Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other

My husband is good at many things. Really, he is. Examples? You want examples? I’ll give you examples:

• He manages all of the annoying household maintenance chores like changing the filters, winterizing the sprinklers, and getting the cars serviced with ease. At any one time, he’s keeping 35 different plates spinning without ever even breaking a sweat. Nothing about tedious paper work or red tape stresses him out: not the mountain of forms from the 6 houses we’ve owned, not the tangled insurance mess that being self-employed brings, not even when the IRS sent a letter telling us we were being audited. Cool as a cucumber through it all.  
• He can identify a song in 5 notes or less. He’d totally be the Ken Jennings of Name That Tune if it were still on. 
• He has the nickname of Google Andy because he always seems to know the answer to random questions. Those few times that he doesn’t know the answer off hand, he can find it faster than anyone I know. Sometimes when I’m bored, I’ll play a game where I try to tell him about some news item before he has a chance to read it himself. I always lose.
• Travel arrangements are his specialty. He has itineraries that would put the POTUS to shame. Canceled flight? No problem, Drew will have us on another one before the other passengers have even realized that the party’s over.
• He’s a very good driver. But don’t tell him I said that. Yes, he drives too fast, but he’s got good enough reflexes to pull it off. So far anyway. He even knows how to use his mirrors properly which as you know is something that I find to be very challenging. Plus, he never gets lost. Even in strange cities with odd traffic patterns—he somehow arrives at his intended destination with nary a detour. I don’t understand it though I think it might have something to do with him having a GPS embedded in his brain. Perhaps the most compelling of all: he drives “The Bus” as I call his extra-long SUV and never seems frazzled about parking it. Though it pains me to admit it, he does have the gift of drive.

There’s more, but I’ll save those for when I need to do a little damage control. My point in all of this is to show that what I’m about to tell you isn’t just a nagging wife thing: it’s an objective statement of fact. Because for as much as my husband excels at those bullet-pointed above items, there is one skill that completely evades him: photography. I kid you not, in this one area, he is truly inferior. But don’t take my word for it. Let the evidence speak for itself.
As you probably know, we hosted an Easter Egg Hunt for Amaya’s friends on Sunday. I handed the camera off to Andy to follow Amaya around the yard as she gathered her prizes in her bucket.  I should have known better. This was the first frame:

Yea.
The kids probably spent 15 minutes running all over our yard looking for colored ovoids. Do you know how many pictures he took of this? 13. 13! I can take that many in a single minute. I mean does the man think that he has to pay for every individual photo he takes?  We’re not using Polaroid or Disney Photo Pass here Drew. 
Ok, so if he’d gotten 13 really great shots, I’d shut up. But that’s far from the case since right off the bat, 5 were easily eliminated from the possible “great shots” category . But still, 8 really good pictures would make me happy. But umm…would this qualify as a good shot?   Or this?

Nope. 3 down, 5 to go. Odds aren’t looking so great.

Still looking for the money shot…

Face! We’ve got a Face!  But when looking at this photo, my eyes are drawn to my duck feet and the big brother with his back to the world. Definitely not frame worthy—not that I bother with frames, but you get my meaning, right?
At last! A half decent picture of the girl in her Easter dress and Converse kicks.  We’ll talk later about her fashion foibles as I think that will probably need an entire post to itself. Or 3.

After viewing the evidence, I think it can be concluded that Snapshots + Drew = FAIL. But since I’m too cheap to pay for a travel agent and have no desire to visit Jiffy Lube anytime soon, I’ll go ahead and give him a pass on this one colossal deficiency. I just hope he remembers the benevolence I’ve shown when my Anthropologie order arrives tomorrow.