Blitzed in a good way

As you may notice, I've been tardy on writing in the past week and a half. After all was said and done, it turned into a long long long stretch of highway that got me from Calgary out to Whitecourt and around the region. After I got back, I still feel like cat-napping in the summer sun after work is done.

A long weekend let me hang out with my Sharon for an extra couple days. However, I sure felt a squeeze of compressing the five day week in four though. Telephone tag for interviews and getting all my articles written? Barely... It worked out in the end though and I learned lots from it. Admitting I need more sleep too. Here's a link to a few articles from Drayton Valley:

Fallen soldiers honoured in mural - Drayton Valley Western Review
Keeping the hampers full at area food banks - Drayton Valley Western Review
Coach, board look forward to season ahead - Drayton Valley Western Review

Very busy town and I hated to go as they were just welcoming as the previous towns and it's been a real pleasant experience on my road-trip to cover other reporters' holidays. So I'm back in Whitecourt and sleeping in my own bed, cooking meals and cleaning my room up after returning home.

Total odometer reading from town to town? just shy of 800km in 25 days logged for work and about 1500 to see my Sharon in Camrose. Totally worth it for catching up on peace & quiet / quality time.

More on long haul driving in a little while -- and I admit, I'm not as speedy on 'to be continued' at times so just like everything else, make a task list and get'ter done when I can as ideas come up while I'm writing and I need to catch up on them on occasion.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a few of my stories were posted on the home newspaper that I had written before I left on the road:

Oilmen open clubhouse doors to the community - Whitecourt Star
Neighbours become friends at original block party - Whitecourt Star

So there you are with it being a bit compressed. As I originally started this blog to share stuff with my parents, friends and family and it's gotten a bit bigger than that now ^_^ I know I already posted that block party story. It's one of my favourites so far and it's a tiny bit exciting to see my articles on the Whitecourt Star website, a legit newspaper online ^_^

So you might notice a shift to less actual articles as I post them on the company website and would feel like I was doing it twice over. However, it'll be more of a journal of the journey taken to get those articles come together. I hope I don't bore people, but really there's all kinds of neat stuff and small miracles that happen when getting things done by deadline.

Still bound by FOIP and respecting privacy of people I interview. Yet some of the little stuff that happens can be really nifty and some of the theory put into practice would be good reflections as well. Thanks for bearing with me as I change the tempo. With journal writing, but for a journalist that's a paradox. It's both play on words and sometimes reality as I have so much happening, it'd be nice to be able to figure out what happened the past week a few weeks from now. Especially when I'm journal-ing other people's lives 98% of the time. Such is news-worthiness -- an eternal struggle of what to print since newspapers were born.

Much as I hate to say, oh read my blog if you want to know what I been up to lately. Much the same as my camera serves as a photo journal at times. It won't be overload of TMI and I still plan to have fun links, stories and opinion pieces -- Stuff I don't have enough space in my pages in the newspaper.

And there's so much paradox between natural beauty and reality of the economy up here so tons to write about. It's been an eye-opener of a road-trip.

Good times still to come but for now? Sleep time.

-- PLR -- 

veterans, respect or forget

Was really happy to hear that the Canadian Defense minister in government put out a press statement on Father's Day. He reminded people that soldiers are fathers too and their kids and spouses are at home waiting for them to come home.

It was a happy thing because there's not a lot of noise made about soldiers making sacrifices other than funerals' announcements. So to hear about their kids waiting for them to come back okay was a great idea. So why stop there? I'd love to write more about it. I cannot forget because veterans' stories have kept me captivated with bravery in just doing their job and duty.

Having never missed a Remembrance Day ceremony, even if just on TV when I was too sick a few years, even got a speeding ticket making it to the cenotaph on time. That's how much I care. Why am I going on about this in the middle of the spring and not November? Everyone seems to forget about the common soldier the rest of the year other than Afghanistan casualties and if a veteran dies -- taking his stories with him. So I'm taking the challenge to figure out when is best to be talking to veterans.

Not the best remembering dates and years, but June 6th was D-day and there's so many other historic war deciding and small battles which have been fought before and since then. I'd love to talk to some more veterans since two years ago I went and drank beers with a bunch of wonderful older men at the legion who told me about their glory days and bitter return to normal life where nobody understood them.

Put that idea on the back burner when I was working full-time and caught up in other projects and half regret not knowing how to get in touch with the veterans. I'll dig up those interview notes and my other formal articles in student and community newspapers as well as online posts and poems too.

Having a few friends tell me wow... interviewing them sounds like an awesome project and I'm sad to say I've lost some of those photos in a stupid lack of hard-drive back-up but it's not too late to go find those wonderful veterans again and get the rest of the stories. Never-the-less I'm really wanting to tackle the issue from all angles from before during and after the war. None of the Hollywood nonsense or nationalism, just a platoon looking after each other, camaraderie that rarely is understood by civies like myself.

If you'd like to look up the kind of stuff I'm looking at doing, read a short story called 'The Things They Carried' and the inspirational book written by a journalist and later a movie called 'Black Hawk Down'. Yet I've read very few books and articles outside of November 11 about Canadians so I'd love to take up that gap in the rest of the year.

Will it be difficult? Bloody difficult to convince those old veterans that I even had an inkling of what they went through. Only because both my grandfather and father (reserves) served in the Cold War era Canadian Navy was why they started talking.

Having heard a few wild and chilling stories from my dad I am more determined to see what I can do about getting those stories out of the Legion Hall and into the electronic sphere. There seems to be a few projects out there that I'll try to latch onto and find out from others' experiences.

Check out at Facebook and the Legion that I intend to contact real soon. Thanks for any supports or ideas on what I could do with this project. It's going to be worth it as these stories bear repeating to keep peace on the forefront of how much was sacrificed by young men my age and younger who were brave enough to enlist and defend our nation. Soldiers past and present deserve to have their legacy preserved.

Cheers to them who fought, supported on the home-front and keep on guard for freedom.

-- PLR --

p.s. stay tuned on old stories and new interviews happening soon! like June 6th and any other significant battle.