Sunday, 19 April 2015

The flowers that bloom in the spring...

Tra la!

Oh wait. Some of you don't have the same music in your brain as I do. Gimme a sec...

Here you go -- from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. I chose a clip with the dialogue that comes before the song so that maybe it's a bit more understandable to those of you who don't know the operetta.

The youth choir that I was in as a youth (um, duh) put on abridged versions of G&S. In the Mikado I was, of course... Koko, the (idiot. Well, that's oversimplifying, but you get the direction) Lord High Executioner. The one who gets to marry the ugly old lady that they talk about in this song. Yay? Oh, it was good fun, actually, but the fact that I never once got to play a female character in all of the productions that we did was a bit hard on an insecure teenage girl. It was only due to a shortage of boys, but still. The one time that I was supposed to be female (Ruth, in Pirates of Penzance) our director became ill and it never happened. Figures.

Aaanyway. That was an awfully long aside when I only wanted to explain the post title. These particular flowers are in bloom right now, and that makes me happy because they're the first wildflowers around here that are. Early Blue Violet (Viola adunca). Even though these are in the yard and surrounded by plant litter (and blown-in garbage, of course), they're still wild. They showed up probably before I was born, they faithfully come up every year, and we're happy to let them.

Tra la.

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Sorry I missed the Saturday post that I generally make when I'm in at Dad's, but I came in later than usual and then we ended up taking a trip to the local trade fair in the afternoon.

Small town trade fairs can be fun, even if in this particular rural centre they come with a lot of farm-related things that this townie has no interest in. As a kid I always loved trade fairs because of the stuff. You know, the giveaways. The pens, the key chains, the stickers, the balloons; basically anything that any company was giving away I'd collect because I could. Occasionally some of the stuff was useful, but most of it -- except the pens -- hit the garbage can within days of being brought home. But still. Free stuff, right? Who can argue with free stuff?

I still generally try to grab at least a pen when I go to a trade fair because you can always use a pen, but I have managed to restrain my stuff-collecting impulses over the years.

This year's show was a bit politics-heavy because we're having a provincial election and of course all of the candidates needed to be there (and incidentally? Way to have no class, Wild Rose. Bringing those inflatable stadium thingies that you bash together to make noise -- thundersticks, apparently --because you know that the kids will all want them? There's more than one reason that I wish you would just vanish. Even though Danielle Smith managed to get rid of herself), but there were still some interesting things to look at. I bought a grand total of nothing even though I'm sort of in the market for a purse and Phil's Fudge Factory makes reeeally good maple bacon fudge (seriously), but I did, naturally, pick up one or two things. You have to, or you just don't feel like you've been there. This time around, a key chain from the Town that has a tape measure on it, a key chain from Corrections Canada (not entirely sure why they were there. Recruiting, maybe. Employees, I mean, not more criminals) that has an emergency whistle on it because the one I got from a pile driving company a while ago is showing some wear, a couple of cards from businesses that might be useful work contacts, and a whack of catalogues from companies who would love for me to either host parties for them or become an associate to find people to host parties for them.

To be honest, I don't understand how party-style selling is still such a big thing, especially in the online store age. Not my lifestyle, I suppose. I also don't understand how Tupperware gets away with being so expensive, but obviously they do so what do I know?

The one thing I didn't get? A pen. I forgot. Dad got one and he offered it to me, but I have other pens. Still, though. I forgot a pen? I must be slipping.

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There's enough words to last a while, but one last thing before I probably avoid drawing today. I was surprisingly gutted to hear of Jonathan Crombie's death. Not because I was one of the apparently thousands of girls who has a crush on him as Gilbert Blythe (although he was a near-perfect Gilbert Blythe, speaking as someone who grew up on the Anne books), but because he was so young, so talented, and had so much potential. Reading about him yesterday made him seem like a really neat person, too. Just goes to show that you can never tell what's going to happen in life, I guess.

Enjoy it while you've got it. He seemed to.

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