I really expected to sit around the house doing nothing today, but somebody placed a new geocache in Huntington Canyon. Since I’d been wanting to go for a drive and take some pictures of the fall colors near Scofield anyway, I decided the cache was a good enough excuse to get out. I took the Energy Loop Scenic Byway starting at Huntington, then worked my way through Eccles Canyon to Scofield. I got some decent pictures, but it would have been much better had it not been so overcast. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds for about a half hour near sunset, and I managed to take ten pictures that I liked. I actually took 72 pictures, and I tried messing with the exposure and aperture on my camera to get better pictures with the poor lighting, but honestly I still don’t understand quite how it works.
I almost hit a deer between Scofield and US-6, and I only missed it by an inch or two. It was a nice little spike, and luckily he stopped short while trying to cross the road in front of me. I was doing 55 MPH, and he was also going pretty fast in a line perpendicular to the road, and I think he even bucked up on his hind legs while trying to keep from hitting my car. I didn’t see where he went after that, but I had to pull over to let my heart slow down a bit. I got out of the car just to make sure he hadn’t hit the rear-end with his horns when his front legs dropped back to the ground.
I’ve used less than half of my allotted vacation at work so far, and there’s only a quarter of the year left, so I’m going to start taking days off at random just to use them up. I think I’ll make plans for a few hikes, some xmas shopping, fixing my garage roof, and a few other odds and ends that I’d like to do before winter is here.