Dog day afternoon
It’s high summer. The sky is cloudless and dusty, stretching pale blue to the horizon. The concrete and asphalt of the city bake in the midday heat. It’s 30 degrees by mid-morning every day. Everyone overheats, gets lethargic, wants to escape the city, and only a light, dry wind that blows across the plains keeps the air from being stifling. This is the summertime Calgary I remember - hot and dry and lazy. Everything slows down, almost grinds to a halt, news starts to dry up and everyone would rather escape to the park or the patio than return phone calls.
The last few weeks have been a combination of the laziness above interspersed with bursts of hard work. I finally finished the EnCana feature that’s been hanging over my head for months. I ended up reworking the entire thing, doing 30 new interviews and sifting through close to 1,000 pages of documents. I decided to make it my main legacy piece at Fast Forward, and I wrote it in a magazine style, with a tonne of softer stuff - colour, detail, scenes - and a few recreations. While the farmers who are angry at the company ended up being the meat of the piece, I personally had the most fun learning about the business side of the company. EnCana’s business model is pretty shrewd, and it’s not surprising its become as big as it is. I think the story turned out pretty well. I ended up unearthing a few things that have never been published and a bunch more that have never been made public in Canada before. At the same time, I’m glad I’m finished.
I’ve also assigned my first two stories for the Eye next year. I decided I want to remake the Features section somewhat, and these two pieces should hopefully kick that off. I really hope they work out. What I’m going to try is a bit of a gamble, but I don’t want my Features section to be a copy of Karon’s or Jesse’s.
The rest of the last month has been dominated by laid back drinking, games and movies at the Bike Rack; cutting work early to sip beer with co-workers; a Cypress Hills camping trip with Sadi; and occasional bar-hopping. On the home front, everything is pretty good. We held a secret café/bar to fundraise for Roadbike’s surgery (there was also a great dreamy bikeride the night before) and I got to play waiter, complete with bow-tie and swallow tails; Sadi’s mom and sister moved down from St. Catharines and stayed at Punx for a couple weeks while they found a place; Rodeo moved out into a sweet apartment in Sunnyside and otherwise, everything’s pretty much what you’d expect in summer, a lot of sipping cold drinks and having people over.
The last few weeks have been a combination of the laziness above interspersed with bursts of hard work. I finally finished the EnCana feature that’s been hanging over my head for months. I ended up reworking the entire thing, doing 30 new interviews and sifting through close to 1,000 pages of documents. I decided to make it my main legacy piece at Fast Forward, and I wrote it in a magazine style, with a tonne of softer stuff - colour, detail, scenes - and a few recreations. While the farmers who are angry at the company ended up being the meat of the piece, I personally had the most fun learning about the business side of the company. EnCana’s business model is pretty shrewd, and it’s not surprising its become as big as it is. I think the story turned out pretty well. I ended up unearthing a few things that have never been published and a bunch more that have never been made public in Canada before. At the same time, I’m glad I’m finished.
I’ve also assigned my first two stories for the Eye next year. I decided I want to remake the Features section somewhat, and these two pieces should hopefully kick that off. I really hope they work out. What I’m going to try is a bit of a gamble, but I don’t want my Features section to be a copy of Karon’s or Jesse’s.
The rest of the last month has been dominated by laid back drinking, games and movies at the Bike Rack; cutting work early to sip beer with co-workers; a Cypress Hills camping trip with Sadi; and occasional bar-hopping. On the home front, everything is pretty good. We held a secret café/bar to fundraise for Roadbike’s surgery (there was also a great dreamy bikeride the night before) and I got to play waiter, complete with bow-tie and swallow tails; Sadi’s mom and sister moved down from St. Catharines and stayed at Punx for a couple weeks while they found a place; Rodeo moved out into a sweet apartment in Sunnyside and otherwise, everything’s pretty much what you’d expect in summer, a lot of sipping cold drinks and having people over.