Floral Flirtations

I tend to vaccilate back and forth between enjoying photographing flowers in my yard and being sick to death of it. Normally I could go and photograph flowers in town, except a lot of them died after they were planted this year. The town employees do a horrible job of watering them on a good year and this was not a good year.

There was a massive water main break in Calgary in June that caused severe water restrictions to go into place. Watering outdoor plants was verbotten. I am sure the town employees were overjoyed to have a legit excuse for doing their jobs badly instead of, y’know, just doing their jobs badly.

The bottom line is that there aren’t as many opportunities for hot lens on flower action around Strathmore as there usually are and if I want to get jiggy with it with some fronds my most convenient and highest-quality option is in my own yard.

So I have been working my yard with some vigour and trying not to feel resentful about it. Familiarity builds contempt and it always hacks on me to have all these cameras and not make it as far as the street with them.

This is ridiculous for several reasons. First, my wife has put tremendous effort into beautifying our yard and she deserves to have her work shown off to others. Second, we paid a lot of money to get the yard looking this way so I should be trying to recoup our investment in whatever way I can. Finally, I’m the same fool who sits around the house during the winter months looking at our dead yard and pining for those months when flowers are blossoming. The same flowers I’m complaining about right now.

Ray would have referred to my behaviour as “asshattery” and he would have been right. He regularly and correctly called me an asshat, something I miss now. I may be an asshat, but I am fortunate to be an asshat with flowers to photograph. At least until winter arrives again.

All images from my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra mobile phone. Yeah, I know. Shut up.