Dear Fort St. James, this will be my last two weeks writing to you.
While I’m sure I will send in the occasional letter to the editor or something, I am finishing up my time with The Caledonia Courier on April 11.
It will be bittersweet to move on, the excitement of starting something new and being able to enjoy other possibilities will be tempered by missing getting to interact so directly with this great community. I will miss my weekly meetings with the RCMP, with municipal staff, and with countless community members who I may never have had the opportunity to meet had it not been for this job.
But I’ll still be in Fort St. James, and so you will still see me from time to time, I just won’t be visiting you here, in the written word every week.
I have gotten so many really great opportunities to get out and see so much of what the community has to offer, covering events I may never have seen and meeting so many people, it has been a whole lot of fun and a whole lot of learning.
Now, there are going to be some who will be relieved to not have to read my voice over and over, and hopefully there will be a fresh new face and voice for the paper very soon, change is inevitable and it can always lead to something better.
For now, you can still submit any material (photos, letters, releases and written stories) to newsroom@caledoniacourier.com and the helpful staff in Vanderhoof will gladly use what local content they can get until a replacement is found.
I am looking forward to starting something new and to have the opportunity to be outside more often and potentially to have the freedom to travel again, which was a big adjustment for me in this job — going from five to six months off a year to two weeks vacation after two years was challenging.
Canada Day, the Santa Claus Parade, Moonlight Madness, and so many more events will be so different now as a participant instead of a documentarian of it all, it will be a new way to see them all over again. I’m pretty sure I’ll still take a few pictures though….
So thank you Fort St. James for your support and help, there have been so many really great stories and interviews and photos over these past nearly four years, but there are still so many more out there, I know a fresh face and voice will help to get even more stories told.
I’m looking forward to reading about you all in the future, and to hearing it through another’s perspective.
I would love to be able to thank each of the awesome people who have helped me out, but it would fill up this entire paper with names, so I’ll just have to say a general thank you from the bottom of my heart. Fort St. James, you are awesome.
