Trip to Ottawa

Hello everyone!

A great deal has been going on lately! I flew to Ottawa to visit the family on June 30th. Mom and Dad were happy to see me, but Harry wasn't and Clouseau was impassive. The house has a nice design with variating floor and ceiling elevation, but it requires some maintenance. Dad's collections of paintings hang on all of the walls.
We went down to Parliament Hill by bus on Canada Day and set up our chairs in the middle of the intersection of Wellington and Metcalfe amidst the throng of people. Many events were going on, including an RCMP musical ride, a brief airshow with the Snowbirds, musical concerts with Blue Rodeo, Murray McLachlan, Garnet Rogers, Haily Sails, and others, break dancing, displays, marching bands, and speeches by politicians including Stephen Harper and the Lieutenant Governor. There were firework displays in all of the communities.
I did some work delivering advertisement flyers for the painting company that Dad was working for, and doing painting and prep-work with Dad on a deck project (ten hours a day, two days in a row).
We visited a village recreated in the period of the 1860's with buildings which dated from the time. It was fully functional and productive, complete with a fully equipped blacksmith, tinsmith, shoemaker, stables, water powered lumber, spinning, weaving, and flour mills, a church, masonic lodge, dwellings, farms, photographer, and much else. The village was occupied by skilled craftspeople and produced most of what it needed and had plenty of surplus to sell to the outside. Transportation was by riverboat, foot, horse or carriage, and the surprising productivity of the village was accomplished without nearly the toll on the environment that such work would have cost using modern means.
Mom and I went to a concert with the National Arts Centre Orchestra with Pinchas Zuchremann conducting as well as playing the solo part in Beethoven's Romance for Violin and Orchestra. Also preformed was Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 and Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21.
Mom, Dad and I went to a casual outdoor production of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, a play which I had been studying in school. It was well played and very funny.
Mom and I went to a Medieval Festival which was put on by the Osgoode business group and several other groups including the local SCA. It was not a reenactment of even anachronism event, but it was fun and funny. We went by a raspberry farm on the way back and picked a couple of baskets.
Dad and I took a couple of visits to the National Art Gallery, including an evening exclusive to members and their guests. We saw Vincent Van Gough, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dali, Emily Carr, the Group of Seven, Tom Thompson, Claude Monet, and many others from the Renaissance through to contemporary.
I flew back to Victoria on July 16th and have been staying in Esquimalt with Bill and Maureen. I attended my first Spanish class, went to the Moss Street Paint-In, had a potluck with guitar-playing buddies, shot an archery tournament, went to the Victoria Bowmen board meeting, spent time with my girlfriend, gone to a work party at a nature reserve to pull invasive plants, and gone to one of Chris Fry's trio's concerts with my friend Berry. I've got a job as an assistant archery coach at the Commonwealth Pool and am working on designs for the treehouse that will be built on my Aunt's property.

All in all, keeping busy!