Now call me Devil's Advocate

The forecast for the rest of the week makes it look like the Gloom the native Victorians speak of is about to descend upon us, so I got out with my camera today. I wanted to reassure everyone back east that the west does get its share of impressive fall foliage - just not in the large swaths we're used to. When we arrived in August the Empress was cloaked all in green. I have the feeling she was an even more glamorous sight last week when I made a mental note to come back with my camera, but it's hard to tell for sure. (The Japanese maple in our front garden was also flaming red last week, but has dropped the deeper coloured leaves and is a now more copper than crimson). Please note two of our favourite trees in front - Sam calls them dinosaur trees but they are really weeping sequoias.
I know there have been some flurries in certain parts of Canada, so I won't go on about our lovely picnic at the beach yesterday - it's sure to come back and bite me with sixty consecutive days of rain. Instead, a story of a happy Canadian, turned bitter Quebec Nationalist when provoked at a children's Halloween party. Not really. I bit my tongue. But nothing brings out the quiet separatist in me like someone comparing my compatriots to "those dreadful twenty-somethings who want to move out but still go home to raid the fridge and do their laundry". Perhaps it was my two years at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal, surrounded by all those péquistes in the height of referendum fever, but I feel something for the Quebec cause - not at all that I would like to see Quebec separate, but simply that I love Quebec, and do understand it to be something special, and that it shouldn't be dismissed as a parasite. That's all. And how bizarre - I say I just moved here from Montreal and you decide to tell me all the reasons why my home province disgusts you? Learn some etiquette. This is not our first encounter with the anti-Quebec sentiment - a man in a car yelled "frog" at Dylan (!) when he saw the license plate on Big Red. It all makes me want to start up some sort of cross Canada exchange program for students who have never travelled to other parts of the country, because I clearly remember all my hardcore separatist classmates at the Vieux coming back after a summer of bumming around BC, all much milder in their political convictions. I think it would work vice versa as well.