Just a second

One of my colleagues told me that she spent the first three months of her sabbatical sleeping. I agreed that I would also probably do this but secretly I swore that this would not happen to me. With the number of commitments I've had over the past few years with administration, teaching, and family, I have trained myself to maximize the small pockets of times I get to do my own creative filmmaking. I figure that if I continue to use that focus when the other duties have been removed, I would do well. However, this "three months of sleeping" is sounding like a very good idea today. We drove home from Cypress Hills, stopping at a number of places but, due the the deferred day for the July 1 holiday, most stores, art galleries, museums, and tourist sites were closed (except for a little "old-timers" museum in Maple Creek where they had one of Geraldine Moodie's actual cameras on display). The sighting of an eagle as we left the hills notwithstanding, I felt increasingly defeated by the day. By mid-afternoon we had surrendered ourselves to just driving and, although the light and colours were perfect, I felt no temptation to pull over and drag all my gear out of the extremely tightly packed trunk and capture any of it. All I could bring myself to do was pull down the window and snap off a few without slowing down. The fields are all green and in bloom, the sky is dark with storms, the contrast was amazing. The image above contains no adjustments, it just looked like that (the blurriness is due to the 120kph motion). I thought I would grab every opportunity that came my way, but sometimes you just have to put your own sanity first and let the light live only in your memory.