Vancouver Concert Band

 Kathryn has been playing a couple of instruments as part of the Vancouver Concert Band for the last 10 months or so and enjoying herself very much. They have been holding a number of summer performances recently, one of which I was able to attend since it fell on a Saturday at the "Hats Off Burnaby" festival, rather than a Wednesday evening.

 She can be a little tricky to spot in the picture above, but the flute section (which she primarily plays in) is located on the right hand side of that picture. Below is a zoomed photo of her playing flute.

 The summer concert had a Caribbean theme with some bongo drum pieces, and her years of playing various drums for capoeira groups made her a natural choice for those parts. My favorite was a mombo they played where her drumming was a very significant part of the music and she played very well indeed.

I brought our pocket recorder with us and got quite a nice mp3 file of the event. If you want to hear it and we haven't sent it to you already, drop me an email and I will get you the file to listen to.

Outbound Inlaws

 Bevan and Valerie stayed with us for a few days before departing for their Alaskan cruise, which gave us a nice opportunity to have a visit and share and take in a little culture and relaxation. Between leaving work a little early and a whale watching cancellation due to bad weather, we were both able to be around for the majority of their time with us which was very nice. Here they are at the departure gate for their ship.

 Which was an enormous monstrosity of a ship! Apparently their room is midships on the starboard side. I think we'll stick to our small boats and nature tours for a good long time to come, but maybe the day will arrive when we'd like to be pampered in a giant floating hotel ;)

 On a very rainy Saturday before they set out, the four of us took a visit to the art gallery, which had a display called 'Mashup' which was an assortment of modern art, collage, and video editing. That sort of art in particular I find is a healthy split of 50% clever and 50% utter garbage (yes, signing a urinal maybe re-contextualizes the object from its original purpose, but it's a little too nonsense pretentious for me...) The highlight of the gallery was a small "dub room" where they were playing Jamaican music which introduced us to the fun album "Super Ape" by Lee Perry and the Upsetters. The photo below shows the main rotunda with a fancy modern art paint job.