ROYAL WINTER GONG SHOW

Ahoy hoy!

Once again I apologize for the delayed blog, but I assure you there was good reason.  First there was a near death experience involving an allergic reaction and one of my parents dogs late on Saturday night. This led to a late night trip to the emergence vet clinic, which was an hour away, and a full on Costanza style freak out between my parents.  Consequently, no one got a lot of sleep on Saturday night, even with the extra hour we gained, and I was too tired to blog yesterday.

Today I had a rare privilege through work to spend the day at the Royal Winter Agricultural Fair in Toronto doing a safety presentation to children.   It was a lovely day, I met some lovely co-workers I had not met before and I got to do a bit of browsing around the fair grounds because it was a slow day.  I even won an insulated cheese carrier at a cheese testing demonstration.  All in all, the show was good.

There are of course some zany highlights which it is my obligation to share with you bloggies.  The first of which occurred very early in the day when an octogenarian walked by and informed me and the other female staff member I was with that we were the best looking duo he'd seen so far.  He was wearing a home made knit wool sweater and a Tilly hat, and he was strutting his stuff with is cane.   We took it in stride, it was a compliment after all.  If only it had come from a young hot farm stud, it would have been all the better, and this blog would probably be a lot more colourful tonight.  The next, and by far most bizarre incident, happened a little before high noon.  I was showing a little boy the safety demonstration when an older gentleman wandered into our booth.  He informed us, through writing on a piece of paper, that he had lost his voice beause of second hand smoke.  Fair enough.  Then he gave me a card saying "You are a special person."  Okay.  Next, after he had listened to the presentation, and asked, via paper, what would happen if a plane was hit by lightening (which had absolutely nothing to do with our presentation, he might as well have asked the square root of pi), he then handed me his "business card."  It was a hand written piece of paper with a link to his website called End of Days Prophecy.  This was all rather odd, but just to add to the bizarreness of it, he only gave myself and one other member of staff these business cards.  Which means, out of the 5 of us that were there, he only felt 2 of us were worthy.  The other staff member was a male by the way, so maybe he has a whole Noah's Ark thing going on... There are animals at the Royal...  That was the height of oddities.  We had a few exasperated parents ask us if we wanted to take their children and one lady got huffy with me when I was on my lunch break and she asked me where to find the horses.  I didn't know and she said "well don't you work here?" I don't think she really believed me when I said I was with the vendors and not staff at the fair, like I'm deliberately trying to sabotage her from seeing the damned horses!

What was less the pleasant was what transpired post Royal Winter Fair.  I decided to stay a bit later after work.  This was my first mistake.  My second, and what would prove to be most fatal mistake, was missing the exit for my ramp on the highway.  There is oodles and oodles of construction happening and once I missed the first ramp I could not find my way back to another ramp that was not marked in big bold lettering and with pylons as "closed for construction."  They might as well have just started posting large bill boards with the skull and cross bones at each corner.  After circling like a vulture for 20 minutes I finally broke down and used my phone a friend.  He got me directions to get out of the seventh circle of hell, but it turns out that Dante was wrong; there is an eighth circle of hell and it's called rush hour traffic on the Monday following the time change.  I spent hours crawling up one highway after another, only to find accidents after accident.  At one point I had to do a full u turn because the highway I was on had just been closed.  It should have taken me an hour to get home.  Instead, it took me nearly 2.5 hours after a long day of dealing with children who were wired on free fudge samples and a day off from school.

Now I sit blogging with a glass of wine and one noisy purring cat.  Home just in time to go to bed, get up and do it all over again!

FYI I'm going to check out the end of days prophecy, if there's anything good there I'll be sure to pass it along... But only to those who are worthy...

Cheers,