Just so I don’t feel left out, I’m going to mention what I did last week ago for Canada Day. I volunteered again to help run the (student-organized) Canada Day celebrations in Waterloo and it was a grueling three-day marathon but I had a blast. Last year Mariano and I ran the main stage so this year I decided to try something a little different and a bit bigger of a challenge by helping run Operations.

Our job was to provide everyone with all the equipment. That included tables, chairs, generators, lights, tents, rope, stakes, duct tape, pretty much everything. Most of the stuff we either had in inventory from previous years or we booked through our school and the heavy equipment was generously loaned to us from United Rentals from the K-W area as well as Guelph and Cambridge. That also meant we needed to go out to pick up all the equipment – 3 cargo vans’ worth of heavy equipment – and return them later as well, which I had to do by making a roadtrip out to Cambridge on Tuesday morning at 6:30 am.

My schedule basically went like this: Friday morning, get some vans and start rounding stuff up at 9 am. Got a lot of equipment out to field and get things ready for the big day until about 6-7 pm. Had some rest. Saturday morning, out on the field by 8:30 am and worked all day until about 1:30 am. Sunday morning, out on the field by 9:00 am and cleaned up and returned stuff until about 6-7 pm.

Being so busy running the day, I didn’t get too many chances where I could sit back and enjoy things for myself, but I did eat one of the thousands of delicious cupcakes that we give away and I also caught some of the acts on the main stage. Matthew Barber headlined but there was a couple of girls called Dala that played earlier in the night that I really enjoyed. They were really cute too haha. Shoulda had them in our line-up last year when I was running the main stage. Honestly though, they had really great voices and I liked their style of music. I bought their CD – Angels & Thieves – as I only had a chance to listen to parts of a few songs and I’ve been listening to it quite a bit this week. So my recommendation is to go listen to Dala for some nice summer easy listenin’.

It seems crazy to do all this hard work for nothing, but for some reason I get some sort of satisfaction out of it. One of my best Canada Days was probably summer of ‘04 when I was on co-op in Ottawa and I partied it up in the nation’s capital but I figure I can do that every year once I’m done school. So for this year and probably next year, I’ll be helping run the festivities in Waterloo.

It was a good day. I enjoyed the great game between France and Brazil, and enjoyed it even more when the French sent Brazil on their way home.
Brazil is a team full of great individual players, but they didn’t mesh together well enough as a team to defeat France, who played solid.

Anyways, Canada day was ok, after the soccer game, a bunch of us played poker, and then the Portuguese Man of War, Phil Vicente himself and his brother Dan and I decided to head to a friends house and try to meet up with them to go to Parliament to catch the celebrations.
I wanted to start drinking in the University Centre while I was waiting for Phil and his brother, but it was all fizzy and I couldn’t really open it in there. I stuck with the dependable 40 of Olde English, it was awesome.
It took us 45 mins to get on a bus and make our way over to the house, and when we got to our stop, the damn bus driver didn’t even stop and let us get out of the bus, so we had to walk an extra block and a half to our destination.
When we got there, we were informed by someone sitting on their steps that they just left…that made us all pissed. We spent all that time trying to get there and they were gone. So we did the next best thing, we headed to the nearby park, and got drunk. After what seemed like hours, Phil and his brother decided to head home, but they didn’t want to carry a whole load of beer all the way back to their place, so what they did was that they stashed it on the back porch of our friends place, so he climbed up and placed them in the BBQ.
After heading about a block away, we stopped to watch the fireworks from the street, and Phil got a phone call from none other then the famous Mark Wilson. Asking us if we were going to head back to their place after, but we all thought it was something like 1 AM so they were going to leave, and I was going to stick around. But it turned out that we were all drunk, and it was only 10 PM. So we decided to head back to their place and wait for them.
When we got there, we got a little bored, so Phil climbed up to their back porch again, and we…kinda’ found our way into the house, hung out, watched some tv, and got more drunk, all before they got back. It was so wrong…but so right.
Anyways, we hung out at their place, and got even more drunk, which was awesome. And after the shindig was over, I ended up walking through downtown Ottawa drunk, and alone…it was awesome.
About half way throught the trip I was getting kind of hungry, but all the stores were closed, cause it was something like 3 AM, but when I was about to give up hope, I saw a sign…a Tim Hortons sign, this made me happy, but almost all of their delcious treats were gone, so I ended up getting a muffin, and it was a very satisfying muffin.
Yeah, the most important part was that I came home safe.

- Yeah, a bunch of stupid kids decided to take a piss on the National War Memorial, which also houses the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Anways, they were identified by the Ottawa Police and 2 of the 3 idiots were underage and the Third idiot was identified as well, but isn’t in police custody yet.
I hope they come down hard on these guys. It would be even better if they got shipped off to Afghanistan so they can see first hand the sacrifice’s made by our men and women serving overseas.