It's here!

My new camera arrived yesterday! I simply can't express how excited I am, so following the old adage of "a picture is worth a thousand words," I'll just post a picture or two that I took with it on my test run! :-D

I went geocaching yesterday and I came across a group of these wildflowers. Have I mentioned that I love wildflowers? I do. :-D

And another just for good measure. :-)

My caching trip took me down to Spanish Fork, near the Windmill Farm (or whatever it's called). It was right towards sunset, and I really liked this shot.



As I was hiking in to grab one of the caches, I had quite an adventure. First, I almost stepped on a snake. (Luckily, he was kind of drowsy and sluggish since it was towards the evening, so he didn't even react. I'm not even sure it was a live, though I think it was.) And then, as I trekked through the field, I almost tripped over this guy! Seriously, what IS that!? I'm gonna say it's a cougar. I don't care if it is or not, it makes for a better story. So I almost tripped over a cougar carcass with the ribcage still largely intact!

And this was the view from an earlier cache I found today.

Don't worry, there will be more photos to come. :-)

As dreamers do...

"What a horrible candle-snuffing word. That's like saying, 'He can't climb that mountain, he's just a man,' or 'That's not a diamond, it's just a rock.' Just."
~J.M. Barrie, Finding Neverland

I saw a shooting star tonight.

I was laying down on the top step outside, just staring at the night sky, and thinking about some things that have really been weighing on my mind recently. Don't worry about what it was, that's not important to this topic.

As I was staring at the sky, pondering and shaking my head in silent frustration, with half of my view completely obscured by the house, a cosmic beacon of light briefly burst to lief, conspicuously burned across the sky for what my head knows must have been less than a second but my mind perceived as much, much longer, and vanished. Just a brief moment, an inconsequential flash, and it was gone. I know what a shooting star is - it's just a hunk of rock, a piece of debris that fell off the tail of a comet, made a wrong turn at Neptune, and burned up in the earth's atmosphere.

Just.

Whatever it "actually" was, I feel like that shooting star was for me. Because even if it is a "simple" phenomenon explained by science, it's so much more than that. It's a symbol of hope, of improvement, of a knowledge that somehow, sometime in the future, things are going to work out. Just don't stop believing, and don't stop wishing.

Of course I made a wish, and no, I won't tell you what it is. Maybe at a future date, after it's come true.

Maybe not.

But whether I tell you or not, that star let me know something. Yes, I've got things on my mind. I have no idea how or when it's going to happen. But somehow, sometime in the future... things will work out.

Smiling for the camera!

Friends, I just made the second most expensive purchase of my life, tuition notwithstanding. (The MOST expensive was my car.) The purchase has been made, the transaction has been run, and I now await the arrival of my Nikon D90 camera. People, this has been a dream of mine for YEARS. For years, I've been working with a nice film SLR, but film is expensive, and most images are shared digitally nowadays, anyway, and film pictures just don't translate to digital as nice as I would like. Now I can take my pictures and share them with my family (and you!) right away, with better quality. I'm finally back on the path to my secret dream of becoming a photographer.

Trust me, people, there will be pictures later.