You know that I don’t totally trust anything electronic or digital. They are going to fail sometime and usually when you least expect it. Nothing breaks unless your are using it.

Knowing that, I use the devices anyway. Just about have to.

Back in 19-ought-when when this grand old lady (The Sun) took us over, we did just about everything manually. All these years later, we have automated a lot of the tasks and still don’t get out much earlier on Tuesday evening.

I went to Stockton Friday evening because I knew you would want to see some photos from the Cedar Bowl. It turned out to be a star-crossed evening, what ever that means.

When I pulled up in the parking lot and got my camera out of the bag, it immediately complained – No card. It was in the reader back at the office.

I went for the spare we always carry, inserted it in the camera, checked for old images and re-formatted it. I changed to my telephoto lens and headed for the already in progress game. The lady at the gate recognized me as working press and let me in.

Since my back-up memory card had only 1 gigabyte of memory, I set the camera on single shot, six shot bursts like normal when I have 4 gigs of memory.

A Stockton player tried to run around the right end and he and his Bulldog tackler rolled well out of bounds, a little too close for comfort.

I found out that I have no potential as a football coach. The Dogs had just stopped Stockton on the Bulldog 43. Coach Derek Scroggins excitedly hollered for a time out and got it with 3.5 seconds to go until the half.

I thought, “What’s the big deal?”

Time for one play. Bulldog QB Senior Trey Babcock laid a beautiful pass out there and Bulldog Wide Receiver Junior Derek Hayes ran under it catching the ball in stride on his way to the end zone for six easy points. Bulldog Kicker Junior Brayden Housh tacked on one to make it 35-0 at half.

OK, Coach, I get it. Good move.

With the turbo mercy clock running because of the huge lead, I headed back to my car early in the 4th quarter to get my camera ready to make the flash change for the trophy presentation. The coach was letting the freshmen play to get some game time experience and to keep from running up the score.

I shot a bunch of flash photos of the ecstatic team with their trophy. I even scrolled through some of the photos to see what I was getting. Don’t usually do that but this was important.

You can imagine my shock Saturday when Kimball called home from the office to tell me that there were 0 photos on the memory card when she tried to download it. That’s right, zero. Nada.

By then, no one answered at Bedford Photo in Springfield. Kimball looked them up on line and found they open at 10 on Monday.

I’ve had this happen once before over the years during a Nevada game and Lawrance Photo recovered them for me.

I called to see when their tech would be back from lunch and headed down with a memory stick in my pocket.

I was prepared to wait an hour like they told me, but the tech told the guy helping me at the counter that it would just be a few minutes. It was just a corrupt file that kept the computer from seeing the 236 photos I had taken. I didn’t think I had shot that many.

The tech said I could reformat that memory card and continue to use it. Like Ray Stevens said the other night when telling that in this day and age, some people complained that he only dances with women from the audience at the end of CaberRay Nashville, “Ain’t gonna happen.”             KL