I finally splurged and got a new camera (a Nikon Coolpix 7900) with which I'm familiarizing myself:

The macro feature is very interesting; here's the center of a rose:

And here's a zoom taken from a normal non-macro shot -- showing Coco's eye (the blue one):

The eye is a bit blurry, but it was taken indoors without my having read the manual.

Both of the above are greatly reduced from the 7 megapixel capacity this thing has. It seems beyond my capacities, but between shopping around (with the help of Froogle and resellerratings.com) the price turned out to be about the same as what I'd planned to buy a month ago.