FIESTA

I'm heading off into the field today. This will be my last time doing fieldwork for The Little Project That Could (aka FIESTA). It's bittersweet, really. I know that being on the lakes again, combined with the recent departure of my academic-conjoined-twin, will make me nostalgic for the halcyon days of 2005. Back when two naive, silly girls named "Candra" and "Leslie" met and, respectively, became the "factual woman" Cricket and geek fish-advocate Ellie. To put it in other words, if we were comic book characters, 2005 would be our origin story.

Of course, I romanticize. Every summer of FIESTA has been fun and awesome in it's own way because each has been so different (and even though I'm generally neophobic, I appreciate that). And 2005 wasn't all that halcyon. Is there an antonym for halcyon? Because that was back when Cricket's idea of a "day off" was to only sample 2 lakes. I'm sure if I were to publish my journal from that time it would be full of entries like,

"July 4, 2005
So damn tired. Cricket dragged me to 6 lakes today and it was hot and gross and my waders have 90 rips in them, which doesn't even matter because I fell through the floating mats on Kidney AND Yellowhead anyway. Damn, I hate Kidney. And I only caught 4 frogs!"

You get the idea. So, to honor those golden days and in tribute to Cricket who is no longer with us (in Alberta, that is. She's not dead or anything), I'm posting an album of 2005 photos. These predate digital cameras, ya'll: these are scanned in from actual film photos! Gasp! And some of the pictures are discoloured from all the times Cricket fell through the floating mats and her camera got wet. Good times!

The album contains the classic picture of me looking stunned:

And one of Cricket looking all of 12 years old:

The rest of the album can be seen here.