Avoiding "I told you so" (can you keep a secret?)

Tuesday night I pulled out the camcorder that Bob and I jointly own. I wanted to upload Riley's hanoverian inspection footage to a new high-definition video site, www.vimeo.com. I was able to do this successfully, and you can see the hi-def version of Riley's best run at the inspection below:

Riley's hanoverian inspection 2006 (run 2) from Stacey Kimmel-Smith on Vimeo.

Now on to my tale of woe...

Bob has a distinct sense of ownership of this camera, and periodically he tells me that every other pixel is his. He tends to bond with his electronics and he's spent a lot of time with this particular one, at horse shows and videotaping me and Harv. He knows it, it is familiar to him, and he is vested in it. He's noted on more than one occasion that I can be a little slapdash with the cam, carrying it around without the lens cover on, etc. I've gotten a few lectures on proper care of expensive equipment.

Well, it happened. I broke it. There I was, trying to download the footage from cam to PC. I plugged in the USB cable, clicked "capture from device" on MovieMaker,and voila. Device not found. Huh? I powered down, I rebooted, tried everything that has worked in the past. The connector on the cam side did feel a little sticky, and when I peered into the plug it looked crunched. I can't recall any casual disregard or misuse, but I'm the only one downloading stuff; it has to be my fault.

Telling Bob is not an option -- at least not yet. With my husband and my boss at work, I try to delay giving bad news until a workable resolution is in place. My options...

• Buy a new cam. I wouldn't buy this model again, and a new model would necessitate "coming clean," plus there would be the endless kvetching about having to learn a new cam.
• I called Sony, they want $211 to fix it. We paid $250 new, so no thanks.
• I can buy a firewire cable and card for under $100. However, my laptop won't support it and if I put it in Bob's PC I'll have to tell him.
  
• Another option: buy a firewire cable and a 4 gig flash drive, and use the firewire connector to download video. This means lugging the cam to work and using the publicly available Macs to download to the 4 gig flash drive. Total cost? $50. Okay, I'll take that one.

On the plus side, the quality of my videos will increase dramatically. On the down side, I now have a secret from my husband. Guilt, guilt, guilt, plus the dreadful feeling that soon I will have to acknowledge that at least some of the time he is right. Remember that song from Carousel? Nothing so bad for a woman as a man who thinks he's good.

Okay Bob you were right. Dammit. Next time I'll be more careful, I promise!