Summer officially started this week. With the promise of sun and warm weather come terrible choices.
What are you going to do this weekend? There’s a summer festival in this community, but that school has their fun fair over there. Then there’s the fundraiser in place number three and the concert in place number four.
And on and on it goes: yard sales, races, tournaments, wine tasting, outdoor theatre, movies under the stars.
They’re all awesome things, brought to our Cowichan Valley communities by legions of hardworking volunteers and businesses keeping the traditions of summers past alive, while bringing us new and interesting events to try.
But, like you, we at the newspaper cannot hope to get to all of them. We have to reluctantly allow our reporters time to eat and sleep and occasionally see their families and daylight. So we have to pick and choose.
Which is why while we definitely do want to know about your event (please email editor@cowichanvalleycitizen.com with the details) and we’ll do our best to let the public know in advance about what you’ve planned, it may just not be possible for us to make it there to take photos on the day.
But we want photos.
We mean it sincerely when we ask if you’d be willing or able to take some photos and send them to us.
We want to feature your event in the Citizen with people from our community enjoying themselves. It’s fun to see what our friends and family are up to, and gives us ideas for what to put on the calendar for next year.
Anyone who has sent us photos at our request will know that, while you might have to wait a week or two to see them in print, we do use the fruits of your labours.
We’re always impressed with the quality of the photographs people provide as well.
And it’s not just during the summer.
People in our communities are incredibly generous and hardly a week goes by when someone isn’t presenting a cheque to charitable or non-profit organizations. We want those photos, too and we will often ask for you to help us out and send them in.
So in the months ahead, don’t think that if we ask you to send us some photos of your event it’s because we don’t think it’s important. We’re asking because we do.