Snow in April is the norm in Manitoba. So it goes.
The robins didn’t seem terribly impressed, and I sympathize.
Spring, eh?
Blog
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”.)
Aurora, March 31, 2021
To the eye it was a faint haze to the northern horizon.
Publication day!
Today is the release date for Cloud Lake Literary, Volume 2, which contains my very short story “The Atlas”, which features an atlas with at least one extra country, a bottle of absinthe, and a hunting knife.
I just checked my stats on The Submissions Grinder, and this one sold to the 18th market I submitted it to. 17 markets said, gently or bluntly, “Thanks but no” before this one found a home.
I guess the lesson is, Keep trying. Someone out there wants your story.
Writers: If you’re not using The Submissions Grinder, you owe it to yourself to at least look into it. It’s a market list for fiction and poetry, and it’s a submissions tracker, and it’s free. It’ll let you import your data from Duotrope (if you were using Duotrope before, it’s kind of like a less-polished Duotrope).
Cloud Lake Volume 2 is available for purchase from Cloud Lake’s site. For $10.00 $7.50 (Canadian), you get fiction, non-fiction, children’s stories, poetry, and art from 16 Canadian creative types.
Header image by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.
The bunny
Hoss, hunkered down in our yard on a windy, drizzly spring evening.
Snow, eh?
I know, I know, I live in Canada. But every spring I get fooled into thinking that maybe the snow’s done now till next winter.
Still. At least it’s an opportunity to showcase one of my favourite graphs.
(The header image is actually about 40 images, stacked using the same method I use for my star trails.)
Birthday Photos
Tonight I headed out into the countryside, planning to take some startrail photos. The data weren’t looking good for any aurora.
Some showed up all the same. (What I saw was a very faint haze; the camera sees far better in the dark than I do.)
I caught a satellite over about 40 frames 
~20 minutes of star trails 
The half-moon
Aurora Again
The northern lights put on a show again tonight.
I reprocessed one of the photos. Which one do you prefer?
[twenty20 img1=“4704” img2=“4710” before=“before” after=“after”]