It does ... trust me.

So what's the story about this one?

Well, just recently our weather turned into a full monsoon flow. That means that moisture streams up from Mexico and the gulf and we had our annual rainfall deficit erased in just a couple of days over the last weekend. It also means that if you are going to hike in the Sandias you'd better do it early, and hike with major rain gear.

So I have, been at the hiking early and gotten off the mountain early, with the exception of Sunday afternoon. I was out on a history hike - looking for history hidden in the mountains and I decided that as soon as it looked like it was clearing I would head on out for another hike up the back side of the mountain. I was going to retrace the route I had taken last Sunday when it rained for at least a good hour or two of my hike.

Although it was clearing I decided to go ahead and throw in the rain gear, just in case.

The long and short of it all was that in the last 45 minutes or so, just as I was finishing my 9 mile trek, the rain started. My camera was safe and sound, tucked away in a camera bag, but the camera bag was on the outside of my pack, and after 45 minutes of solid rain, the bag was pretty soaked.

My bad was not taking the camera out as soon as I got home because we were headed out to a friends for dinner.

Come Monday morning, I opened the case and thought to myself, Oh no... this can't be good. I should have taken this out yesterday.

It had been sitting in the damp bag for so long that the circuits were wet and the camera would not turn on. So the first step I took was to turn the ac unit in the kitchen window to dry and set the camera, sans battery and digital card, in front of it to spend the day, hopefully, drying.

When I came home, I had a glimmer of hope in that the camera turned on in one of it's 12 settings - but still sat silent and dead in all of the others. Besides that, it sent weird electronic messages across the screen and flashed and beeped and generally behaved like a short circuited electronic device.

Enter google, stage left.

I looked up what to do with wet electronics and found several references to saving various devices that had been submerged in water by placing them in a plastic bag full of rice.

???? Rice ???

That's rice, rice. Supposedly it adsorbs all the moisture and sometimes you get blessed with a working device at the end of it all.

So I went to the cupboard and found a large plastic jar of rice pilaf sitting there and remembered that my wife said that she didn't like it. Well, maybe I had found a second use for it all.

I grabbed a large plastic bag and poured out the long grained rice till it was about twenty percent full and then dropped the camera down in there and sealed up the bag.

Seal, don't shake, and let sit for 24 hours.

That's all I did, and when I pulled out the camera the next morning, sure enough, it smelled like rice pilaf. I put in the battery, photo card and threw the switch to on.

The monitor blinked to life, the lens whirred out of the camera and I pressed the shutter on my first of several test shots. Sure enough, that's all it took, and it seemed that I had brought back one more piece of electronics from the grave.

Since I've had my new job I've been on the road and missed a whole lot of weather in Albuquerque but not this night. This photo was taken in my second set up shooting the storms from my north facing balcony. I had both cameras on tripods and was firing away when the old "pilaf" captured this shot.

Nevertheless, the initially dead camera did send me out on a search for a possible replacement, one that was much smaller and one that I could carry in my briefcase everywhere.

After this week on the road it should be in Albuquerque when I get back and I'll have to test it out next weekend. I already took a few shots with its sister at Costco and was so impressed that I went ahead and ordered the better version of the camera.

More photos to follow.

But you already knew that.