Victoria Day
First rule of blogging – never type whilst cross.
I am in a better humour than I was earlier, having had my mood improved by chatting to my dearest insomniac cousin online, and also by a large glass of wine. But nevertheless, today was all round PANTS if you ask me. I’m sorry to report that the Cathedral Village Arts Festival wasn’t so much rubbish, as actually non-existent!! Well, this afternoon at least. Tomorrow may prove more entertaining.
I have a whole list of things that went wrong today – namely me not realising that a.) it is Victoria Day and b.) that Victoria Day is actually a national holiday. No one warned me of this until Friday evening, when Arun – also an immigrant here, I should add – announced it just as I was about to leave work. We had a discussion on why the English don’t bother with Dead Old Lady Holiday: which particular dead monarch would you pick? we would end up with A LOT of holidays if it we were to commemorate every dead member of the royal family. But anyway, I did not realise at all that Victoria Day meant people don’t go to work. I had my shift posted for today already, and didn’t even realise I’d been scheduled to work on a national holiday. Normally I wouldn’t mind – it’s not like I have other plans at the moment :-s However, Miranda’s daycare doesn’t operate on national holidays. Luckily, I had the sense of paranoia sufficient to ring Carolina to check before traipsing over to her house with a half-alseep Miri. No daycare today. Doh. So Miri had to spend the day cleaning the cafe with me. This is a lot of work in normal circumstances and involves bleach and swearing and plenty of dishwasher-saunas. Doing all that whilst trying to stop Miri jumping off chairs or invading Mike’s kitchen or painting the tables with yoghurt or dropping marker pens in the detergent bottle, was nigh on impossible. I ended up very tired, cross and smelly, and Miri was bored stupid, poor baby!
We tried to phone Daddy earlier than usual, but on today of all days, my microphone – or possibly Carl’s speakers decided not to work, so he couldn’t hear us. I got so frustrated I gave up in disgust. Poor Warly 😦
So, to try and cheer ourselves up, I tried to take Miri to what remained of the day’s events at the Arts Festival
All Afternoon [it said]: Food sales, The Living Statue & Living Pictures, Participation Stations: Games, DIY Face Paint, Balloon Twist, Hula Hoops.
Great! I thought, Miri will love that! Could i find anything??? Could i hell! We must have walked round in circles for about eight blocks, never found anything like that, not even any sign of stalls that had already closed for the day, absolutely nothing!! I walked all the way down to the river without seeing another person, let alone a festival crowd, and was going to give up and take Miranda to the swings instead, when I realised she’d fallen asleep in the pushchair anyway!
gah. all in all, an incredibly frustrating day.
The Regina Monologue 
Argh. So sorry your first Victoria Day was such a bummer. It’s too late to fix this for you but here’s some info that might help later:
– While it’s still called Victoria Day, for most people it’s May Long Weekend. Sort of like a Bank Holiday in England? Time to open the provincial parks and/or cottages and go camping. Except that it often snows this weekend. 🙂
– It used to be that everything was closed on Statutory (Stat) holidays but more and more business are open on those days now. You might get a bump up on your paycheque because you worked it, depending on how many hours you work.
– Next one is July 1 (Canada Day), then August Long Weekend (first weekend in August) then Labour Day in September.
– The kickoff for the Arts Festival is (was) held in the park behind the Neil Balkwill Arts Centre, on Elphinstone and College. My son wandered down there yesterday and there was some stuff going on, but don’t know how long it lasted!
Hope July 1 is better for you. Fireworks in Wascana Park at 10PM or so!
hey,
fireworks sound good!! Thanks for the info. There is a May day bank holiday in the UK but it would be next weekend, not this. i think Labour day used to be the May bank holiday, i’m not sure… anyway, Canada day i have at least heard of, and i shall endevour to Not work it!! Like i said, it wasn’t as if I had anything else planned, no weekend camping trips for me, but still, the lack of daycare thing meant it would have been nice at least to have been asked!!
today’s experiences at the arts festival are far more positive, though i never saw any sign of anything happening during the day today, only in the evening! i’m on a 6 day / 46 hr week this week though so i am going to miss pretty much all of it 😦
How goes the bakery?