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.
