The first big event in July was, of course, Canada Day. I had a choice of being in the Canada Day parade with either the SPCA or the Red Hat Society. I opted to go with the SPCA, but the SPCA was placed close to the RHS by the parade marshalls, which worked out nicely for me. Here's a few ladies from Divas of the North, the local chapter of the Red Hat Society.
My friend Lisa works at the local CBC station. She was helping out with their float and generally helping get people in the mood before the parade by decorating them with temporary tattoos etcetera. Here she sports a red maple leaf on one cheek and a CBC logo on the other (I think - it's hard to make out, but that's what I remember it being). Anyway, she gave me a red maple leaf on my cheek in between doing the same for other people. The bottled water she had to use to wet the tattoos was cold!
The parade went fairly well. It was impossible to give SPCA stickers and brochures to everyone, no matter how much we tried to give them to all the kids in particular. There were two problems with trying to do this: 1) we didn't have enough stickers for every kid at the parade and 2) there's no way we could keep up with the parade if we tried to give stickers to everyone (I know because I had to keep running to catch up to the rest of the SPCA group that was walking dogs up for adoption).
Overall, it was great weather for the parade and there was an excellent turnout. I saw a few familiar faces in the crowd, handed out lots of stickers, and some information about the SPCA pet calendar and pet ownership in general. I haven't been in a parade since I was a little kid in Waverley Gold Rush Days, so it was kind of fun to participate in this one in Yellowknife.
Shortly after Canada Day, I left for two weeks in Tulita, which is about halfway up the MacKenzie River. I was originally expecting to take Jasmine with me, but the new bed and breakfast where we had reservations had to cancel all bookings because their electricity wasn't hooked up in time. That caused us to do a bit of scrambling because I had to make other arrangements for Jasmine plus the hotel in Tulita was booked up, so we had to find another place for me to stay. Our main contactin Tulita made a bunch of phone calls and eventually found a place for me with a young woman and her four-year-old son. Leeann's partner was away for some training, so she was happy to have some company while he was gone. The timing was perfect and I was glad to be staying with a young person instead of community elders or something, although I was sorry I couldn't take Jasmine after all.
I flew with Canadian North as far as Norman Wells, then I had to get a smaller plane back upriver (south) to Tulita. Well, it was a smaller plane all right! It was a tiny four seater and they loaded my gear into the back seat, leaving the front passenger's seat for me to sit next to the pilot. It was only about a 20 minute flight, but it was neat being in such a small plane and it gave me a good opportunity to observe the land and river beneath us.
Our training contact picked me up and took me to Leeann's, showing me the training facility along the way. Then I had a bit of time to get settled (I had to fly in on Saturday to start training on Monday because of how the flight schedules work out between the airlines). Leeann loaned me her bicycle while I was in town, which was great because it was a small enough community that I could easily bike from one end to the other, but it was large enough that walking would have taken me more time than I would have liked. Plus I feel safer on a bike than on foot when I know there's bears and stuff around - there's a pretty big speed difference between the two.
This is Kane, Leeann's son. We played together a fair bit when I was there (he really likes wrestling) and he was really interested in my cameras. I let him play with this one a bit while I used my digital. He used up the last bit of film pretty quickly, but that was okay - I just gave him back the empty camera and he kept taking pictures that went nowhere. That was just as well, because he's a bright little boy and he saw how I opened the camera so he kept opening it himself after that. If there'd been film, it would have been exposed and the camera would have been very confused about whether it was winding or rewinding the film. As it was, there was no harm done.
Here's me and Kane on the sofa. He sat still for a moment, but not long enough for Leeann to take the picture.
This is the building where Leeann works. There's a variety of community offices in there and it's also where they sell the bingo cards for radio bingo. I decided to play with Leeann one day just to see what it was like and everything. Well, the first thing I learned is that it's expensive!! It was about $20 just to get in the game and after I bought the cards Leeann recommended (because I didn't have a clue what to buy), I'd spent $70-80. Ouch!
Anyway, we went back to Leeann's and got ourselves set up with the radio on and the phone nearby in case we had a bingo to call in. Leeann gave me a dauber to use and I made a bit of a mess - the first one was too dry and the second one was drippy. Once I learned to turn it right-side up between daubs, I managed okay.
Part-way through the bingo, the power went out. We still don't know why, but Leeann's absent partner is the superintendent of the power company in Tulita, so it was unfortunate that he was away at the time. The phone did ring - not the cordless, which required power, but we heard a phone ringing in the basement. Leeann didn't even know there was one down there, but that turned out to be useful later on in my visit. I'll come back to that in a sec...
So after a little bit, the power came back on, we finished up our games, and - not surprisingly - I didn't win a thing. I was one number away a few times, but I never won. Oh well! I didn't really expect to.
Here's a picture I took during my bicycle explorations of the community. The MacKenzie River has many different moods and I found most of them more beautiful than the "Mighty Mississippi", however much more famous the Mississippi might be. I liked it most when it was glassy and calm, as in this picture.
While I was in town, I heard about some black bears wandering around. Some people had seen them in town, but mostly they were seen out at the dump. I didn't want to bike out because I didn't know how far the dump was and I figured I'd be rather vulnerable on a bicycle anyway. I asked Leeann if she would take me out, so we drove out a couple of times with Kane to see if the bears were around. There was no sign of them on our first attempt, but we found mother and cub on our second run out. I took this picture from the truck window with no zoom - which gives you an idea how close we could get without disturbing the bears. I got a few slides with my Nikon after I took this picture - fortunately I have a better zoom lens for my Nikon.
Partway through my stay in Tulita, we had a mishap at Leeann's house. The phone wasn't working late one evening when she wanted to make a phone call, so we started looking around to try to figure out the problem. Both of us remembered hearing the phone ring in the basement during the radio bingo power outage, so Leeann went down to find out whether that phone was working or if it was just the cordless that was out. When she went downstairs, she found the whole basement flooded! Northern homes have water tanks and sewage tanks that are filled and drained respectively on a regular basis. It seems the water delivery truck that day had over-filled Leanne's tank by quite a lot - there was about 3-4" of water through most of the basement. Fortunately it was a concrete floor, but there were still boxes and other things on the floor that are better kept dry.
We started bailing and were at it for a couple of hours before Leeann called a halt for the night. Kane was sometimes helpful, sometimes not - at 4, he wasn't always clear on the fact the water always had to go into the buckets, not the other way around. Still, he was generally good and wasn't whining or cranky like many kids mnight have been that late at night.
This picture doesn't do the flood justice. You can see the baseball reflected in the water, but you really can't see the depth. You'll just have to take my word for it. Anyway, Leeann took the next day off work to finish cleaning up. On the bright side, she found some non-perishable goods from their last year's barge order (people along the river can order bulk shipments of goods to be sent downriver from Yellowknife on barges).
Here's another shot looking downriver toward Bear Rock on a calm day. Beautiful, isn't it?
So Tulita was an interesting trip. It was a nice change staying with a family instead of in a hotel, but I know it wouldn't always work out as well as it did with Leeann (who I really liked) so I'm glad I usually get to stay in hotels.
I flew out of Tulita on Friday of the Folk on the Rocks weekend, which put me back in Yellowknife in time to do my volunteer shifts at the festival as well as pack my bags for my summer vacation, which started the same weekend. I wasn't flying out until Tuesday because I scheduled my flights so I'd be in town for FOTR.
This is my friends' jewellery booth in the arts and craft section of the festival. They set up there every year and - as always when I see their stuff - I found things I liked enough to buy. It was also nice to hang out with them in between my cleanup rounds when I was volunteering because there wasn't enough work to keep me going steadily the whole time. I listened to some of the musicians too, of course, but it's more fun doing that with people you know so I spent more time at the stages when I bumped into friends there.
Partly for fun and partly to support a local charity, I got my leg painted. I could have had my face painted, but I didn't want to and I liked the look of the body painting when I saw it on other people. The funny thing was at the end of the day when I went home and showered, I had a tan line around the painted places because they hadn't been exposed to the sun all day.
After a fun, sunny weekend at Folk on the Rocks, I went home to get ready for my vacation to Calgary, Halifax and Ottawa, which is how I passed the rest of July.
Jan