MMX

I’ve been working at finding excuses to not write here for some time, but now I think I’m finally ready. The Christmas tree is down, and the house is pretty well back to normal. There’s a few Christmas goodies left that I can try to eat today, but tomorrow marks the start of the serious salad and back to the pool in the morning season. The cat has been patiently sitting just at the edge of being in the way, watching as the living room transforms itself once again.

It’s been several weeks since I’ve done anything here, what with the site being down in the fall and then me having to go off to Connecticut to deal with Mom, and then the holidays and so on and so forth. But now 2009 and the decade it was part (the Oughts) of are over and we can begin to get on with what happens next.

2009 for me was a year of letting go. In the fall of 2008 I started having back problems which I took as a sign that it was time to make some changes in my life. Rather than try to figure out specific details, I tried changing lots of things all at once. This included quiting my job and taking the last 9 months to try to figure out what I really want to do when I grow up (Trouble is the answer’s always the same – I don’t want to grow up!)

I did try to make a number of changes that will work in my favour – I lost 50 lbs, try to sleep an hour later in the morning, and made myself undertake a more rigorous swimming/exercise program. To make the weight control work, I’ve had to readjust my priorities so that I’m no longer on a see-food diet (if I saw food, I’d eat it) and faithfully get on the scale every morning to chart my progress. I call my diet the photofinishing diet because it works like photofinishing. I will not go on at length about it here, but will do a separate post on it for the advice section, right after I get this one finished.

Gerda and I were talking earlier about the past year and decade, and how surprised we are at how much’s whizzed by when we weren’t looking. 10 years ago my daughter was starting her adventures as a teenage and my son hadn’t learned to drive yet. Now they’ve both moved out and started their own lives and homes with other people. Wow! when did all that happen? I don’t want to miss the next ten years so I need to decide what I want to do so I don’t spend my time just running in circles. I saw a blog yesterday where the author was asking people if they had a plan for what they plan to do for the next seven years, and I thought “Hey, that’s a good idea”, as I’m done with the “oughts” and letting go.

Now it’s time to face the future and get started on the new decade.

Harvesting Apples/End of summer

Yes I know – I haven’t posted anything in far too long, but I have a good excuse. I feel bad for the kids here – they all went back to school the end of August, more than a week before Labour Day, and the weather ever since has been absolutely fabulous. June, July and August were pretty lousy but the past three or four weeks have been outstanding, and that’s where I’ve been – outstanding outside, enjoying the nice weather.

I should also explain the sunflower photo. We have new neighbors down the street who dug up their front lawn and put in an amazing garden, including these giant sunflowers. Some of them are over 12 feet tall. The picture is a bit of an inside joke, as my mentor on this blog project is mad for sunflowers, so pumpkin, this sunflower’s for you.

I should really being getting myself organised and be looking for some gainful activity to augment my rapidly eroding bank account, but slowing down this summer has been a great tonic for both my back and my head. I keep telling myself I’ll get busy once the weather becomes a little more fall-like, but so far that hasn’t happened. It’s a bit cooler today after yesterday’s rain, however the weather office is promising that it’s going to get sunny and nice for the rest of the week.

The apple tree had a good summer too so I decided that I better do an apple harvest before they all just fell off and fed the squirrels and birds. It’s not that big a tree but I still needed the ladder to get to the high fruit. The apples were very tart and were the core ingredient for several apple/cranberry/rhubarb pies. I’ve included a shot of the tree and the apples, but the pies were consumed before I could make photos of them, so you’ll just have to take my word for how good they looked and tasted.

If there is a key message in this post, it’s that taking time to slow down and enjoy life is super important. I’ve got lots of stuff clamoring for my attention, and now I think I’m better prepared to deal with it – once the weather turns to fall.

Ready or not, here I come

This is the first “official” post to this website, as I’m ready to put it out there and let people start to see it. I’m going to start with the story of my leaving SCN so everyone has the same information.

In the winter of 1989 I was setting off on the great adventure that I expected to define my life for the next several years. I had been invited to spend the Winter as a guest of the Banff Centre, helping them launch their new photo arts facility by setting up the colour darkrooms while printing a series of large colour photographic images for a show I was having in Calgary in April.

I’d been working on a consulting project for SaskTel who allowed me to take a 3 month leave to go to Banff and Calgary, and when I got back to Regina in the spring I told Gerda (my wife) that we were moving to Alberta to be artists as soon as the SaskTEL gig was finished later that fall.

Unbeknownst to me, at the same time in a set of government offices in Regina and Ottawa, the start of another even grander adventure was getting underway. The province had been playing with ideas around using television for public priorities such as distance education and educational broadcasting for years, but suddenly with Ottawa’s help, things started to happen

My stay at the Banff Centre and the show were a great success, and I’d been back at SaskTEL less than a week, dreaming grand Alberta dreams, when I got mugged by a couple of guys wanting to talk about starting a TV station for the province. Somehow I signed on for a three-month contract to see if we could invent this TV service which all the experts across Canada were assuring us would fail.

It’s now twenty years later and it has been a wonderful adventure – SCN has accomplished great things and I am very proud to have been part of it.

I originally moved to Regina in 1972 to go to graduate school at the U of S Regina Campus as it was then known. I had been working in film and television news in the states, and was surprised to find that there was almost nothing of the sort going on here at the time. There were some young filmmakers just going through the University, but things like the Saskatchewan Film Pool were still all in the future.

My first love was always film and photography, and after the Communications MA program collapsed at the University, I went on to (try to) make a living as a commercial and fine art photographer. I did continue to hang out with members of the fledgling film community and was in Yorkton for the founding meeting of what is now the Saskatchewan Motion Picture Industry Association in 1984 (?).

The SCN gig was too good a challenge to pass up, as we pretty well started with a blank sheet of paper. All the experts said it would never fly which made it even more of a challenge.

I started the first day the office was opened as a Program Officer, then a Program Manager. Right from the beginning we decided that we would work with the province’s evolving filmmakers rather than try to do stuff in house, and since then have been involved with over 700 Saskatchewan film and television projects. Not all of them were completed, but many of them were and they kept getting better and better.

When first I started at SCN, I said I wanted to see a Saskatchewan made show be shown on national television, and everyone said I was nuts. At first it was an up-hill struggle but as the industry matured and the product got better, I got my wish. Then I said I wanted to see a show that SCN was part of hit the American air-waves, and everyone said I was nuts again until the Saskatchewan made series Incredible Story Studio went on to be sold in over 100 countries around the world, including the US.

I have been very fortunate to have been part of a number of exciting aspects of the industry, having served on the Executive Committee of the Association of Tele-Educators in Canada (ATEC) and the board of the Canadian Television Fund. More importantly, I have been one small part of the evolution of the Saskatchewan Film and Television industry from a handfull of long haired weirdos playing with movie cameras, to an industry worth millions of dollars annually which employs hundreds of people.

However, SCN is what happened to me on my way to something else, and now it’s time for me to go see if something else is still out there.

So here I am, trying to start another new life in these new “interesting” times. I think we are all going to experience some turbulence over the next few years as big changes are needed and will be happening all around us. We will need to be creative, flexible, cautious, brave and a little lucky to get by, but there are also going to be some wonderful new opportunities out there that we can’t even imagine right now.

So yes, I’m excited about this. Stay tuned.

Richard