The northern lights are out a bit tonight. I tried to get a picture from my deck but there is too much light in the area for great photo. I would take a little road trip but I am on some medication that makes me sleep at night and I don't trust myself to drive once I've taken it. Maybe on the weekend when I can stay up late. I took a drive around town on Sunday to try and get some pictures of my neighbourhood. Here is a bit of what I found. This truck pulled up beside me at Walmart the other day...the back is typical of a lot of vehicles that have been on the highway up and down to site. Covered in snow or covered in dirt. Speaking of dirt the next picture may look familiar.

These next couple of pictures are from work. This is the kind of equipment our welders work on. Yeah...just tiny stuff.

Back to the neighbourhood. Here is the view from the deck which I think I've shown you before but if you can see the line of white trucks across the top of the parking garage. I may have mentioned before that this is a white truck kind of town. Almost everyone drives a white truck. the parking lots are always full of white trucks. its a fleet thing. companies buy them in bulk and apparently white paint is cheap. i really don't know if that is true but it does seem a bit odd. everyone drives a truck. a couple of nights ago i counted all the white trucks that i could see from my window and there was 10--just white ones. there was probably another 4 or 5 in black on top of that. so my red truck definitely stands out...that and it about 1/2 the size of most of the trucks around. it is so tiny when parked in a row of site trucks. yes, this is red neck country. the shift key on my keyboard is sticking and i can't seem to get it unstuck which is why this post has very few capital letters.

this is a new condo going up right beside the highway and right beside the fire department. i guess if they have a fire like one of the other buildings in town recently did then they will be ok. the luck of condos in this town is not great so i'm not sure i would buy this.

looking down the river towards some other homes in the area

this looks like an ordinary bench in a park...and it is. what i took the picture of is the tree. the tree contains the stash of a homeless person. he was stashing cans and bottles in there when i came upon him a few minutes before taking the photo. he eyed me wearily when i got close almost as if he was afraid i was going to take his precious treasures.

this picture was taken from my bedroom window on saturday. this gentleman was in and out of the garbage bins in the parking lot hunting for cans and bottles to take in for recycling.

another park resident that was keeping a close eye on me and my movements in the park.

self portrait.

these final two pictures are of the condos that were condemned last year about this time. the people living in them were evacuted at almost midnight one night and basically never allowed to go back in. the finally let them in at one point for short periods of time but my understanding is that not everyone was able to remove all their contents before the closed the doors for good. so people were out on the street still needing to pay the mortgage on a unit they couldn't live in AND still needing to pay rent somewhere else. crazy. there are lots of lawsuits on the go and they decided a couple of months ago to rebuild...so it will be a couple more years yet until the money is there for the rebuild and people can more back in. they will need to basically tear them down and start over. i can only imagine how hard it must be for the people who are still living somewhere else and still paying on this home.

so that ends the tour for today.