Fly

A little fly in the ointment, but first, the ointment.

The weather continues sunny and warm and Vancouver positively sparkles with pride at her own beauty.

This afternoon, Alex and I attended a meeting at the Vancouver Museum which overlooks English Bay, Kits beach, the North Shore mountains, Stanley Park and just about everything breathtaking.
The speaker at the meeting was the Education Director for the Vancouver Olympics, which is admittedly, outside my area of interest, but I tried mightily hard to concentrate. Unfortunately, I found his voice difficult to tune into. He seemed to be speaking slightly too quietly for the size of room, he also had a very unmodulated mode of speech, and dropped the ends of his sentences. I watched him and thought that had he been speaking French or were I not a native speaker of English, I wouldn't have been able to follow.
But interesting points were raised, of course, just, for the most part, not interesting to me.

What did interest me however, was that afterwards, we were given a short tour of some of the museum's exhibits. Vancouver through the ages, well, not ages exactly, but since 1900 or so plus one in the works that will cover 'pre-contact'.
It seems that until the 1920s, Vancouverites had to drive on the left-hand side of the road. I'm sure that many think that hasn't changed.
The exhibits were well set-out however, and marvellously and enthusiastically presented to us by the museum's curator.

We were able to preview a new exhibition about women's clothing in the Belle Epoque. The clothes themselves did not interest me too much, although some of the fabrics and embroidery and lace were exquisite, but what the curator said about them did. She pointed out that this way of dressing - which we would probably quite simply refer to as Edwardian - ended abruptly with the First World War, when women were suddenly needed in the workforce. After the war, the fashion changed from the pre-war corsets and curvaceous shapes, to flat, almost shapeless and oversized styles. She gave us food for thought. What was the psychology behind this? It was as though women were trying to hide, like children, in grown-ups clothes. This era, she agreed, had done a great deal for women's emancipation.

The fly. When Kevin came home, he brought in a letter from Richmond City. Was it rewarding me for being such a fine and upstanding member of the community? No! It was an 'alleged bylaw violation'.
It seems that when Kevin unloaded me and all my props for the Richmond City Children's Festival in the place we were told to unload, and where other poor saps who were giving up their Saturday for free were also unloading, somehow the city itself hadn't been notified - presumably by itself.
They will be now, and it won't be pretty.