “more” with my blog, but have felt really limited because of the constraints of WordPress.  Don’t get me wrong – I like WordPress – the two features that I really liked about it are the ability to schedule posts to publish later, and the ability to password protect individual posts.  What I don’t like about it is the limited range of templates available, and the fact that I can’t get the template code to personalize it a little more.  So, after some serious consideration, I’ve decided to move back to blogger, where I started out blogging a number of years ago. 

So, starting February 1, my new URL is: http://www.englishelegance.blogspot.com/.  The blog is still “Afford Your Passions”, but if you’ve got me bookmarked, or in your blogroll, or Reader, you’ll need to update the link.

To help you remember the link, I’m going to have a special “blog reopening” celebration.  Each day during the month of February, I will have a blog giveaway.  That’s right – 28 days of giveaways.  This will serve a number of purposes – hopefully, it will help my regular readers become familiar with the new address, but more importantly, it will help me reduce my stash.  Like many of you out there, I have more stash than I’m ever going to use, and since I’m moving in June, I thought it was time to do a little purging of my stash.  I know that I don’t have to pack up for the move (my company is taking care of everything related to the actual move for me), but I figured this was a good excuse to have a little purge, so to speak.

 So go ahead and visit the “new” site.  I’m still playing with the template, so they’ll be some changes in the appearance in the next week or so, but come February 1, that will be my new blogging home!