I finally caved in and got a new camera. It's another point-and-shoot; a Canon Powershot A100 IS. One of these days I'll get an SLR camera, but that's going to have to wait until I can justify the expense. One of the advantages of having a cheaper camera is that I'm not afraid to take it hiking with me. I can still get some pretty decent shots with this kind of camera. I got a pleasant surprise when I got it too. They threw in a free photo printer. Sure, I had to pay up front for it, but I get 100% of the cash back in the form of a rebate. Nice.

As I get older, I continue to be thankful for cameras. Sometimes I forget things that happened last month, or even last week. I think it's because the older we get, the more memories we hold. It's all in there somewhere, but crammed in like like little bits of paper in an overstuffed filing system. It's hard to locate things sometimes.

As children, our filing systems are relatively bare of detritus. Everything in there is important and easily accessible. Strangely enough, those childhood memories tend to rise to the top of the pile in our mental filing systems. I can remember certain moments from childhood more clearly than I can remember yesterday. In fact, some of those childhood moments seem to grow in importance over the years. They continue to resonate in a way that's all out of proportion with their initial impact.

The first Rattlesnake I ever saw was a big one. Like most Northern Pacific rattlesnakes, it had a banded tail, making it superficially resemble a Kingsnake. As a sixth or seventh grader, I had already developed a predator's eye, instinctively honing in on visual cues in my environment. Because of this, and based on its banded pattern, I was halfway to grabbing the huge Rattlesnake before thought kicked in and a little voice in my head said, "hey idiot! It has a rattle!" I backed off, and so did my friends who had also been running towards it. We watched it slowly crawl into the undergrowth until it had disappeared from view.

It was soon afterwards that we caught our first Rattlesnake. It was inside a drainage pipe in the spillway up at Steven's Creek Reservoir. I can't remember how we got it out of the pipe, or how we got it to crawl into the old beer can we'd found, but the end result was a trio of pre-teen boys walking around with a baby Rattlesnake inside a beer can. We took it home, and my friend tried in vain to convince his mom that it was a Gopher snake. She didn't buy it of course, and made him release the snake.

There were other, similar incidents as well. Quite a lot of them, actually. I'll save those stories for another day. Now that I'm writing them down, I'm realizing that the stories tend to bleed together after all of these years, and I can't remember which beginnings and ends fit together. The memories I have are often like mental snapshots. I can remember moments, but the context is sometimes hazy. I guess it's a good thing I'm starting to write them down.