Spring is beginning to arrive on campus, my first true spring in years. I got a quick taste of it when I visited Washington D.C. in early 2005 but not since then have I seen so much a blip. I type that even as I hear the wind howling outside my window. But though the grass is brown and the weather is bipolar, among all of the bare, leafless trees on campus, one has suddenly burst into flower.

I gave a sigh, glared at my ever-malfunctioning camera, and swore that I would manage to take some pictures today, regardless.

When I turned it on, it flashed a distorted magenta screen at me balefully and I nearly gave up. I took a few distorted magenta pictures and futilely changed settings on the phone when it occurred oddly to me to use an outside method. I turned the lens of the camera directly to the full afternoon sun, and the image on the screen blanked under the light and resolved itself into something resembling normalcy.

Flowering tree is in the middle, flanked all around by bare trees. Notice the strange lines on the light background of the sky, though. My camera won’t give me flawless images anymore, but they’re close to perfect save for light backgrounds, upon which those lines are evident.

Squirrel like flowers. Flowers pretty.

And then my camera started failing again, this time irrevocably– the sun had gone behind a cloud, and I doubted the same trick would work twice.

Still, it was worth more than worth the hassle to get the shots I did manage.