http://www.fborfw.com/news/lynns-notes-canada-day-quay/
I live a 15 walk from the waterfront, where the Sea Bus comes in to the Quay. There are family parks are on all sides.
My comment: I think she means a “15 minute walk”. Also, it is the Lonsdale Quay Market and there is a terminal there for the Lonsdale Quay SeaBus. As for the family parks, I don’t see them on the map. There is a kids’ alley in the market though.
I walked down with my daughter and her family, to see the Canada Day spectacle. There were tents set up everywhere with the usual buskers, crafts, and balloon animals…but the food trucks are the big draw. There are dishes from everywhere: Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, China, India, Persia, the Caribbean, Greece, Germany…and then you have Québecois poutine, English pot pies, and the Canadian grilled cheese sandwich vendor (with the best mac’n’cheese anywhere), whose stuff is so good he had to get a second truck.
My comment: “my daughter and her family”. Interestingly phrased. As I go through this, the only people Lynn mentions specifically are her daughter and her granddaughter, so I think it’s possible Lane and Ryan were someplace else. While Lynn talks about the food trucks, let’s see if she actually talks about eating any of that food. You would think Lynn would have had that mac’n’cheese, but I don’t see anywhere where she says she ate it.
People-watching is the best here. WASPS are in the minority, and even if you do run into a European family, you can’t expect them to speak English. You hear Russian, Dutch, Danish, and Spanish…it’s a real melting pot, with couples of all colours going hand in hand. My mother used to say "We should all intermarry, then the population would all be the same colour. There would be no racial differences, everyone would get along." So, I said "Mom, you’d be happy if I married a Japanese man?" She looked shocked, and said sharply in her British best, "Not US, dear!!" Well, Mom. The day has come. There is mixing and matching, and it’s all working out just fine.
My comment: There is nothing Lynn enjoys more than a good slam to mother Ursula, but in order to believe this story you have ignore a few things. The big one is that Ursula’s sister, Monica Reznick, was married to Maurice Moses Reznick a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who left the Ukraine to escape the anti-Semitic riots of the 1920s. Yes, Lynn, your British best aunt married a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine back in the 1940s when people would have definitely frowned on that and as near as we can tell from The Comic Art of Lynn Johnston, Monica got along well with her sister Ursula. Now, if you want to look at a person who has problems with mixing and matching, you have to look no further than Lynn Johnston’s comic strip, where the marriages were all same race / same religion and the boy with the Japanese heritage went to Japan to find a wife.
We stayed most of the day. Large tugboats came up to the wharf, and did what they called the "tugboat ballet". These things have monstrous engines and side thrusters, which allow them to be maneuvered in every direction. Four of them, polished and new, did movements in unison, facing each other in square dance fashion, lining up side to side, then swirling as fast as they could in place…the way they whipped the water up looked like a frothing storm—everyone on the jetty was sprayed, and the kids were mesmerised. None of us will ever watch the tugboats now without thinking about the day they danced at the Quay!
My comment: Sounds like fun. They stayed most of the day, which it turns out is just until 3 pm.
We stayed until 3:00, just in time to walk up to the movie theatre and take in a show. It was quite a day. We then went back to Kate and Lane’s.
My comment: No mention of what the movie was. Most likely it was the nearby Landmark Cinemas and almost assuredly the movie was “Finding Dory.”
We were all full from the food trucks, so my granddaughter, Laura, and I had painting time in the basement studio.
My comment: “we were all full from the food trucks”. Lynn goes to a plural here to include herself, but she never said what she ate. I like the way Lynn refers to the house as “Kate and Lane’s”, but then talks about painting in the basement studio, which is where she lives as if she wasn’t the one who paid for this place. I guess she is still waiting for her next move to her next place (assuming that's ever going to happen. I think we've missed the "spring" deadline).
I’ve been working on a rather goofy cartoon painting of a dog, and Laura puttered about with watercolours.
My comment: “goofy cartoon painting of a dog”. I think I have seen several of those now. Glad to hear she’s doing more.
What’s good about her being there when I’m painting, is that I’m too focused on what I’m doing to watch her closely. I can’t answer her questions the way I normally would, and she can only break my concentration if she needs clean water or has an accident.
My comment: So what’s good for Lynn is her ability to be with her granddaughter, but not actually spend any time paying attention to her granddaughter. Psst to Lynn. Spend time with your granddaughter, you idiot. She’s not going to stay little for long.
This means she has become independently creative. She’s doing lovely abstract designs, learning to mix colours, and is enjoying the freedom to see whatever materializes from her hands.
My comment: And by “independently creative”, Lynn means “she has learned not to bother me.” It is so funny the way Lynn is putting a positive spin on this bad grandparenting. I had wondered if Lynn would turn into an Elly-style, i.e. uninvolved, grandmother, and Lynn is doing an excellent job of following in Elly's footsteps.
When he’s in the mood, my grandson, Ryan, is also fascinated by colours and paper, crayons and clay. I think we have more artists in the family.
My comment: Either more artists or Ryan is like a regular kid. Also, the comment here doesn’t sound like Ryan was there for this Canada Day painting event.
So, I have given you our version of Canada Day! We celebrated our wonderful mixed nationality with food, music, and fireworks. And in the end, it really was a great way to express our joy and relief. To be able to live in freedom and harmony is not something one can take for granted!
My comment: Whoa there! “fireworks”. Nope. You don’t get fireworks if you leave at 3 pm to see a movie. The rest of this is equally confusing. “joy and relief”? “freedom and harmony”? What? From the oppressive English? This really is Lynn’s own version of Canada Day.