I bought a set of Cambridge Microworks computer speakers nearly 20 years ago. I used them on several computers, and they spent many years connected to a radio in the living room. A few years ago, I got a Sonos for the living room, and put the speakers away for “later”.

Well, I didn’t actually put them away – I put them under a spare chair in the office and tried not to trip over them very often.

I kept thinking about listing the speakers on craigslist, but it seemed like too much work. So they sat under the chair and gathered dust.

Last weekend, I noticed a Facebook Marketplace posting from a friend who was trying to get rid of a Facebook Portal that had been gathering dust atop his TV for a long while. His asking price? Free. He told me that he had an inquiry within two minutes and it was out of his house that same day.

I was inspired to try the same thing with my speakers tonight. It took half-an-hour before I got my first nibble, but they were gone about 90 minutes after I posted the ad.

Decluttering can be easy when the price is right!

I learned an important lesson on our trip to Africa: don’t overpack your TSA bag.

Especially don’t overpack it with liquids in bottles that can be jostled open.

Especially especially don’t overpack it with liquids (like DEET) which can dissolve plastics when they’re in bottles that can be jostled open.

And most especially, don’t put the overpacked TSA bag in the same backpack as valuable electronics like a camera with a plastic body.

I had thought at first that the only damage was to the battery door, and it wasn’t too big a problem. But when we were on our Hudson River trip, I discovered that some of the buttons and one of the knobs no longer worked, so I sent it off to Lumix Pro Services when we got home.

It’s still there, and I’m hoping for the best…but in case the repair cost is prohibitive, I started looking for a replacement camera today.

My current camera is a Panasonic Lumix FZ-1000M2; it’s a superzoom, with a top zoom range of 16x. It’s comfortable, not too heavy, takes good pictures, and I’m pretty familiar with it, so I hope I don’t have to replace it.

But if I do have to replace it, I think I want to go mirrorless. The cameras I looked at are smaller and lighter, at least with the included kit lenses, and it’s always possible to get a bigger lens for a trip to, say, Africa or Alaska (neither of which is likely to be repeated soon).

I went to San Jose Camera; they let me play with several cameras, and the ones I liked the best were the Nikon Z5 (full-frame) and the Canon EOS R10 (APS-C). I want to check other brands, too, but that’ll require a trip to a different store.

It’s quite scary.