A series of fortunate events has the crew here on the second floor at 626 Connaught reflecting like a solar eclipse on the inside of a pinhole camera.
If you found yourself in Fitzhugh voicemail jail this week, we apologize. The quick set-up cards have been excavated from parts unknown and all will be well and reflective of who is actually there now, which as is want to happen in the wiley world of web weathered news reporting, has changed again.
And like anything worth remembering on this great adventure we find ourselves and each other on, there’s a good story. Naturally, navigating the departure of an editor and the arrival of a bright-eyed and bushy tailed new reporter from as nearby as Valemount sounds like a straight and steady paddle. But prior commitments to cover some vacation time for another member of what’s referred to as the Aberdeen Publishing family over in the Okanagan put the publisher on remote access when Mr. Matthews, Evan if you’re groovy, arrived at our office overlooking the main drag.
Those following the drama so far already know our trusty award-winning designer works remotely herself from Sackville, New Brunswick, where she is settling her smartly sized fledgling family into a new house.
We can thank the Cloud for giving us the ability to aptly approximate a lot of the automatic stuff and attune the absolute best for presentation to you, an intensely engaged audience in our adopted home.
Such magnetic and Mac-powered flexibility afforded the author the opportunity to witness the once-in-two-generations-or-so solar eclipse in Peachland, south of Kelowna, where the perfectly named newspaper, the View, is ours, and those vistas are tough to vex on a clear day.
Still, it was a phone interview with a girl named Abby, who was at a sleepover birthday party Sunday night and ended up on the same patio on Monday where the eclipse was being captured by a mutual neighbour of the birthday girl’s mom, that stuck out.
Abby’s only 11 but the significance of the eclipse was not lost on her. She knew her brother and parents had missed it, and she would have, too, if she hadn’t gone to her best friend’s birthday party.
Once in a lifetime.
So it is that we find ourselves still at full throttle in the throes of the busiest busy season our businesses have ever seen, based on a few informal accounts, but still careening toward the shoulder season like the cold rushing in after the sun has disappeared behind the mountains, reminding you why it has the ability to antique your retinas from the inside out at the right inclination.
The same as it ever was is not how it will be at the Fitzhugh going forward. The fall, as it comes into focus, frees us to feel out exactly where we fit with you, friends of Jasper, letting the days go by like the water flowing underground in Maligne Canyon. If you see us on the street (one of these days), stop us and sell us on what you think should make the cut.
Spoiler alert: we print in colour, brother.
Into the blue again.
Craig Gilbert | [email protected]
