Wonderings from the Wack

I have got the curious dragon to 70 hours completed. As you can tell, I am fairly close to finishing. There is about in inch worth of work on the bottom, mostly rocks. The bottom-most stitches ( in yellow ) of the dragons tail are actually the bottom of the design. There will be a lot of back stitch once I am done with the cross stitching.

This is how Weezers' bedroom looked this morning. I've put white primer over the puttied areas. Pardon me, it's actually called drywall compound, not putty. You can sort of see some little gold blobs on the white painted area to the left of the closest door. The gold is stenciled on suns, planets and moons It was rough paint, so we sanded it down first and now I have also primed over top of the gold. The closet door is mostly primed too since it needs to be painted white eventually. I have to do the back of the door tomorrow and some puttied areas that weren't quite dry yet. I'll post another photo after all the primer is on. Her bed is also completely taken apart now and there is more putty behind the bed.

A few things are going on lately:
-my sister is moving to Langley next week. I will miss her. It's an hour drive away. Right now she lives across town.
-T's dad sold his house in Richmond ( suburb of Vancouver ) for $620,000 and bought a house here in Chilliwack fro $408,000. His Richmond house was a 1500 sq. ft. bungalow/rancher built in 1956. His house here is a 1600 sq. ft. rancher built in 2005. Not a bad deal!
-Weezie's room is taken apart and she is sleeping on her mattress in her brother's room. Puttying, priming, and painting is in progress. I hope to have photos posted here eventually.

This gentlemen played outside the front of the Royal Scot Hotel every couple of hours or so. He'd do a couple of tunes and then go away. If you look past him to the white sign down the block you can see Menzies Street, which crosses Quebec where the hotel is. On the other side of Menzies is the western edge of the lawn of the Provincial Legislature. We first heard the piper as we were loading our stuff into our room. Knowing how pipe music carries I figured that someone was piping on the lawn of the Legislature. A bit of local flavour for the tourists. But we went for a walk a while later and then headed back to the Days Inn across the road from the Royal Scot. The Days Inn has a Cold Beer and Wine store in it. Upon crossing the street after purchasing wine I discovered the piper. He was originally facing Quebec Street, but obligingly turned toward me as I took the photo.

After we came out of the museum we decided to get a photo in front of this big sign. There was a hidden microphone making splashing wave noises and the clanging of a ships bell.

We spent a hot couple of days in Victoria and got back last night to hide in the AC.



On Monday morning we picked up Mom and Dad and got the 11 am ferry from Tsawassen. By 1:30 we were in Victoria and checking in at the Royal Scot Hotel. It's very nice, not too fancy, and only one block south of the harbour. It's also one block west of the Legislature building.



Some family friends have recently moved there so we went to their place for dinner on Monday night. Angelo has just taken the job of VP of Royal Roads ( or is it Rhodes? ) University. We haven't seen them for about 8 years so it was great to visit again.



Yesterday morning we got the 10 am show of IMAX Titanica at the Royal BC Museum. I'd seen it before on TV, but IMAX is better. After that we went through the Titanic Exhibit. There were a ton of artifacts that were really neat to see. Unfortunately you can't take photos in the exhibit. Before you enter the exhibit itself, 2 people wearing 1912 cork life vests handing out "boarding cards" with a passengers name, class, age, party they were travelling with, etc. I was a young French girl who was the mistress of a Mr. Harbeck who had been hired by White Star line to film the maiden voyage. My son was Mr. Arthur Ryerson, whose name rang a bell with me as someone of importance on board. My daughter was the daughter of a jeweler from Rhode Island. Hubby was Major Archibald Butt. The idea is that at the end of the exhibit you check the passenger list again survivors to see if you made it out alive. I said right away as soon as Toni got the boarding card, "Sorry honey but you died. You played cards in the smoking room with Benjamin Guggenheim, waiting for the ship to sink."



It turned out that the daughter of jeweler survived. The French mistress did not. Mr. Ryerson didn't either. He could have been in the smoking room with Butt and Guggenheim. Ryerson's wife and 3 children survived.



I'll try to post some photos of Victoria later.

Not quite yet, I can pick it up on Sat. Apparantly something called the hook was broken. That is now fixed and they did a general lube and tune up. Sounds like a car...

$69.95 plus tax and I am hopefully good to go.

I'm going to try to finish up the pillow and enter it in the Chilliwack Exhibition in August.

I have all of the cross stitching finished now on my slender dragon friend. This is 47 hours worth of work. I just have to do the remainder of the back stitch and he is all done. Since I have done the back stitch on the knotwork border as I go, most of what is left is just the dragon.