this thing is a year old, so i have a present for you ///

I realized today that I started this blog exactly a year ago! I bet most of you weren't reading it a year ago-- so I'm going to repost the photos I showed that day.

They have a great story attached to them, AND, they're polaroids!

I took these on my birthday LAST year.
I had just bought my polaroid camera at a thrift store for $7 the week before. I didn't have much to do on my birthday, so I decided to take a walk down La Mirada blvd with my new camera. My small challenge to myself was to use all the film on that street.

here's some red thread.

While taking this one, I took one step backward, slipped on a muddy hill and totally fell into the mud. I was wearing a DRESS. happy birthday to me :) ha! this picture was literally coming out of the polaroid MID-FALL. oh man.

this is the mean mud. wahhhh.i like shadows.

a shadow self portrait,

and the sky :)

Here's all of the, sewn together, hanging over my stove.

and here's your present! its a desktop image that you can download. click on it, it will get bigger, and then you can save it and use it. you can envision me falling into the mud, mid photo every time you look at it, and hopefully it will make you laugh. :)
thank you to the 15THOUSAND visitors to my blog.
thats a really large number, to me anyways.
i do appreciate you all,
and i'm looking forward to more!

thankyouthankyouthankYOU.
goodnight everyone, :)
shannon.

I'm 21 now.

Yes! Today is THE DAY.
I turned twenty one.

twenty one!++++++++++++++++++++++

I love this day because I get to share my birthday with my favorite author, who I talk about a lot: Madeleine L'engle.

When I found out she and I share a birthday, I literally was so happy I had a few tears. I remember JUST finishing A Wrinkle in Time last year around Christmas, looking up some information online, and coming across an article that noted her birthday. I was ecstatic. The post about it is right here.

Today,, ruled.
I had seven hours of class to go to (flexibility and core training, Integrated Design 2, and Torrey), but that didn't stop the day from being wonderful.

First of all, I got to wear my yellow sweatpants all day.
Second of all, I got some phone calls from some great friends.
Thirdly, an entire kindergarten class sang to me and yelled at me over the phone.
4thly, I had breakfast with Hollie, dinner with my parents and dessert with Denise!
fifthly, i feel like i could write a hundred things,
sixthly, God gave me energy & joy today even though i hardly got any sleep.

+, thank you to all of you who left me comments on here, too.
comments are my love language.
i love reading them! i respond!

instead of a photo, a thought from Madeleine is going to finish us off this evening. this is from her book called Glimpses of Grace.

When I am constantly running there is no time for being.

When there is no time for being there is no time for listening.

I will never understand the silent dying of the green pie-apple tree

if I do not slow down and listen to what the Spirit is telling me.


i dont do this enough. but yesterday Hollie and I layed on our backs and listened to 5 songs in the middle of the day. No talking. Just the music, and the sunlight, and the sense of timelessness.

Wooooo!!! Kate (and Seth) win.

Thank you everyone for entering :)
It made me happy to get submissions for my impromptu contest.

First place goes to Kate Eberle!

I second shot Kate's wedding last August, and I really love her photo. She took it while she was in Miami over Thanksgiving. I chose hers for first place because it moves me. Doesn't it just make you wonder about that couple? I like this nuance because it is a moment that anyone could have passed by and not noticed, but Kate noticed, and I think that its beautiful.


Second place goes to Seth Cutter! I really like the formal elements of Seth's photo. He captured the light perfectly, there's great color, great lines, great shapes... it's fantastic! He took this at The Whisper Lounge, which is one of my (many) favorite restaurants in LA (yes, that scored him bonus points). He was having dinner there with his girlfriend Gina for their first anniversary.

Here are the runners up.

This one has the best caption of them all: Seeing the ocean for the first time. Isn't that so cute?? Kelly C'debaca submitted this one of her and her son. I did the C'debaca's family photos a while ago-- and she has a fun blog!

This one is from Riley Kimball! I love the light and the reflections that he caught from his Arizona backyard.and THIS one is from my Grandma. Flies on a truck.
I'm telling you--I loved all of these!

and... this is Brady Dillsworth's. He was the clever one of the group. Sorry Brady, taking a picture of your computer screen doesn't cut it.

i hope this inspires you to keep noticing subtleties in your day,
thanks to everybody who entered :) i really enjoyed looking through all of the entries. you are noticers. i love that.

if you are Kate or Seth, email me your mailing address and I'll mail you your fun prizes! coffee and calendars.

so, does everybody want to do more contests?
mmm??????

a rainbow in some stainless steel. ++ AND A CONTEST!

i hope that this is interesting to you, and not a waste of your time.
i suppose you wouldnt be here if you thought things like rainbows in stainless steel were a waste of your time though, right?

i just decided i want to run a nuances contest. send me your best photo of a good life nuance by Wednesday November 28th at midnight! you have 23 hours!

- email your photos to shannon@shannonleith.com
- you can interpret 'good life nuance' however you want. just go notice life, and send me what you notice.
- the prize will be: a pound of amazingly amazing coffee and a dayplanner with soy-based inks from littleotsu.com
- enter!

People are Better than Trees: Canada day something.

Its day something because I kind of forget what day I'm on, since I'm now back in my Tropicana apartment, and I haven't been consistent in my whole day 1 day 2 day 3 thing.

so.
here are some more photos i like from our trip!
and thank you Donny Hoover for my new mantra: people are better than trees. as much as i like trees, they definitely don't have much personality to capture.

trees would never do THIS.

ohh brothers.

trees would never drink iced coffee in sub zero weather.

my sister, time and time again, is adorable.
i cant tell you how much i appreciate her freeness. (freeness?)

and here's the whole family! although i prefer real life photos to the classic stand in front of the christmas tree shot, i think this photo of us is cute. i love how tall we are. heather's the shortest i think and she's 5'8". i think.

heath and i got to speak with my mom when she talked about being a mom. here she is doing her part of it!

and here they are! my parents telling the world about marriage. if you're interested, they speak with Family Life. click for more info. To my engaged couples: you can go too! It's a great conference!!

i like how my mom still KIND OF blends in. ;)

Ryan being his intense self.

and here are my tree photos. i realized when we were halfway down the mountain from Whistler that I hardly took any photos. Really-- what I posted on here was basically the highlights. I don't have many more that I'm hiding away. So, I snapped some tree photos on the way down, to prove that yes, I WAS in Canada... but Donny Hoover is right. People are better than trees. Aren't the people ones a hundred times more interesting?i took them while we drove, and i love how this one came out. so tense and creepy, eh? eh eh eh eh eh eh eh eh eh?

i didn't like the bottom of this one (it was just black.) and cropping it like this made me want to do so a lot more panoramics. mm.

so that's about it.
it was a great family trip!
i think my favorite part was the THREE spas that were outside.
sitting in a spa in the middle of the snow was fun.
and i liked our meals. whistler has GOOD food.
especially with the seven of us taking over the restaurants.
i loved it. :)

the best Thanksgiving gadget.

I like to make pie, and in my opinion, you can't really make pie without making the crust. When I spend time on the wonderfully flaky crust and it BURNS, I get ticked off.

Tin foil isn't any help. Either your hands burn or it falls off.

My Grandma gave me these Pie Crust Shields last year, and they are GENIUS! The perfect little thing for people who care about their pie crusts.

Thank,, you,, Grandma!!

Vancouver, BC day three.

my day started with coffee, like usual, but today's had an AMAZING CUP!! man ALIVE. look at that rad handle. this hotel we're at has the best coffee presentation i've...ever seen. i had to show you. :)
here's a quintessential Canadian chandelier and here are some weird photos from last night that we took while waiting for our shuttle back to the hotel, which NEVER CAME. I have no idea what Carson is doing in this photo, but I love thinking about it. Caption ideas? eh?
Another awkward moment that makes me laugh.
the boys. we figured out that our breath was photographable. look at the accidental but wonderful breath border.
Now, here are some special photos of my mom. We got to watch my parents speak tonight, and the whole time I couldn't help but notice that she completely blended in with the wallpaper and curtains behind her. Garden State memories, anyone?
lets all take off our photo-analyzing hats, because in terms of lighting, these photos are terrible. BUT. In terms of PRECIOUSNESS... they win big big points.what I love about my mom is that she can laugh at this. :)here's that scene from the film Garden State that i was envisioning. this, to me, is one of the funniest things in life. does anyone else get a kick out of things like this?
Here's another Stephanie and Shannon Classic.
Stephanie's trip to visit me in California the first year I moved...
and we thought burying me would be fun.

dessert time. :)
my favorite time of day, i think.

a little party at the Veronese Tea House (a diversion from my Canadian adventures.)

I'm waiting for my dad to be done with a meeting, so I'm going to show you some photos from a birthday dessert I had a few days ago.

Rachel and I started off the day going to the LA flower market. Anyone who lives close enough should go to this place. I guarantee your life will be enhanced. Plus-- you might encounter a smokin hot man at 6am looking for flowers (or women like Rachel, as we see in this photo.)

Rachel and I decided that baby's breath is going to be our new way of doing floral art. So, for this party we used solely baby's breath, and it was really quite stunning! Baby's breath as the main deal. Mmmm mm mmm. (this photo was taken by ellen!)

Also taken by El, this is me opening a BOOT SHAPED PENCIL HOLDER from Blythe! As we can see, I was really really really stoked.
Here's the Biola part of my life who came,
Rachel Annie me Ellen Hollie and Den!

And the friends who I've known since high school! Lindsey and Blythe.

And my family (girls only.) My mom and Heather.

When we got back to Trop we realized we didn't take NEARLY enough photos, so we utilized our kitchen and did a few shots.Hol was the only one who dressed up for the party. She was a business woman...

Complete with a floral briefcase.
(look at her ruby ring! she's getting married in April!)

Hee. El.

ahh! gotta run!