COURTENAY, B.C. -- Before Kevin goes to work as a golf course groundskeeper in Campbell River, he gets to work on his weather forecast.
“I pull out my phone and give a forecast on Instagram,” Kevin says.
“Good morning Campbell River,” he smiles at the start of one of more than 60 of his forecast videos. “It is three degrees under overcast skies.”
Kevin has been memorizing and delivering the forecasts from the front seat of his car at the beginning of every weekday for the past three months.
Although he dreamed of being a football player as a kid, Kevin studied climatology in university.
“I like the clouds, the wind, the way it shifts,” he explains. “I like watching the fog radiating off the cold ground.”
I tell Kevin that almost sounds poetic.
He laughs.
It sounds poetic until his puppet appears.
“Dexter the blue puppet,” is how Kevin introduces his fuzzy sidekick. “He comes every Friday to mess up the routine!”
While Kevin focuses on accuracy during his forecasts, Dexter provides comedy.
“You can be serious,” the muppet meteorologist says in a different voice that Kevin’s. “But laughter is way funner!”
Kevin’s wife Kirsten agrees.
“Every day is a lot of fun,” she says of her husband. “He keeps me laughing.”
She’s particularly fond of her husband’s other series of videos, "The Balcony Fishing Show."
Kevin has posted 16 episodes at balconyfishing.com that show him casting a line from his deck and catching creative things from his lawn.
They range from the winter episode, which shows him fishing from a lawn chair while a neighbour is shovelling snow in the background, to a summer episode, which he begins in a blow-up boat before jumping overboard to scuba dive around his lawn.
