Very unhappy -- defective camera gear

Sunday I ordered a right angle viewfinder and a remote timer for my Canon. The viewfinder I went non-Canon to save money, I hope it works out. I thought with magnification that I might be able to focus my 6D at night. Here's to hope!

The timer is Canon, though used. It arrived about 24 hours ago, and I was disappointed by what I thought was a dead battery. There's no way to get a CR2032 up here, and I didn't want to drive down to Alamogordo for one thing. Fortunately my wife was amenable to go down to dinner, and Home Depot had the battery in stock. Getting it at HD also let us look at storm doors, so it was an excellent twofer.

I get home, replace the battery, and it's still dead.

ARGH!

And they're closed on Saturday for the Sabbath. But at least that means they're open on Sunday, so I can call them tomorrow to see what we can do. I'm hoping they'll send me a replacement promptly, I might have to buy another and then have them refund the dud.

The only good thing is that the timer also works as a remote release with a lock, so I can do long exposures with it and just time it with my watch, but without the timer function, I can't do a series of shorter intervals. I know that the star trails work at ISO 800, f2.8 and 30 seconds, but long exposures don't mathematically scale at this low of light levels as you'd like.

I NEED THAT TIMER! I wonder if they'll test the new unit (still going to be used) before they send it? Also need to dig out my multimeter and confirm that the original battery and my replacements are good: CR2032s are used in lots of things and should have enough turnover to ensure fresh stock.

Very happy -- going to see Jethro Tull live!

On an extremely rare occasion we didn't zip through commercials on our DVR and caught an ad for "JETHRO TULL performed by Ian Anderson" performing at the Route 66 Casino in Albuquerque. Naturally it's a week from tonight when my wife would be working. ABQ is almost 4 hours from here. She's a huge Ian Anderson fan. She pulled up the tour info and they were performing the following night in El Paso, which is only two hours from here, unfortunately not only was she working, she was running a special program that she couldn't skip.

Yesterday she bought tickets for the Route 66 Casino so we're driving up next Saturday to see Tull!

I think the last full-on concert that I saw was 1994's The Division Bell by Pink Floyd. I honestly didn't want to see it as I'd heard poor reviews of the album, and I'd seen the tour for Momentary Lapse of Reason just a few years before. But my brother had bought the tix and wanted to do brotherly things with me, so we went. And frankly, I was not impressed.

Still, this should be interesting. I'm curious exactly what the name implies. Normally tours are named like that when there's horrible breakups and lawsuits, I'm curious what's going on here.