Photo Finish Friday -- Peyto Lake

This is Peyto Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta, in August of last year.

It's Banff National Park's Birthday

Bow Lake along the Icefields Parkway

The first national park in Canada, Banff, was established today in 1887 after the passing of the Rocky Mountains Park Act.
Thank you, Sir John A. Macdonald.
Let's all go hug a mountain.
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Thanks to Messymimi for her listing of important things on this date.

Shed a Tear for The Weeping Wall

The Weeping Wall

It's been such a dry year the Weeping Wall in the north end of Banff National Park is barely a trickle.

At least there is some water on it, but it's nowhere near what it should be.

Maybe we'll get some proper rain. Maybe we'll get a decent amount of snow in the mountains and then this and other waterfalls and rivers can go back to being their spectacular selves.

If you'd like to compare, here's what it looked like last year.

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Please note, I made a mistake in the photo caption last year. The Weeping Wall is in Banff National Park, not Jasper National Park.

A Trip Back in Time

A lake along a loop drive in Banff. I was going to write something metaphorical, but it's too much work.

I had a reasonably misspent youth, and I mean that in the good way. Reporters, we heard in J school, are supposed to have life experiences. I can’t remember the exact reason given though it is moderately obvious. The more you experience, the more you know, and the more you will question. You’re less gullible if you’ve been around a bit.

You never know when an experience from the past will work its way to the surface and be exactly what is needed.

My current WIP is about a mirror. This lets me write short bits in the lives of many characters. It’s fun and I get to use fragments of life from overheard conversations to stuff that really happened.

For example, back in the Pleistocene epoch my best friend and I stumbled into her house at 4 a.m. stoned out of our gourds. Our tummies cried for attention. We sacrificed dill pickle potato chips to the munchies gods and giggled in terror that the crunching echoing in our ears would waken her dad.

I’m tickled silly that I can now call this moment research.
I suspect as the writing continues so will the mining of the past as well as whatever I can scavenge from the world around me.
Everything has a purpose; it is just a matter of discovering what that purpose is.

What about you? Has that thing you did all those years ago proved to be something you need now? Or as you still waiting to see the good side of it?

Gratitude Monday - Soon

Near Num-Ti-Jah Lodge along the Banff Parkway.

Spring is here and with it the promise of sunshine, green grass, and lazy summer days.
But it first brought us a spring snow storm that left us with several inches of fresh, fluffy snow.
Moisture is good, and I am certainly grateful for it, but I'd really rather have a proper summer soaker than more snow.
It is what we have, though, and there's nothing to be done about it except ride it out and know that summer, and scenes like this, will be back soon.
I'm grateful that I live so close to the mountains and that I have a car. I can go any time I please. I am also grateful that I have this photo and many others like it to look at on days when it is snowy and grey.
It seemed like time to put up a picture like this. I hope you enjoy it.

Peaks and Valleys

Banff National Park

Peaks are less intimidating the closer you get. But they're still high.


I had a very good writing day yesterday. I had a reasonable idea for a scene and a character and had fun writing it. I've alway felt good when writing, but it's been decades since I felt this good. My paraNano project has been wonderful. I'm inventing creatures and writing dialogue. It seems to have blasted through some barrier. I was never very good at dialogue and got to the point where I told myself I couldn't write it.
Now I am writing it.
Stop thinking and start doing. Or, as I tell people who are annoyingly negative around me, "Stop telling me what you can't do and start telling me what you can do."
I am supposed to hit the 20,000 word mark today, 20004 in fact. As of yesterday I was less than 1,200 away.
It is logical to assume I will get there.
And if I fall short today, so what? There's always tomorrow and there always will be a tomorrow as long as I'm enjoying it.