Salmonfest

So from Dawn til dusk, well alright, not quite but it seems like it since I got up at 6.30 on a Sunday to be on duty at Salmonfest, I have been cutting out and stapling dragonfly hats.

Steveston is a beautiful and expensive waterfront part of Richmond, they like to think of themselves as a village, but that's only because, in spite of being Brit ex-pat central, they obviously don't know what a village is. Still, that notwithstanding, it is a lovely part of the city. (Oh and technically they don't know what a city is either.)

Anyway, I digress, once a year they have this salmon festival called, rather unoriginally, Salmonfest. Steveston is blocked off, so you have to get in there with your stuff to set up before 8.30, then approximately 75,000 people descend on it and pay over the odds for a salmon dinner. A great many kids came to our stand and made dragonfly hats.

When Lori and I did 'Science Jam' earlier in the year, I was literally astonished that kids were willing to come and colour in and wear, fairly lame cardboard hats. This time I was expecting them to want to do it, but I was still surprised at how many. I had, admittedly, designed quite a cool hat, so cool it couldn't sodding well be cut out easily in stacks on a band saw as usually happens. But we got through hundreds and hundreds. Towards the end of the day I was cutting out the damn things freehand and non-stop.

I'm trying to justify how for the next event, I can get away with Chinese dragon hats. Usually we stick strictly to animals we have in the park. I'm thinking I need to find a Chinese dragon in the coyote tunnel. But then I might just confuse things further, I labour constantly to get kids to understand that a taxidermy specimen is real, but dead. I say this all the time,
'Yes, it is real, but dead.' What I want to say is,
'You're real now, but if you died, you'd still be real, just dead,' but I don't. I'm not supposed to scare the children except at Halloween, really, I think we should get back to the brothers Grimm and their excellent story-telling.
At least their tales were gruesome and NOT real.
Yet again, today, a dad went off, ' to get money from mom,' leaving two small children colouring in on their own at our tables, but I'm sure that there weren't any bad people among the 75,000 who turned out.

Anyway, I'm kind of missing the point of today, it wasn't just Princess Diana's birthday, although I'd be happy if my children were to organise a concert at Wembley for my birthday - don't forget children, my birthday is Patriot's Day, you might get sponsorship for that - and that Princess Di died in 1997 as a continuation from yesterday's post, no, today is Canada day and people even dyed their dog's fur with red dye in the shape of a maple leaf. But since Canada Day was on a Sunday, we get tomorrow as our Bank Holiday.
Thank goodness. I'm needing a lie-in.