Eats, Shoots and Leaves last night. okay, i think punctuation is a weird and fun thing, which makes me a bit weird i am sure, but this book was so fun. The title is based off an old joke where a panda goes into a cafe, eats, shoots the waiter, and leaves. All due to a typo in a dictionary where it states that a panda is an animal that “eats, shoots and leaves”. corny, yes, but if you had grown up in my family, you would be used to it.

as i was leaving photo lab friday night, i walked out and was astounded by the yellow-ness of the sky. it was very reflective, bouncing light between the clouds and the city and, as i learned later, a storm had just ended. i walked up further and saw a huge, full, extremely bright rainbow. it was truly the brightest and most complete rainbow i have ever seen. i ran back in the lab to tell the people still there (all two of them, friday nights are not big photo-lab nights for some odd reason) and by the time i got back out, the rainbow had started to fade. Within 5 minutes, it was gone.

it’s another dream report.

i’m riding on a flat-bed with my family and we reach our destination of a roman estate. then we’re inside, in a convenience-type store, getting food. I am looking around, not hungry. They even have creamies and i don’t even want any of those. Quite a statement there. My dad comes up to me with a slice of pizza with sausage and pepperoni on it for me. i ask him what exactly am i supposed to eat on that, the bit of crust over on one side that doesn’t have meat on it? i tear off that little chunk and wave it at him. somehow, i end up holding the slice of pizza and then i throw it at him for making me take it when he knows i don’t want it. after this bout of teenage bliss, i grab a big, square pizza from one of the freezers and leave, running to hide. Now i am inside a larger store, trying to decide whether it would be better to hide in the office supplies or the action figures. my sister ends up finding me and is, of course, mad at me for running off. we go back to out ‘rooms’, we are in the roman estate again now, and we’re in the process of packing. everyone in the estate is: there is something coming and although we know what it is, i can feel that, in retrospect i am not sure what it was. i’m helping my neice and nephew decide which “little people” set to take and then i am trying to put in my contact and something keeps causing me to drop it, though i usually catch it before it is on the ground. there is a dog nearby who i know will eat my contact if he gets it. i know that one of the roman gods is the one messing with my contact and, as i put my contact back in its case and fill the well with solution (my dad had warned me by this time not to attempt putting the contact in, to wait until we were away from the estate), a ringlet of blue is formed in the contact where the solution has risen, but left an air pocket still in the center of the contact and, since this is obviously a sign representing the Caesar, i call out in a sarcastic voice, “how very caesarian of you!” I am still angry about this and working on packing and getting ready and i know that these roman gods are working against us. i am then holding a silver bracelet made of a thin, silver chain and then a slightly thicker, curved, silver bar, about an inch in length with a slight pattern. the rumor is that when you rub this bar you can call upon these roman gods and there is a legend, or is it a memory of mine, of a girl who foolishly tried this, and going through a list of god names had the bar start heating when she got to a certain god. the name apollo keeps coming to me and that could have been the one who caused the bar to heat. i know that this god is trying to vex me and i throw the bracelet and yell “you are a god of jealousy and SPITE!” The word ’spite’ echos in the halls.

i awoke angry and upset.

while in escalante, i primarily shot film. It is rather unusual for me to shoot color film, but i did it down there and had a lot of fun with it, in case you couldn’t tell. I did shoot some digital pics as well, but not as many as i should have, probably. You see, i bought an s500 recently (i’ve only been ogling the S line of canon digitals for 2 years now, so i guess it was expected). The reason for buying the s500 as opposed to a more-featured, perhaps less-expensive, camera was that i wanted a camera that i wouldn’t even think twice about taking with me. If i have to think, “ooh, do i really want to carry that” i won’t have it with me enough and the s500 is nice and small. i also checked newegg.com every single day to wait until it dropped to a price i could justify. Anyway, after all that, the case that i bought for it falls off the belt of my camera pack, as i found out while hiking the grand canyon, and so i have been putting it in the pocket of my water pack when i am hiking, which means i have to take off the water pack every time i want to use it. Grrr! So, i need to find a new case for it.

all that aside, i did get a few shots in escalante on the digital and, since Iknitoo from the Knitter’s Review Forums asked about the digital camera, i figured i better post some of those pictures, too.

These flowers were so neat: i love how life in the desert pokes its head out wherever it can:

i think this picture of a scrumptious desert mushroom was taken on “The Gulch” hike along the Burr Trail. Hike names are approximate as we were using a close to worthless hiking guide-book. (hint: if a hiking book indicates that you should “turn when you see the fence with tumbleweeds pressed up against it”, DO NOT buy it!)

chmney rock:

and, from the last day, in oh-not-near-enough-light, the sunrise during a storm:

this picture does not really do it justice, but it does give you an idea of how much the size changed! i ended up washing it 3 times! i thought i was finished at 2 times, but when i got up the next day i was not happy with the amount of stitch definition still present, so in it went again. Let me tell you, i have some extremely clean, but fuzzy, jeans now.

i used cascade 220, charcoal, for the base and the handles up to the grips; noro kureyon, 82?, for the body and the grips.