Canon Rebel K2

This is the camera that I want to get:

It's the Canon Rebel K2. A 35mm film camera. The only thing is that I don't know exactly which lens to get with it. There are a couple different packages that I'm looking at that would come with a lens and other accessories. The good thing about this, is that later down the road, when I go to buy a SLR digital camera, I'll be able to share lens between the two. This will cut down on the costs. This K2 is only around 230 dollars but I need to make sure that my bills are paid first before I splurge...

Zion National Park

After leaving Arches National Park, we drove to the south-western side of Utah and stopped at Zion National Park. I had seen some pictures of the park and wanted to see it first hand. If you come in to the park from the eastern side as we did, you can hit a pretty big traffic jam. The tunnel (with no lights) is small and everyone is trying to bring in huge campers, which requires an escort while no one else is in the tunnel. So, it can take a while. But once you get through the tunnel you're immediately blown away because you're looking at a huge canyon valley. From the car you cant see down to the bottom but you're driving right along the edge of it. You work your way down and most of your time is spent in the valley area.

Zion National Park uses a natural gas bus system to get you around from trail to trail. At first I was sceptical because I always imagined going on trails as something you do on your own. Just you and the great outdoors! Well, that's fine when you're out in remote areas that no one ever travels to but at some of these National Parks there are so many visitors that it would be a nightmare navigating through all their cars and trying to find parking at each trail head. So the bus system, while confusing at first, once you got the hang of it was just great. It got you where you needed to go in just a couple minutes and there was always one coming up the road in 5 to 10 minutes in case you get off at the wrong stop. And as you can see, Kelli thought the buses were AOK:

One of the more interesting trails we went on was called the hidden canyon. This is where you hiked up a very steep graded trail. It seemed like it went up forever, and when you go to the top, you could see so far down it was breathtaking. But this was just the beginning because once you reached the top of the trail now before you was a canyon that went back forever. We walked through that canyon for as far as we could go before realizing that the sun was going down, very quickly. We had no lights and we did not want to be in this canyon when it got to dark to see because you could trip on anything. So we actually ran the whole way back out of the canyon and oddly enough that was one of the more fun things that we did. Very exciting. Here is shot looking in to the beginning of the canyon and some other pictures:

Concerning Inept News Stories

I'm mainly testing out the ability to send a post from my email account to my blog. Then, after that, sometime I would like to test out the ability to send texts from my phone. I don't know what exactly this would be good for, but it certainly sounds like a neat idea! Imagine, I'm at the bar and I see a funny joke on the bathroom wall, well no more forgetting the joke, I'll just send my nifty blog a text with the joke in it. For me and all to see! haha. We'll see if I ever end up using that. The ability to upload from my email is a good feature though. Since I'm limited to certain websites here at work I'm unable to post any other way.

So, let me see, what are the pressing issues of the day? I've noticed recently when news stories leave out, what seems to me, the vital information about the story. Case in point: I read a story today on www.cincinnati.com that talked about Bush's State of the Union address tonight and different areas he would be focusing on. But Nowhere in the story was there any information about what time the address would be. Did the author ever consider that we might want to see the address? Or were we supposed to know that the address is always on at 9:00... I don't remember when it is but people regularly check cincinnati.com, they might not have even known that the President would be speaking tonight, and after being interested in what he's going to speak about, the next logical question is, "what time?"

Also, I was reading another story talking about how Alito was confirmed this morning. This story was on www.msn.com. It talked about how it was a very partisan vote and even compared it to a Clarence Thomas vote. So, the next logical question is... what was the tally of the vote? was it 51-49? who knows? because it was no where in the story. Eventually, I did find a link to the side which gave a state by state tally of the votes, 58-42. Partisan but not straight down the party lines.

The First Infamous Post...

I don't think anyone will see this yet but I'll start by posting a picture... hmm, what picture should I post?

This is a picture I took at Arches National Park. The first park that we stopped at when we went out west, and the first National Park I had ever been to in my entire life.

We (Kelli and I) love to go on walks/hikes and thought we were up to the challenge of hitting up one of the more advanced trails. Ignoring the caution signs we headed out on a very rugged 7 mile trail. It was, without a doubt, the hardest trail I have ever done. 7 miles is a long walk to begin with but when you add in the fact that the trail is very easy to lose and many times you have to climb up and down rocks not much different than the one pictured, that 7 miles becomes extremely difficult. One of my not so fond memories of it was when I was completely exhausted and realized that we had just gotten to the halfway point of the trail.

Then, when we got back to our campsite and were very excited to be able to lay down and rest we saw that our tent had blown over. The ground was too rocky to stake down the tent so we had used rocks to way it down. But the afternoon winds had picked it right up and sailed it about 30 feet away. Fortunately, a nice neighbor had secured our tarp in a tree so that we still had that and we were able to secure our tent by tying it to the trees. I did get a couple stakes in but they could not go deeper than about two inches.

Here are some more pictures from Arches National Park: