It was bound to happen.

Tonight, I went to the nearby lake in order to get some action shots of water dogs doing what they've been bred to do best--retrieve--and ended up swimming myself instead.

It was at that moment that I realized: whenever I head to one of the local lakes in the winter, I return with a handful of decent photographs, like this one:

Yet the majority of my images from the summer or early fall are mobile snapshots such as the ones below.

It is simple, really. Growing up in Moscow, I was trained to swim for a number of years, and I really loved it. (In fact, back then, coaches visited elementary schools and picked me for various other athletic disciplines--from figure skating to tennis. Even gymnastics was on the list, though I was "dumped" soon afterward, when they realized I was going to grow into somewhat of a Gulliver among the petite, four-foot-nine girls.)

Later on, like most people trapped by The City, the choice to swim comprised either the overly chlorinated, sneeze-inducing swimming pool or some remote lake in the summer, accessible only on weekends.

Then I moved across the entire continent to "Twin Peaks" and discovered that one of the cleanest glacial lakes in North America was just a walk away! I might sound a bit like an eco hippy by saying that I'm "of the water," but worry not: I imagine myself as a giant mosasaurus when I swim, not some dolphin or worse yet, a wimpy mermaid!

As a result, everyone around gets to be annoyed by this overly giddy post-swim mosasaurus, hear it...err...me brag incessantly about each of my workouts comprising a distance of 2.5-3.5 km (2 miles) primarily in front crawl (see, I did it again!), and, most important, miss out on aesthetically pleasing water photography in the summer.

But I think we can all live with that. After all, the alternative is much worse: transforming into a full-fledged "swim bum," spending all day at the lake, and developing a bad case of giant shoulders.