On the way home from Virden.
There’s a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they’re absolutely free. Don’t miss so many of them.
—Jo Walton
Sunset
Patrick
Ste. Rose and environs
Since I was in Dauphin today to supervise a judo grading, I took the long way home, swinging by my old home town, Ste. Rose du Lac.
It’s been a few years since I was in town. I didn’t know what I should expect: would I feel all the feelings? Have I been away long enough that I would be dispassionate?
Turned out to be door number 2, mostly. I snapped a photo of our old house—I haven’t lived in it for, what, 30 years?—and mostly I was a) surprised by the addition of a chimney to the side of the house and b) impressed at how many vehicles fit in the ol’ driveway.
The town’s famous grotto, which I had intended to photograph, looks like it’s under construction—scaffolding everywhere—so I didn’t bother with pictures.
I stopped in briefly at École Laurier, where I learned français, and got a weird hit of nostalgia looking at the playground. I’m like 75% sure that the monkey bars there are the same ones a friend fell from in grade 2, breaking his arm.
I stopped just outside Laurier and snapped the 19 images that make up the header image, a panoramic view of Riding Mountain.
Spring is springing
Well, the trees are starting to bud out, anyways.
Yet Another Aurora Post
I had dozed off on the couch, and woke up about 12:45am or so. I thought, I should go to bed.
Then, brushing my teeth, I noticed there was quite a moon. So I check the aurora data and decided, what the hey, I’ve got the week off, I can stay up late on a school night.
So I packed my gear and headed out for about half an hour, and these photos are the result.
11th and Lorne
Taken on my bike ride yesterday.
Nerdy details: This is a 22-image panorama, all 50mm, f/2.8, 1/4000s, stitched together with Hugin.
Aurora, April 16, 2021
Last night I took a drive, and got some shots of a diffuse aurora borealis on a back road a few miles outside of town.
I shot for about ½ hour between 11 and 11:30 pm, and made a short timelapse video, too. Each second of video is about a minute in real-time.
And then, when I came back to town, I decided to get a few shots of the old Kullbergs warehouse demolition going on at 18th Street and Pacific Avenue. The photo below is an HDR merge of two photos, to try to balance the brightness of the exterior with the darkness of the interior.
Spring, eh?
Snow in April is the norm in Manitoba. So it goes.
The robins didn’t seem terribly impressed, and I sympathize.
An era ends
The demolition of the Kullbergs warehouse at 18th St. and Pacific Ave. is really, really happening.
Bike ride, April 10, 2021
The weather’s supposed to turn wintry again for a few days, so I took advantage of today’s nice weather for a good long bike ride—27.8km, which took about 1¾ hour or so of cycling (I stopped to take photos and to chat with a friend, so I was gone from the house for 2½ hours).
I took my camera along, too, and snapped some photos.
Goose 
Contrail 
The river
The contrail photo above is actually a panorama of about six photos. Compare and contrast below with a single-frame version of the same image.
[twenty20 img1=“4758” img2=“4757” before=“Single” after=“Panorama”]
Publications in 2021
Out now on the finer Internets everywhere: my (very) short story “The Atlas”, which features an atlas, a bottle of absinthe, and a hunting knife, published in Volume 2 of Cloud Lake Literary.
Forthcoming in October 2021: Alternate Plains (available for pre-order now!), featuring my story “Summertime in the Void”, which is one answer to the question “What if the Singularity didn’t want you?” (Canny CanCon types might wonder if I lifted the title from an I Mother Earth song. The answer is “Absolutely.”)
(It’s been a long time since I had two publications in the same calendar year. I think the last time was ’04, when On Spec published “Resurrection Radio” and I won the Manitoba Short Fiction contest with “A Map to the End of the World”.)