You know, I'm starting to get a bit tired of this weather. Freezing cold, biting winds...OK in moderation, perhaps, but...well, I'm in the last of my three stages of dealing with weather: 1) the initial shock; 2) finding the fun and the adventure in it; 3) getting tired of it.

Could be worse though. We could have a mild but continuously grey and rainy winter. I used to envy the people in Vancouver, but not any more.

The very mild December and early January period was deceptive, but at least it helped put climate change at the top of the national agenda. Not that warmer weather is bad in itself, you understand. In fact, I remember when we had our first major snowstorm last month- and this following weeks of "where did our winter go?" angst in the media- the Montreal French-language daily La Presse ran a cartoon showing two people digging their cars out of a snowbank, and one turns to the other and says "Remind me why we were missing this?". But of course, we Canadians love to complain about the weather- it doesn't even really matter what it is. Even those Quebecois who don't regard themselves as being Canadian share in this.

No, but seriously, I like springtime in December as much as anyone- it's just that when you start screwing around with a complicated tangle of interlocking systems like climate, which is itself interlocked with complex natural systems such as ecosystems, you stand a good chance of reaping the whirlwind. After all, we humans also depend on ecosystems for survival. If this planet were just a bit differant in some ways, we wouldn't even be here.
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For me, there's no more complete feeling of energy and power than that of artistic creation at its peak. I've been working on a play- reworking the script, working in new songs, adapting it to a new vision- and this feeling of creating something in this way is so exiting and engrossing. The only problem is that because of this I can become obsessed with it and so caught up in it that it becomes stressful- it gets hard to sleep or do other things I need to do, because my mind is always darting back to resolving problems relating to the script or the songs and different possibilities for resolving them.