May 31st

11pm: The Sadies live at The Canmore Hotel. Undoubtedly the best band in Canada at the moment, I love The Sadies - here they are on the 2nd night of their stop in Canmore, probably into song number 25 of the night. Myself & George lapping up their cosmic country sound. The Ho is a neat place, totally in tune with the band - after a 2 1/2 hour show, incredibly they still left the crowd begging for more!

May 30th

11pm: A cold evening, the sort of evening for alphabetizing (is that a word?) one's CD collection!!

May 29th

8pm: Finally the snow clouds have lifted a little on what was a cold Saturday afternoon. What to do when it's like this, no biking, no gardening, not much really - just an indoors kind of day. Hope it warms up a little for the start of the Bow Valley Soccer League tomorrow.

May 28th

9.30am: Last night's cold, damp football training session heralded the onset of snow. SNOW! It's the end of May for god's sake.....so here I am snapping a bunch of frozen cows in a field just south of Cochrane, the snow clouds still looming in the background. When will this late winter ever end......

May 27th

10pm: I'm sorry to say this week has been pretty uninspiring on the photo front. As you can tell from my muddy football boots the weather has been crap & taking photos a chore rather than a pleasure. Still football training was fun, hard work in the cold & wet, but energising fun. The team is coming together well, think we will compete this year.

May 26th

7.50pm: Well you can see where I was when this photo was taken, hlfway between Calgary & Canmore on my way back from the airport. Again sad-to-say, just a busy, busy work day - interviewing potential new employees, grabbing hasty lunches, shuttling to airports & getting home in time to go to bed!

May 25th

9.30am: On board  Westjet flight across to Vancouver we flew directly over Canmore, the valley itself shrouded in misty cloud but down there in the bottom right hand corner is my street & probably house, marked with an x. It was a busy day in Vancouver, lots of interviews to conduct............

May 24th

10pm: What better way to spend a freezing bank holiday Monday than at the local garden centre, much money spent on plants that will probably die of frostbite - but you gotta be in it to win it & if by some miracle we have a nice summer, I will have enough produce to start a small market stall - planted today lettuce, basil (under the plastic domes here), carrots, runner/broad/italian beans, lots of different herbs, arugula & others I don't remember. Hours of earthy pleasures in the back yard & front deck..............

May 23rd

10pm: Just leaving Paul, Nastya & Lucas' house after a very relaxing afternoon including splendid wine & dinner - they live opposite a very small fire hall & parked outside was this gleaming fire truck, much to the kids delight. A very civilized afternoon which I needed after a hard cycle including a flat tire right at the tip of the gruelling Silvertip hill.

May 22nd

1pm: The cold continues & we find ourselves having coffee & lunch at Communitea in downtown Canmore - the kids like it here, plenty of toys & the food is good. We are blessed in having a few really top class cafes here including Mountain Mercato, Summit & Harvest as well as Communitea. Charlie is getting to grips with Connect 4 it seems! Later on we went to The Iron Goat - the absolute opposite end of the culinary scale, an appalling meal, probably the worst I have had in the last 5 years of living out here. 5 out of the 6 of us thought our food sucked. The saving grace was a trip back to George & Lesley's & some fun & games after the unhappy meal...

May 21st

11pm: Hah! The worst photo of the year - no doubt!!! I had spent the day in Calgary for work, interviewing some prospective employees. Then rushed home to have sushi with the kids & nearly forgot my daily photo - so I decided to capture my nightly ritual of covering the tomatos & tomatillos with plastic, fleece & tarpaulin in a vain effort to stop them from freezing. It's a bank holiday weekend, it's predictably freezing, we had to turn the central heating back on - oh man!

May 20th

10pm: A busy day today, work & soccer practise. Time to relax with my favourite novelist - Willie Vlautin, testament to Willie that I bought his boon in the old traditional form t due to its unavailability on the kindle. I have read exclusively from the e-book thing this year - but didn't want to miss out on Lean on Pete.

May 19th

8pm: The long road home, a beautiful evening as I head down the TransCanada on my way back from Calgary. I had flown into & out of Saskatoon today for work - an easy journey 45 minutes or so through the thundery skies each way. Saskatoon was predictably hot, dusty, agricultural but also pretty in her new spring foliage.

May 18th

4pm: The weather is on the change, after about a week of sun & heat - the rain is moving in & you could see it, falling in great swathes to the west of ( a still blisteringly hot) Calgary. I got this shot by driving up a little farm track on my way home from work on Highway 22, not too far from Bragg Creek - the temperature plummeted about 10 degrees upon entering the rain, and then shot up again as I got to Canmore, nestled in the sunny mountains that can be seen far off in the distance.

May 17th

8am. Now with the warm evenings it's moth season - I leave the outdoor light on most nights so that in the morning we get a selection of moths for Tabby & charlie to study - they love it & some of the bigger moths we will get in July are amazing. Afraid to say Charlton crashed out of the Play-offs today, beaten on penalties in a roller-coaster of a match - as I lay slumped on the sofa after Swindon's winning kick, Charlie came over and hugged me - poor boy didn't have a clue as to why I had been shouting at the TV and was now a picture of pure despondency, it's OK Daddy he kept saying, it's OK....

May 16th

11am: The Rocky Mountain Soap Companies 12km women's race is underway at the Nordic Centre in Canmore. Nicky is in there somewhere & she did really well, with a time of around 1hr 15mins for the longest race she has participated in. I had Charlie & Tabby to contend with, Tabby loved the dance routine warm-up, Charlie just wanted to run off. We ended up afterwards at the garden centre where he was told off by the lady running it, for chucking stones - much to Tabby's delight. I had a decent bike ride in the afternoon, not particularly long but i focused on a couple of really steep hills to build up more power & endurance. I think one ride up the fearsome Silver Tip road is worth 5 long, flat ones.

May 15th

2pm: Just finished digging my vegetable garden patch, OK its not the most exciting photo out there but I love growing herbs & vegetables & this little patch of freshly dug, composted soil will bear a decent amount of veggies & herbs over the next 3-4 months. Lettuce, onions, arugula, maybe even some spuds - depends on what takes my eye at the garden centre. Tabby & Charlie collected the worms that were getting exposed by me turning over the soil - they had never seen them before, poor worms I caught Charlie stretching one out like a rubber band. Finished today with a really nice barbecue a few houses down with Ian & Monica, a young couple who come up for the weekends from Calgary - they have two boys the same age as Tabby & Charlie. Even though Charlie ended up in a full on fight with their youngest boy over a tennis ball or something, it was fun.

May 14th

11pm: Hot enough to dine outside tonight on the back deck, no mosquitoes either. The brightly lit votives I bought from Crate & Barrel in Calgary happily burn into the night. Earlier I had watched Charlton at Swindon, in the play-offs, a 2-1 defeat could have been worse & I now anxiously await the 2nd leg on Monday.

May 13th

3.00pm. On a country road just north of Edmonton, an old truck gently rusts in a farmer's field. All over Alberta you can see in the backroads, the rusting carcasses of cars, trucks & farm machinery. I don't mind them, they add a touch of the past to a landscape which is often spoiled by the garish new. I was making a long, hot 4 hour drive back home from Edmonton to Canmore.

May 12th

8.00pm : Edmonton skyline on a warm evening. This city so often suffering in the deep freeze comes alive, like only Canadian cities can, in the summer. Whyte Avenue, the trendy thoroughfare south of the river, is flooded with bikers & muscle cars - roaring up & down as the pubs & restaurants spill onto the street. I can't say I am a huge fan of Edmonton, but on nights like this I can easily make an exception.

May 11th

6.30pm. It is Minor Soccer time again, and as with every week, Tabby & co are charging around after the ball. It's always great fun to watch - later we had another Canmore United training session - hard work but my match fitness improves with each session!

May 10th

11pm: Here are the fresh, young leaves & flowers on my new tomatillo plants. I love tomatillos & even though they are pretty easy to get hold of over here - I thought I would try & grow some thsi year. I picked these up at the farmer's market in Kelowna - not sure how they are going to adapt to Canmore's unpredictable montane climate. They are really a Mexican/Southern US plant - I don't have a greenhouse so they are going to have to take their chances outside pretty soon. Wish them luck......

May 9th

3pm: So here we are at a surprisingly quiet Rogers Pass, high up in the mountains on our way back from Kelowna - its been a nice drive, kids well behaved & conditions good. Rogers Pass is a treacherous thoroughfare during the snowy months as avalanches tear down the steep slopes either side of the road - in the summer it is home to hordes of ground squirrels like the chap above, posing for photos, basking in the sun & eating food offered by the coachloads of tourists who pass this way.

May 8th

3pm: A gorgeous sunny Saturday in Kelowna, warm & springlike everywhere - we started with coffee on the trendy Pandosa Street, graduated to the Farmer's Market, bought a picnic from Choices Supermarket & ended up in this lovely wooded park, behind the little airport. The kids had a great time playing in the woods & chucking stones in the river. The river was in fact pretty feisty, a series of waterfalls throughout it's course & as the trail got progressively harder we ended up turning back not far from this point.

May 7th

9am: On my way from Kelowna up to meet some customers in Armstrong, the weather forecast was calling for thunderstorms & this impressive stack was brewing in the north west beyond the little town of Oyama in the foreground. the storms didn't transpire though & by the time I got back to Kelowna in the evening we had time for a nice dinner at the sushi place on the main drag through town. The kids ended up playing in the little park on the lakefront downtown, but they were exhausted - a result of sharing the sofa bed & the chaos that this entailed.

May 6th

2pm: I stopped in Revelstoke on the way down to Armstrong where i was meeting a customer, Revelstoke in bout 3 hours west of Canmore. It seems like a nice place, certainly in the sun & greenery it was more inviting than back home - which was cold & even a bit snowy when we left. Another 2 hours to Armstrong from here. It was election day back home I kept fully upto date with the dramatic events via twitter!!

May 5th

11pm: Off to BC tomorrow for work, it's a 5 hour drive over the Rockies & away from snow & frost - the weather forecast isn't great but compared to here it's positively tropical!!

May 4th

6.15pm: First Minor Soccer session & Tabby is playing yet again for the Squirrels - they hammered the poor old Marmots 4-0 in the opening game. Tabby definitely stronger & with more technique this season, although the attention span of a goldfish & like the rest of the kids suffering in the sub-zero temperatures. We had our first official training session later that evening, I think I have contracted frostbite - it was appalling weather - not very enjoyable to be honest but we had an incredible turnout of players - nationalities included Chilean, Brazilian, Japanese, Czech, German, Polish, Dutch, Jamaican, Scottish, English & the odd Canadian.

May 3rd

11.45am: Music Monday at Tabby's school - all the kids in the various grades performed to varying levels of accomplishment - Tabby & the gang performed a nice little song. It was a pleasure to see the hard work that went into the performances, some talented kids - not least a quartet of local Native Indians who performed an excellent number.

May 2nd

11pm: The partially zested skin of one of the lemons used in the mousse I knocked together earlier this evening. It really was a cooking kind of day - a bit too cold to really do anything, although I managed a 40km bike ride earlier that afternoon & got the kids out for a bit of a run around in the park.

May 1st

9pm: Catherine MacLellan & The Olympic Symphonium at the Communitea Cafe in Canmore. I quite enjoyed the opening act, maybe a touch too melancholy for my mood at the time but quite exceptionally gifted musicians. Catherine M. was different class as well, a kind of Laura Cantrell/Eillen Jewell hybrid (which is just about perfection in my book) she came with a neat repertoire of pretty frank songs about her life experiences. Her dad wrote Snowbird, one of the all time classic MOR songs - I didn't realise the family connection until afterwards, it might have explained the somewhat mature audience - probably reminiscing back to the days that particular song made it big in 1971!! Earlier we had George & Lesley round for a really nice Viertnamese flavoured lunch on the deck, al fresco as well..........