Weather is fun

It’s nice to know that no matter what, I will always be loved…by mosquitoes!!! At least I’m making lots of friends, hundreds a day, I tend to kill a lot of them, but it’s nice to be popular. I’m starting to appreciate the old line about the provincial bird, I think that was Ontario – but I’ve never seen anything like this. Four weeks of record rain followed by several days of record highs have led to a crop of the little fuckers that even the farmers say they’ve rarely seen – and remember they can tell you the mosquito count from 1912.

I’m just back from taking pictures of a golf tournament where I was dancing around and slapping at myself like I was having a seizure, it’s nice to be inside. It seemed like I had 4-6 biting me at every moment. Despite the bugs, and the now constant itching, it’s awesome to have the heat and the sun back, even if it means I have to stay in doors more than when it was raining.

Luckily I didn’t get around to writing here a few hours ago, I was fuming when I left work and it could have been ugly. Suffice it to say I’m tired of being told I’m "an embarrassingly bad" or "crappy" photographer because I’m forced to use the paper’s embarrassingly crappy amateur camera. It’s hard to walk into an event and try to act like a professional photographer who knows what I’m doing when I have the cheapest camera in the room.

So as the floods end now we get tornadoes?! It’s nice here but now in southern Alberta there are tornadoes. Is that normal? I knew there was a reason I didn’t trust the openness of the prairies – there’s nothing to protect you and keep you safe on dry ground like in the mountains.

Another nice thing about the sunny weather is the sunsets. For weeks people have been telling me the best feature of the prairies is the sky, which is like saying the nicest thing about a building is the empty next door, but when the sky lights up insane swirls and layers of deep oranges and reds and purples, even I have to admit it’s impressive. I’ll post pics when I get them on this computer.

Another nice look is when you get spots of cloud shadow drifting across rolling fields of swaying grass – of course it says a lot that I think it looks like a yellow ocean.

Speaking of endless prairie I met a young couple the other day who are cycling from Victoria to St. John’s. It took them a month to get here, taking their time, and they figure they’ll hit Newfoundland in September. In B.C. they did about 70K a day, out here it’s more like 110-120.

I’m out of steam for now, Marcel e-mailed some great thoughts on the future of news etc that I wanted to get into but it deserves more time and energy than I have now. For now I’m adding a picture and reorganising my links, again.