We just had a very nice visit with my youngest brother and his wife, who are currently living and teaching in Qatar on a work visa. It was fascinating to me hearing about the country at the opposite side of the globe, and the vastly different culture that, turns out, isn’t as bizarre as one might imagine.

And now that they’ve left for the evening and gone to their hotel, I’m sitting here feeling very bitchy. It has absolutely nothing to do with them – I just feel annoyed with life in general.

Well this sucks.

If this is the start of peri-menopause, then it can just bugger right off right now, because I have no use for this kind of crap, whatsoever.

On a totally unrelated note, here are some of the photos from my trip up North (which was equally enjoyable, visiting a different brother). Ordinarily I’d clean them up a wee bit in Photoshop first, but honestly, I just couldn’t be bothered today, so these are completely unedited and uncropped.

I’m a sucker for old prairie barns, having spent the best moments of my childhood swinging (literally) from the dusty, rough-splintered rafters of one.

This was, at one point, a huge concrete grain terminal in Boyle, Alberta. I watched the wrecking ball for about ten minutes and it seemed like the equivilant of a fly swatter, barely making any dents and taking forever just to loosen a small area. But there must have been method to the madness, because when I went back through five days later, it was just a small pile of rubble.

Not too far away, there was this abandoned log house. I would’ve loved to explore but it didn’t look very stable, plus I was brought up to have respect for the private property of others. Growing up on a farm in a beautiful valley, we had plenty encounters with city people who figured “But this is the country! Anyone can go anywhere – it’s not like you own the place!”

(Yes, I have a thing for liking barbed wire in the frame of my rural photos… so sue me. Unfortunately, this one didn’t turn out very well.)