Nikon N50
Thanks to Freecycle and a very nice person who had no use for it, I just acquired a Nikon N50. It’s a very nice SLR film camera, and I’ve already walked all over the house taking dumb pictures of everything (Nora’s wishing she hadn’t stayed home sick today — she didn’t bank on being pestered by me and my lil’ flash). Anyhow, I’m getting the film developed today while Nora has her doctor appointment, and then we’ll know if this thing works. Boy, if it does, this is going to be fun.
Of course, the film I found was a few years old, so it could be that this round won’t be definitive proof of its abilities one way or the other. So we’ll see — but it’s sure nice goofing around with an SLR again, particularly one that does a little bit of the thinking for you.
Doug — where do you buy lenses? Are there any sites/stores with good, used lenses at good prices? I need to scratch this itch without appearing on Lizzie’s TomSpending radar, you know? 
I’ve always used bhpotovideo.com or adorama.com, FYI.
Do you have a nearby place that processes and digitizes film? I’ve heard that you can now bring in a roll of film and have a CD of hi-res images in an hour many places, and for less than it used to cost to get prints for a roll of film. Is it true?
Walgreens will do it — I’m going to try that with my next roll of film. I didn’t know for sure if the camera worked, so I didn’t bother with the first two rolls (the first roll was very washed out due to its age, so I wanted to test again before I started getting 5×7s or a CD or something).
The CD is an extra $2.99, and I figure I’ll give it a shot to see what kind of resolution and quality I get. I just hope it’s just a CD with JPGs and not some monkey-brained PhotoFriend software or somesuch. My mother got some kind of a Kodak viewer thing back with a CD once that barfed stuff all over her registry. Took me a day to get it all luxed out again.
Right now I’ve got C-41 black and white in it — I got one roll developed already and it looks pretty great. But I think I’ll move to color soon — I thought it would be great to re-learn the basics in black and white and then go to color, but I think it might be easier the other way around.