So it was a typical week. Just another in a long stretch of sunny days and starry nights. Not that we see much of the nights mind you. This time of year we go to bed when it’s still light out and even I get up after the start of dawn. But the long stretch of sun has had one significant drawback. We’re critically short of water. The snowpack is lower than it has been in decades. Lower than it normally would be by the end of summer. You may be familiar with how California is dealing with a severe drought. Washington state has also enacted water restrictions due to low snowfall. Well, BC is in the same boat. We were dry most of the winter. This May was the driest ever with Vancouver getting just four millimetres of rain, normally they get over sixty. Here on the island we were correspondingly dry and it looks like we’re going to have a really bad fire season province wide. Already there’s been one bad fire on the mainland.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/little-bobtail-lake-fire-burning-over-8-000-hectares-1.3073457
But there was a break in the warm dry weather. Our friends Jaki and Dale stayed with us for a few days. They arrived on Monday and the rain started that night. It rained off and on through Tuesday and Wednesday. They left on Thursday and by the afternoon we were sunny again. The forecast for this weekend is hot and dry. 

The Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller Alberta unveiled a newly discovered dinosaur this week. Regaliceratops peterhewsi is similar to the more famous Triceratops but with smaller horns over its eyes and a spiky frill around the edge of it’s shield.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150604141748.htm
An interesting sidelight came from the article where details of the species were unveiled. The article, published in the journal Current Biology, described the creature in detail and the process of extracting and restoring the specimen. However at the end of the acknowledgements, which nobody ever reads, was one little line, missed by all the staid, stuffy, dry academic reviewers.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-dinosaur-expert-proposes-marriage-in-scientific-paper-1.3100584

This weekend marks the beginning of the theatre season. This weekend I went to the first of the auditions. It’s for Merry Christmas George Bailey, a radio play version of Wonderful Life. It sounds like fun, and I’ve got two other auditions to go to in the next few weeks as well. I’d love to do them all but there’s no guarantee that I’ll get any of them. Some of you may remember a year ago I thought I had a part in A Woman in Black sewn up and that fell through. That’s show biz. I want to cover all my bases and make sure I’m in at least one, if not two plays this season. 

And finally, there’s been this project I pondered for several years, and started working on in ernest a few months back. The Poetry Project. You see I have a theory. I suspect that many people say they don’t like poetry because they haven’t had a good experience with it. They had to stand up and recite the Song of Hiawatha in front of their snickering friends in fifth grade. They had to read Chaucer or Dante in high school for a grade when they would really have rather been doing anything else. Somehow most people’s exposure to poetry seems designed to suck all the life, the fun, the texture out of it. Nothing will kill a Shakespeare sonnet faster than diagramming the sentence structure. Nothing takes the excitement out of writing a poem than fighting to find a word of the right meter and rhyme. Poetry used to be how all stories were told. Now it’s the jazz music of literature. There’s a core of people who love it but most just don’t get it.

This is where my project comes in. You see I figured rather than someone standing up and..reading..each..word..out..stiffly..and..mechanically how about someone approach the poem like a script. Look at it like an acting project. Like a film. To perform the poem not recite it. Not having anyone else around I decided to take a first stab at this. Here are the first three poems:

The Wonderful One Hoss Shea
What really good engineering can accomplish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47EFuZ-6ioQ

The Cremation of Sam McGee
The creepy things that can happen in the cold of the far north.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDicdG1AYTI

Climb
This is one of my all time favourite poems. I learned it by heart when I was around 11 or 12 without anyone telling me to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV1BnxCy3U4

I have three more on deck but it might be a few months before I get them together. 

Doug & Marsha
PIX: Vancouver Island Sunrise. Imoto on a hot day