Dancing In Irreverence

Week 18: Pearl Jam in Seattle

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the first time I travelled to see a Pearl Jam show, 19 years ago. Prior to this, I had seen Pearl Jam twice: the first time was in July 1998 at the Pacific Coliseum, and the second was earlier in the year, in May 2000, at the Commodore Ballroom. (That show and my efforts to get tickets to it require a whole post of their own, but not today.)

In November of 2000, I was still living at home. I was going to the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design on Granville Island, and working in my mom’s store, Knotty Toys, part-time to pay for concerts and other necessities. It was a pretty great era – there were tons of awesome bands to see locally, the ‘serious’ part of my life was spent making art, and I almost never had to cook for myself.

The only downside I can think of is that this was before the smoking ban in bars and clubs. It seems unimaginably gross now, but we were accustomed to it at the time so it didn’t seem like a big deal to come home at 2am completely permeated with cigarette smoke.

For Pearl Jam, the year 2000 marked a few important events, both good and bad. In May, they released the album, Binaural, which is the first album that Matt Cameron is on, as their 5^th and final drummer. This album has a more experimental sound than some of their previous ones and I have heard that it was a bit of a disappointment to mainstream audiences. For me, it is one of my favourites. At a time when a lot of casual fans were losing interest, I was becoming increasingly dedicated.

Side note: The name of this blog, Dancing in Irreverence, comes from the lyrics to the song Insignificance, which is on Binaural.

In June, the band experienced a terrible tragedy when 9 fans were crushed to death during their set at a large festival in Denmark. At that time, we were worried that this would be the end of Pearl Jam and we’d never get to see them in concert again. Luckily, it was not.

………

The Key Arena shows in Seattle were a bit of an awakening for me. Before that, it hadn’t really occurred to me that a) if a band wasn’t playing in your city you could just go to another city to see them, and b) if they were playing more than one show, you could go to more than one show.

I don’t recall exactly how I obtained tickets to the first Seattle show. I know that they were fan club tickets purchased directly through the Tenclub, but I’m not sure what the process was at that time. I would bet it involved filling out a form and mailing it in with a US money order.

Because of this direct method of buying tickets, I was unaware that a second show had been added when the first one sold out through the regular public sale. It’s hard to imagine a time like this, when the internet was still just for emailing your friends and downloading songs from Napster. It took an offhand comment from my cousin, Jeremy, for me to find out about this rollover date.

As it turned out, a friend of his had ended up buying two pairs of tickets to the second concert, and he was looking for someone to buy the extra set from him. That person was me! It was a very exciting and unexpected development in my plans.

When November rolled around, my plan was to go to Seattle with my friend, Cathy, and some of her Little Caesar’s Pizza co-workers. Cathy and I were using my fan club tickets, and the others had bought theirs the usual way. Being young and full of energy, but low on money, we drove down for the show and then headed back home straight afterward.

The morning after the first show, I got up as usual for school. After our morning classes, I hopped in the car with my friend, Shaun, and off we went for the second show. He hadn’t been to the one the night before, but he had seen Pearl Jam in 1998 in Vancouver and was almost as big a fan as I was.

Again, we drove home after the concert that night. I tried doing a show this way a few years ago and I will never do it again. It seems to work pretty well when you’re in your twenties, but I would dissuade anyone over thirty from attempting it.

Of the actual concerts, I don’t have a lot of clear memories. This was 19 years ago, and I’ve been to many shows in the meantime, but here are a handful of snapshots that are still clear in my mind:

Night 1:

Cath and I were waiting in line for pizza in the mezzanine when we heard someone on the microphone say “hello”; we knew right away it was Eddie, so we rushed back to our seats and got to see him play a solo version of Throw Your Arms Around Me to the half empty arena. The whole trip would have been worthwhile for that bit alone.
Sometime before PJ was on, I noticed the guy behind me had the same shirt as I did, which was very exclusive because it was only available at two very small warm-up shows (in Vancouver and Bellingham); I tried to start a conversation about it with him but he had no interest. I don’t know if this was the “Seattle Freeze” or if he was just an anti-social jerk. Who wouldn’t want to bond over amazing Pearl Jam shows? I hope he forgot to renew his membership and now he has to sit in the rafters.

Night 2:

The second show was the final show of the tour and the audience was super amped up. (I don’t recall the night 1 audience being bad, but apparently it was pretty low energy.) To this day, Seattle Night 2 of 2000 is considered one of the best PJ shows of all time. I have listened to the bootleg of this show many times over the years and it really was incredible. You can watch the whole thing here if you want to decide for yourself.
The clearest memory I have of that night is walking back to the car after the show, getting in, and Shaun saying “No one knows how to satisfy like Pearl Jam”.

Now, almost two decades later, here I am still checking the Pearl Jam forum every day for new rumours about an upcoming tour… So thankful they’ve only gotten better with time, and that the internet is so much more useful now.

Week 17: Early Retirement

Retirement is something that I think about a lot, and while I am coming up on a milestone birthday, it is definitely nowhere near my 65^th. That being said, I don’t intend to spend the next 25 years working for a living either.

I got into this topic a bit in my post about Life Energy Valuation without really discussing the “R” word. I know from experience that if you say ‘retirement’ people immediately think of this:

That is not what I have in mind.

What I really want is to be able to spend my time pursuing my different interests, and not have to depend on a full time job to pay the bills. I want to go out swing dancing on weeknights, spend mornings sitting around in my pyjamas blogging and drinking coffee, have afternoon naps, immerse myself in creative projects for days at a time, and follow Pearl Jam on tour whenever I want. That’s not the whole list, but clearly I need more than just weekends to do things properly.

It hadn’t occurred to me that there was a legitimate way to achieve this until a couple of years ago when I read the book Early Retirement Extreme. This was my first introduction to the FIRE movement, which I mentioned a bit about in my October Check-Up post a few weeks ago.

Based on some notes I came across this morning, this is what I got from that first book:

Reduce expenses drastically.
Save as much as possible.
Diversify income.
There are not ‘wants’ and ‘needs’, you just have to decide where you draw the line.
Don’t depend on consumerism to fill your needs.

The first three points are pretty straightforward; they are things that are easy to understand, regardless of how much effort it may take to integrate them into your life. The second two points are more philosophical, and I will get into them a bit later.

At the time I read that book, we weren’t living extravagantly, but we weren’t really putting much into our savings either. We lived within a reasonable budget, we were on track to pay off our mortgage early and we both worked full time.

I have always reviewed our household expenses and tried to keep things in check, so there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room to make any ‘drastic’ reductions, except in one category. Ever since we became homeowners, we have allotted a monthly amount to the “Reno Fund”. The amount has varied over the years, but has consistently gotten larger as our income increased.

As a positive, this means that because we kept to a fixed budget, aside from that particular category, our expenses have avoided lifestyle inflation. Now, instead of painstakingly trying to get a bunch of bills under control, we just have to quit renovating in order to start putting funds aside for the future.

As a negative, that’s years and years of money that could have gone into savings and built a pretty good nest egg by now, but I have no regrets. Realistically, it was good use of the money at the time and I’m happy with the work we’ve done. If we’d been using that money for a doll collection or something, I would probably feel a lot differently.

Luckily, all this newfound information that has come from my obsessive reading of FIRE books and blogs is coinciding (though not coincidentally) with the completion of the majority of the renovations we had on our list anyway, so it’s not too painful to end this era.

The next era is the one where we throw every extra cent we have into investments. The way I see it, there are two main ways to save for early retirement:

Option 1 – Hustle:

I will say right now that this is not the option we’ve chosen. A lot of FIRE blogs are written by people that have gone this route and it’s definitely not for me. Hustling is devoting as much time and energy as you can to making as much money as you can, quickly. I’m sure it’s great for the 20-something tech guys who are making 6-figure salaries and can sacrifice a few years in order to gain decades of freedom, but hustling is the opposite of the lifestyle I want.

Option 2 – Optimize:

I have mentioned various aspects of this already, but the main things we’ve done so far include reducing job-related expenses by getting rid of a long commute, adding a basement suite to diversify income and increase savings, changing Reno Fund to savings, simplifying by purging unneeded items and borrowing things we only need temporarily, and making a point of buying less stuff in general.

It may not be the absolute quickest route, but it’s enjoyable and at this point, we’re really only adding a few years to our plan anyway. Just being conscious of what we’re aiming for plays a big part in getting there; it helps inform our decisions and make choices that reflect what’s important to us.

Wants and Needs

I thought the author of ERE made a really interesting point when he said that wants and needs are not two different categories, they’re just on two ends of a sliding scale. For each thing you think you need, you can still decide how far to go and how much that’s going to cost.

For example, transportation is a need. You need to get to work, visit family and get to appointments, but how you do it can vary widely. You might want to drive everywhere in a giant SUV with heated seats, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the option of hopping on the bus.

We have always only had one vehicle between the two of us. It has not always been convenient, but we are used to it and I can’t remember it ever causing any big issues. We have situated ourselves close to transit, we are walking distance from most basic amenities, and in the last few years they’ve introduced a car-sharing program to our area.

We have actually started discussing the idea of getting rid of our car completely, once it starts to become too costly to maintain. A couple of years ago, this would never have been a consideration because I needed the car to commute, but along came ERE and all the ensuing changes that it brought.

Consumerism

The point about using consumerism to fill your needs can be taken various ways. I don’t remember if he meant it in a specific way in the book because I just wrote down that one sentence, but the way I am thinking of it is as a challenge.

One of my goals for 2019 was to buy no things. I am planning to write a post about how it went, closer to the end of the year, so I won’t go into detail here, but there are a lot of ways to get by just fine and avoid a lot of purchases. After a while it even becomes habit.

I’m still quite a few years away from being able to quit working completely, but every step I take to live on less is a step in the right direction. In the meantime, I am integrating my ideal retirement activities into my current life as much as possible, because it is so satisfying to be able to enjoy the progress along the way.

Week 16: Blues Dancing

I wrote a post a few months back about Swing dancing and what I love about it. Swing dancing is definitely one of the great pleasures in my life, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Recently, we’ve also started exploring Blues dancing, and have really been enjoying it as an extension of our dance experience.

I first heard about Blues when we had just started with Swing. Our local social dance would have a regular “Swing and Blues” night, with beginner lessons in each. We did attempt a couple of Blues lessons at that time, but we were so new to everything that it was too overwhelming to pursue both styles. As we became more and more immersed in the various types of Swing dancing, Blues completely fell off our radar.

Then, a little over a year ago, the local Blues dancing group, Bearcat Blues, was offering a workshop aimed at people who had dance experience, though not specifically Blues dance experience. That sounded like us, and we were interested in expanding our knowledge a bit, so we signed up.

At that time, we were just dipping a toe into Blues, and while we quite enjoyed the workshops, we didn’t really do anything with what we’d learned. We didn’t practice, so we quickly forgot everything. We meant to go to one of their social dances, but they occur at the same time as our regular Friday night dance, so we never made it.

One year later (this past summer) there were some informal classes being offered in a small group format, similarly aimed at dancers who weren’t experienced with Blues, so we signed up.

For 6 weeks, we met downtown and spent an hour and a half at a time learning different basic techniques, as well as some of the history of the origins of Slow Jazz and Traditional Blues dancing.

Like all the jazz-related dances, Blues dancing is rooted in African movement. I don’t feel informed enough to try to explain the historical context in my own words, but I found a little summary on a New York Blues dancing site, which is brief, but informative: https://bluesdancenewyork.com/what-is-blues/ It is definitely something that I’m interested in learning more about, just not in time for this post.

I don’t know the origins of this photo to give credit,
but I found it on http://www.savoyballroomtoblues.com

Blues dancing includes all the things I love about Swing dancing (as listed in my other post), but it is also quite different in a lot of ways. Contrasted with my Swing dancing experience, this is what Blues is to me, so far:

Tempo – Blues is danced to jazz music, and this is definitely one of the things that is so appealing about it. Over the past few years, I have heard a lot more jazz than ever in my life before that, and it is fantastic. Obviously, this has come up in numerous posts already, but what I haven’t really gotten into is the speed of the music.

As swing dancers, we mainly dance to the medium- to fast-paced songs. When a slow song comes on, we either take a breather, or we can awkwardly do some slow Lindy Hop. There are definitely swing dancers out there that can make Slow Lindy look fantastic, but I’m not really there yet. Instead of trying to make that work, I’m just switching gears completely and attempting a whole new thing.

When there is live jazz at a social dance, the band tends to stick within a certain range of tempos, aimed at the crowd they are playing for, however; if you go to see a jazz performance, in general, you can expect to hear them play both very fast and very slow songs. If I can also Blues dance, I can dance to ALL the songs.

Connection – I am sure there are all kinds of intricate Blues “moves” to learn, but as a new dancer in this style, there seems to be a lot more emphasis on connecting with your partner and the music, rather than learning specific footwork patterns.

The partner connection is much different than in Swing, and I have found that there is a lot more opportunity for swing dancers to get away with having a lot of moves, and never really bothering to improve their partner connection. This makes them much less fun to dance with, though not impossible, and from the outside looking in, they may even look quite skilled.

I would love it if more people focussed on improving their connection rather than learning flashy moves. I am looking for people that I enjoy dancing with, more than people that are interesting to watch. (PSA: You can be both!! But please start with being a better partner.)

From what I’ve learned so far, Blues is mainly danced in close embrace, which is very similar to Balboa. I’m sure my Balboa experience is helpful here, but I also know I have a lot to learn and I am very eager to do that. As in Balboa, if you don’t have good connection, the whole dance is a total disaster. Once you get there though, ssoooo sooo good.

(I think this is also the main appeal of Balboa, to me. It may not be as impressive to watch as Lindy Hop, but it is super enjoyable to experience when you have a good connection with your partner and the music.)

Solo Improvisation – To me, this is the scariest part of Blues. I have never liked being the centre of attention and have no interest in performing. Somehow having a dance partner makes things much easier for me. Also, as a follower, I love being able to rely on my partner to decide what’s happening next. Admittedly, I’m not thrilled with their ideas 100% of the time, but as I addressed in my Swing dancing post, this is the one area of my life where I can just be in the moment and not have to make decisions, so I find it’s still a good trade-off.

Solo dancing does come up in Swing dancing, but there’s not always as much emphasis on it as in Blues, so I’ve mostly been able to avoid it. While Blues dancing is still a lead/follow dance, there is more opportunity and expectation of solo improvisation and this is an area where I am not very comfortable. I expect that as I become more familiar with the movement of the dance with a partner, I will also become more relaxed about this part. (Fingers crossed, anyway.)

What I do know is that from Day One, over 6 years ago, dance has forced me out of my comfort zone on a regular basis, and this has improved my life in almost every aspect. I see no reason to sit back now when there’s so much more to explore, and I’m really looking forward to expanding my repertoire so that I can more fully appreciate and enjoy traditional swing and blues jazz music, at whatever tempo is being played.

Week 15: Thanksgiving

I didn’t really have a plan for this week’s post, very much like the Thanksgiving long weekend, in general. If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, you’ll know I’ve been going on and on about free time and all the things I want to do with it, and on that front, this weekend has been pretty successful so far!

On Friday afternoon, I decided to leave work a couple of hours early. It was nice and sunny out, the office was quiet, and the weekend was calling me. For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to tick off some things that have been hanging around on my ‘to do’ list for a few months. Now that we’re in the 4^th quarter of the year, I am feeling the need for closure.

My plan was to go home and post a bunch of items in the local share group on Facebook. If you aren’t a member of any groups like this, I would highly recommend joining one. The main rules of the ones I belong to are that there is no money involved (free items only) and you must be located in New West. If you have something you don’t need or want, you post it to give away, and if there’s something you are looking for, you ask if anyone has one they want to get rid of. It is the best.

I have mostly used it for giving stuff away because I’m still working on purging unnecessary things in my life, but I have also had great success in getting specific items that I was looking for. Both giving and receiving through the group feel great because you’re keeping things out of the landfill, not spending any money, and making connections in your community.

Friday afternoon, I posted photos of 11 separate, very miscellaneous things that I wanted to get rid of. I am actually going to list the items to give you an idea of the variety of stuff:

Cat water fountain
2 plastic/ disposable rain ponchos
Ceramic cake stand
18 silicone muffin tin liners
¾ of a package of brown paper lunch bags
Twin duvet cover with pillowcase
¾ full bag of charcoal briquettes
Refill for dish scrubber brush
Plastic Elizabethan collar for cats (“cone of shame”)
Single chandelier light bulb
Mostly full jar of digestive enzyme powder for pets

Some of this stuff had been sitting in the cupboard for several years, some of it I had recently decided I didn’t need, but all of it could be useful to someone. Proving this, 10 of the 11 items were claimed within the hour. It is now Monday morning and 7 of the items have been picked up already.

Good start to the weekend!

Our plan for Saturday was to go down to Granville Island for donuts and coffee, and then (weather-pending) work on getting the back yard cleaned up a bit.

On the way to Granville Island, we had one stop in New West to pick up an accordion file folder, which I had requested from the share group earlier this week. (Another of the items on my ‘to do’ list is to get our filing organized.)

Weekend baked goods at Granville Island is something we have done every so often for many years. I had pretty much forgotten about it over the last year of working on the house, so it felt kind of celebratory to do it again. Due to the season, we wanted go to Lee’s Donuts and get pumpkin spice donuts.

Now whether you feel like it’s cool to like pumpkin spice, or very uncool, I don’t think many people would argue with a fresh, warm donut on a cloudy fall morning. Being there, we felt it would be prudent to order half a dozen donuts. Then we made a quick stop at Petit Ami to fill our mugs with coffee, and were onto the hit-or-miss task of finding somewhere to sit.

As usual, the Granville Island Public Market was busier than I expected. There was a time in my life when I was on Granville Island about 6 days a week, either at school or working, and I was very knowledgeable about how to get in and out, and the best times to avoid the craziness of tourists, etc. These days, I usually just aim to get there as early as possible and get out as soon as I can. Not that I don’t see the appeal of the public market; it is an amazing place and I love it. I just don’t love it on weekends when everyone else is there loving it at the same time.

Luckily for us, we found a free table for two above the hubbub, and got to enjoy our breakfast in relaxation. After a quick stop at the butcher shop, we were heading home. In and out in under an hour.

It had rained quite a bit while we were inside, but as we drove home, it was clearing up. This was good news as far as being productive with the rest of the day.

All the time we spent working on the inside of our house this past year directly correlates with the amount we neglected and abused our backyard. Our original goal was to spend a few weekends getting it cleaned up before we had a tenant, but we were so behind schedule that we had to abandon that idea.

Our backyard has always been a space that was a low priority for us. We don’t really use it, and that’s probably because we haven’t spent any time making it into something that suits our purposes. We hope to remedy that next year and we have lots of plans, but before we even think about beginning to create anything, we need to clean up our mess. Currently our yard can be thought of as 3 sections: raised garden beds, bee hive area and rubble pile.

Prior to this, we had made a bit of headway by getting rid of the garbage that had stacked up from our renovation, and pulling out all the overgrown weeds in the raised garden beds. (The beds have been there since we moved in almost 10 years ago and we haven’t done anything with them yet.)

The remaining items required to get the yard to a kind of ‘clean slate’ state were to weed the bee hive section and remove the large piles of rocks and broken concrete that accumulated from digging out for new plumbing and entry stairs. That second part is going to take a lot of sweat and creativity, unless we want to spend a lot of money, which we don’t. I’m guessing it won’t be tackled until the spring.

The bee hive section of the yard is pretty much what it sounds like. We have a bee hive, which requires specific clearances around it to meet city by-laws, and it is enclosed on three sides by fencing. Our bees did not survive last winter, and we decided not to get a new colony this spring because the yard was in such a state of disarray. The whole area has since been overtaken with blackberries and morning glory.

I don’t think anyone that is reasonably good at taking care of their yard can appreciate the great satisfaction that you feel when you clear up years’ worth of overgrown invasive species in a few hours. I would say it’s one of the great joys of having a Type B personality.

We filled the bed of my mom’s pick-up truck with so much green waste that it was taller than the cab, and took it up to recycling. Due to the nature of the load, it held itself together without any outside assistance, so we didn’t even have to spend any time tying it down. Thank you thorns!

I wish I had taken a ‘before’ picture because even though the area still looks pretty sad, it’s so much better than it was.

Saturday night, we made dinner at home and watched a movie on Netflix. It was a nice, quiet end to an enjoyably productive day. Plus, the weekend was only a third over and I had already checked multiple tasks off my list and even fit in a nap.

Week 14: Watch Not, Want Not

We decided to cancel our cable a few months ago, and I have to say, I do not miss it at all. Not because we don’t watch TV, because we definitely do. We watch Netflix, and we stream a few shows or movies here and there. We probably have more than enough options with Netflix alone, but there are a handful of programs that we have to make a bit more effort to find, and they’re worth it.

Before we cancelled our cable, we had a pretty basic package anyway. We mostly used it to watch the news before and after work, to record a few shows on network TV that we would watch weekly, and Michel would watch college football during its season. For the amount of money we were paying each month, it just didn’t make sense.

I never really enjoyed having the news on in the morning or evening anyway. I was used to it because Michel liked it, but I much prefer quiet. I don’t like having ‘background noise’ and I find it extra irritating when it’s repetitive and negative, and the fearmongering seemed to be getting more and more blatant. I don’t need that in my life.

A few months ago, I had an experience that also made me think about how much what you watch on TV can affect your outlook, which also has a huge impact on how you spend money (and how much you spend). I’m sure this is not really news to anyone, but it’s like when you go swimming: The water seems nice and warm when you’re acclimatized, but if you jump in dry, it’s shockingly cold. This is how I felt when I found myself watching HGTV for an hour last spring. It was so bizarre that I actually took notes and can write a blog post about it months later.

I should mention that during this time, we were deeply ensconced in Mad Men. We had already watched the entire series when it originally aired, and were right in the middle of ploughing our way through it on Netflix for a second time. I was already in the headspace of advertising (in the 60’s) but was mostly seeing the ads from the seller’s point of view, not the consumer’s.

I’m just going to transcribe my notes from the time because they kind of crack me up. I’ll add some more comments and context so they make some kind of sense outside my own head.

Alexa – trying to make it an emotional purchase – sentimental use to help daughter w/ problems. Soft music.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine: Selling technology from the standpoint of it being a way to connect people emotionally.

This particular ad is aimed at parents, I guess. The daughter has a rough day at soccer practice and gets up in the middle of the night to kick the ball against the house. The mom uses Alexa to turn on the outside light for the daughter, and they share a look of understanding through the window. (Never mind that the mom would definitely not be visible to the daughter because she’s standing in the dark, the window would be reflecting the light that just came on, and the daughter would be temporarily blinded by the sudden change in brightness anyway.)

It’s just stupid. Without Alexa, the only thing that changes is the mom has to walk downstairs and flip the light switch. Instead they opt to install eavesdropping devices all over their house, which seems much more sensible.

Clamato pickled bean flavour?

I have no additional comments on this. I don’t drink, I’ve never had a Caesar, so I really don’t have a qualified opinion; it just sounds gross.

Mr Clean Magic Wipes – disposable toxic version of a cloth

I was aware of Magic Erasers before this, which also seemed like a bad idea, but this product just seems like it goes that extra mile to be the worst. It’s definitely well past the time we should have collectively decided not to buy disposable items in general, but it was legitimately surprising to me that companies are still designing new ones! And to replace something that works perfectly fine, except for the fact that it doesn’t go in a landfill when you’re done. Insanity.

Luxury pool design shows – good way to combat global warming? “most extravagant designs”

This was an ad for another show. I can’t remember the name of it (and there are multiple ones to choose from), but it’s basically rich people putting in ridiculous pools. I can’t figure out who the target audience for this show is meant to be, but I suppose it’s watched more as a fantasy ideal than as inspiration for your own project, so it could be just about anyone.

I don’t recall exactly what I meant by “good way to combat global warming?” but I think it was influenced by the previous commercial for disposable toxic cloths and I was thinking that instead of changing our habits to be less destructive, it was suggesting we spend more money on pools so we can keep cool while the Earth burns around us.

CLR – “make life a little bit easier” aimed at moms who have to clean up after messy family. Who’s doing the cooking?

At this point, it was starting to become clear that this time slot was aimed at harried moms. I would assume if they were actually watching, it was while multi-tasking because this was around noon on a Sunday and I can’t imagine anyone as busy as the moms in the ads would be sitting around watching TV in the middle of the day. (I could be wrong though! I don’t have personal experience here.)

In the CLR ad, it seemed to indicate that the mom was frantically trying to keep up with cleaning after her family, and this would make it so much easier. The confusing part was that the kitchen was a total disaster and since it was obvious the rest of the family was not helping out at all, she must have been the one that made the huge mess in the first place. And while that seems pretty realistic actually, I think they were trying to indicate that her family had made the mess.

I can’t find the ad now to refresh my memory, but at the time I was watching it, it seemed like they hadn’t really thought the whole thing through and were just relying on stereotypes to make it work.

Budget Blinds – “making life just a little bit easier” smart home

Two ads in a row with a tagline about making life easier. In this one, they were promoting the vast amounts of time and energy you could save by not having to manually open or close your blinds.

If these two ads were meant for the same audience, I would suggest that instead of blowing thousands of dollars on automated blinds, you could put the money towards having someone come by and help out with the cleaning every so often. In all the time you freed up, you could open and close the blinds as often as you wanted.

Shows let you see only the fun, satisfying part of a reno. Inspire you to make expensive changes to your own home, make you dissatisfied w/ what you have

When the TV show came on, it was a design and construction show about a married couple who helps people find and renovate a home. This part, I was watching from the perspective of someone that makes a living as an Interior Designer, but also as someone who had been spending all their free time on actually doing a home renovation. From both these points of view, these shows are very unrealistic and annoying.

A lot of the time, when I tell someone I’m an interior designer, they light up and get excited, as if it’s something like playing with kittens for a living. This is all due to HGTV, I believe. They show the fun, creative part and the exciting reveal, but don’t waste a minute on the other 90% of the work. Most of my time is actually spent working out construction details that are never seen, spending hours drawing up all the plans and elevations, compiling all the specifications, dealing with clients who change their minds constantly and contractors who need designs to be revised for budget purposes, and then co-ordinating all of this so it works out in the end… That would be a super boring TV show.

Married hosts having so much fun working together (better than forced drama)

The hosts of the show were having a lovely time working together, which I found unrealistic, but vastly more palatable than the shows where there is a bunch of conflict added for the sake of drama. I don’t get that at all.

Full set of reasonable commercials – have I adapted already?

Somehow, in the next set of ads, I didn’t really have any issues, which was kind of alarming actually. The only thing I recall is there was a commercial with a baby basset hound.

If that was the first ad I saw, then maybe it was enough to envelope me in a fog of complacency for the entire set. The only other explanation is that the amount of time it takes to become assimilated is extremely short.

As we have been consciously working on optimizing our spending, we made the decision that cable did not provide adequate value to us, so we got rid of it. This decision also happened to double as a way of implementing a Low Information Diet, which is a concept that comes from The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, and is also used in a post by Mr Money Mustache. In both cases, it is about reducing the amount of time that is wasted in your life due to getting caught up in useless garbage disguised as being important. I think it’s fair to say that TV commercials definitely fit in this category, but until you step away for a while, it might not be obvious.

If you’re constantly being sold to, it seems normal to have to make a lot of purchases, but if you don’t know what you’re “missing”, then you can save a lot of money.

But wait, there’s more!

This is also an alternative way to “make life easier” because the less money you need to pay for all this stuff, the less you need to work, which frees up time for things like:

opening and closing your blinds
cleaning the kitchen
washing reusable cloths
drinking Caesars

The list is endless really. That’s just a small sampling I’ve chosen based on my limited research into the needs of the average consumer.

My own list is quite different, but can be found here.

Week 13: October Check-Up

October starts tomorrow, so I thought it would be a good time to check in on the Fall Focal Points situation. I wrote that post just about 2 months ago, in eager anticipation of gaining my weekend hours back, and as of yesterday, our basement project is 100% complete. Big sigh of relief.

To say this is the biggest renovation we’ve ever tackled would be an understatement. Before this, we had limited ourselves to one room at a time, and as of right now, none of them have actually been completed. They’re mostly done, and after a surprisingly short amount of time, you barely notice things like missing trim or unpainted ceilings. We are pretty good at getting to the point where the majority of the project is complete and the room is totally functional, then we lose interest. I know this isn’t an uncommon problem, but both of us work at jobs that are very much about producing finished work so you’d think we’d be able to get our act together. As it turns out, we can, as long as there is a financial reward.

In this case, we decided that we wanted to build a suite in our basement to replace the weirdly laid out maze of rooms that had become a grungy storage area for things we didn’t really need. Huge waste of space was what it was. We had been planning to do this for years, but it was an overwhelming task to think about, as it meant getting rid of almost everything down there, completely deconstructing the existing layout, and moving/redesigning our heating system before we could even begin.

Once we got started though, there was really no going back because every cent we paid to move forward was wasted money unless the end result was rental income. The entire process took about a year and a half, though it was really only the last 8 months or so that involved us spending all our weekends physically working on the construction. As an interior designer, I loved planning everything and I think my professional knowledge probably helped us avoid a lot of bumps along the way, but actually doing the work? Not my favourite.

You may (or may not) wonder what, after so many years of living in our house, made us decide to finally take this on. For me, it was definitely influenced by the reading I had been doing on financial independence and early retirement (known as the FIRE movement, if you want to look it up.)

I referenced this, but didn’t really go into detail, in my Life Energy Valuation post. I’m not going to go into detail here either, but the basic premise of the FIRE movement is to maximize your savings and reduce your expenses, with the goal of not having to work for a living as soon as possible. The part about not working is something I have always desired; I just had no idea that there was an attainable way to achieve it, aside from marrying an elderly millionaire or winning the lottery, neither of which are things I could really see happening in my life.

From a FIRE standpoint, the basement suite hits a lot of marks:

Rental income – This is, of course, an obvious one, but I do want to point out that instead of using the money to buy more or fancier stuff, we intend to save it for the future.
Optimization of space – We have now taken something that we were not using, and turned it into a comfortable home for another person; we were lucky enough to buy our house before prices skyrocketed, but that means that if we wanted to downsize to just the right amount of space for us, there would likely be no financial gain, just a lot of hassle. Plus we love our neighbourhood and want to stay right where we are.
Purging excess stuff – We sold or gave away as much as we could of the miscellaneous items that had amassed over the years, though sadly quite a lot of stuff ended up in the landfill too – we are making a conscious effort to limit purchases going forward. (There’s still a lot of stuff in this house that doesn’t spark joy, but it’s an ongoing process.)
Retirement income – Further down the road, the suite income could cover a portion of our living expenses, and potentially, it could also be turned into a short term rental when we have more time to be involved in managing it.

Building the suite was a big step in optimizing our finances, but once you’ve optimized as much as you can, unless you can also drastically increase your income, the blazing excitement of FIRE kind of settles down to hot coals and it just becomes a waiting game. This brings me back to my initial intent of this post, which is to re-assess my Fall Focal Points, because I don’t want to just wait around for retirement, I want to live it during the free time that I’ve worked so hard to create.

When I wrote my FFP post, I was anticipating (optimistically) getting started in September. I am about a month behind, so I really haven’t actually started yet, however; in the past couple of months, I have had some thoughts and additional ideas about my plans:

Writing:

Weekly blog – still going strong!
Children’s book – no progress
E-publishing/ self-publishing – this is a topic I want to look into; it seems to open the door to a wide range of endeavours but I haven’t done any research on it yet

Swing Dancing:

No progress on watching or practicing the content from all our video recaps yet. I think we will need to choose a specific move or technique to focus on during a particular time frame in order to make progress; we need structure or we don’t do anything at all.
We have branched out into Blues dancing by taking some lessons and attending one social dance (so far). We are also registered for a workshop next month. We are really enjoying it and I think it will be beneficial to our swing dancing progress as well.
I am thinking about starting a monthly Balboa practice group, but haven’t worked out the logistics yet. It’s an idea that has been percolating for a while and now that I have some free time again, I would like to get it going
Video of myself dancing – this idea is somewhat horrifying to think about, but I know it would be useful in order to understand what I want/need to work on…

Stained Glass:

No progress here, though I do have another design I want to work on, in addition to the one I did during the summer
Until I clean up what’s left of our basement, I don’t really have a work space for this so it might have to wait until spring. In the meantime, I might continue to work on some new designs whenever the mood strikes.

Secret Design Project:

No progress here, but I have a few items on my checklist that I plan to compete by the end of the year.

These focal points should be more than enough to keep me enjoyably busy for the next season or two*, but still allow me to be flexible about how I want to spend my weekends and Mondays. I’m already looking forward to next weekend when the only thing I have on my schedule is Sunday jazz.

*I have given myself permission to not think about any house-related projects for 6 months and just bask in the glory of achievement. I would like to complete all those 90% finished projects, just not right now.

Week 12: Glen Rambles

I’m a little behind schedule this week, but with good reason! I had to work on my usual blogging day in order to take yesterday and today off for a mini-vacation to Seattle to see Glen Hansard at the Moore Theatre. I have mentioned this trip to enough people over the last few months to know that your next question is: Who? So I will tell you.

Glen Hansard is a singer and songwriter from Dublin, Ireland. He started out as a busker, fronted a band called The Frames for many years, and starred in the movie Once, which won the Oscar for best original song in 2008. He wrote and performed that song with Marketa Irglova, who he went on to make an album with called The Swell Season. I had not heard of any of that the first time I saw Glen in concert.

In 2011, I had tickets to see Eddie Vedder on his solo tour. He was doing two shows in Seattle at Benaroya Hall. The drama that unfolded in the 24 hours leading up to that show could be a blog post in itself, but briefly; I realized on the Thursday night before the Friday show that my passport was expired. Anyone who knows me will agree that this is VERY unlike me, but somehow it happened.

Everything I googled said that the fastest I could get a new one would be 24 hours, and as it was already end of business day on Thursday, that essentially meant Monday morning. But like one of those moms lifting a car off her trapped baby, I can manage extraordinary feats when it involves Pearl Jam or its members. By Friday at noon, we were on our way to Seattle with my brand new passport in hand, and I was heading towards one of the most magical concert experiences of my life.

It may have been the overwhelming relief that I had actually made it to the show, combined with the amazingness of Benaroya Hall, but a big part of it was also finding Glen Hansard, who I didn’t know was missing from my life. Second song in, he sang Leave and blew our minds (you’ll understand if you get to about the 2:00 mark). There was no going back from there.

Since then, I have seen him 6 or 7 times in Seattle, Vancouver and Las Vegas, and he has never let us down. Unfortunately, this tour only included a single stop in Seattle and nothing in Vancouver, so we took a little road trip and had to resign ourselves to only one show.

Joining me and Michel on this trip was my mom, and her friend Allison. My mom had seen Glen with us a couple of times in the past, but Allison had been won over by listening to a single song and eagerly joined us.

We arrived in Seattle in the early afternoon and checked into the Moore Hotel, which is next door to the Moore Theatre. We often stay here because it’s close to everything and it’s reasonably priced. After dropping off our bags, we split into two groups: people that hadn’t been to Seattle in a while (mom and Allison) and people that no longer felt like visitors (me and Michel).

Michel and I headed down the street for pizza at Serious Pie. We had been trying to eat here for years and it had so far never worked out. Yesterday, we succeeded and we were there for happy hour. We started off by sharing a margarita pizza, which was so delicious that we then ordered a half size of their most popular pizza, the one with Italian sausage, peppers and provolone. It too was excellent.

After our late lunch, we walked another half block to get slices of the amazing Triple Coconut Cream Pie at Dahlia Bakery. This is not to be missed if you’re ever in the area, so we made a point not to miss it.

Our lack of interest in seeing any local sights also allowed us to fit in a nap before the show. It hadn’t been a very strenuous day, but after spending 3 hours driving that morning, I did need to rest my eyes.

At 6:30pm, we headed downstairs to go to the concert. Our tickets were excellent Row D floor seats. By the time the opening act started, the venue was about half full. The opener was a duo from Rwanda that was playing in North America for the first time ever. The audience was very supportive, and they seemed to appreciate it.

Before the lights went down for Glen’s show I saw Eddie Vedder’s wife and daughter arrive to the balcony box across the auditorium from us. This, of course, got my expectations for a guest appearance by Eddie up extremely high. I still feel like I’m in a major Pearl Jam drought, so it’s hard not to wish for these things. (Last time we had seen Glen at the Moore, we were hoping Eddie would come out for a song or two, being good friends with Glen and a resident of Seattle, but no such luck.)

Glen, as usual, was charming and interesting and sounded fantastic. In between songs he would tell us stories of how the songs came about, or what he had done that day or at other stops on the tour. If he announced a show where he was just going to stand on stage and chat about random topics, I would probably be just as likely to buy a ticket as I would for an actual concert.

The majority of the songs he played were from his new album, The Wild Willing. Admittedly, I am less familiar with this album than the previous ones. I do own it, but I mostly listen to music in the car and I don’t drive very much anymore. The album, unlike his other work, has a lot of layers and huge contrast between quiet, soft parts and extremely noisy jumbles of sound. It’s almost like something Trent Reznor would come up with if he was an Irish poet.

With such a large catalogue of material from his years with The Frames and The Swell Season, and his previous solo albums, I knew that I probably wouldn’t hear all the songs that are my favourites, however; I also know I wouldn’t want to go see him play the same songs over and over again, so I am more than willing to take whatever setlist he deems appropriate. He knows what he’s doing.

I think it was a pretty long show, but I was making a point of not looking at the time. I didn’t glance at my phone once, and it wasn’t difficult at all. As I have been so many other times, I was fascinated by the people around me and how they experience live music. Not that there’s a right or a wrong way, but it just seems very weird to me that the people that are outwardly acting the most excited, by yelling or waving their arms or whatever, are also the people that spend half a song looking down at their phone to go through the crappy pictures they just took, or run out to get a beer in the middle of the show.

Overall though, I found the crowd great. Glen Hansard is not widely famous enough that people just buy tickets to his shows without already knowing his music, and that tends to cut down on the amount of lame people that just go to things so they can take selfies to prove they were there. I enjoyed watching the guy in front of me, who had come to the show alone, make friends with the people sitting on either side of him.

After the main set was finished, the crew brought out two stools and two mikes to the front of the stage and I knew Eddie was coming out. (Plus I’d seen a person with a flashlight enter the balcony box earlier and escort someone out, so I had a bit of a heads up.)

Eddie and Glen are good friends and have toured together a lot over the past 8 or so years. It is clear, watching them sitting together and talking, that they have great respect and love for each other. I have seen them do some songs together in the past, always at shows that Eddie was headlining with Glen as the guest, so it was a huge treat to see them together in reversed roles.

They sang Society, from Eddie’s Into The Wild soundtrack, and then they did Pearl Jam’s Smile, which is one of my favourites. As excited as I was witness this, I was probably more excited that my mom got to experience it. She has been subjected to my love of Pearl Jam for 25 years or more and has had to spend many, MANY hours listening to their music in the car, or listening to me talk about them.

It was also appropriate that she finally got to see Eddie live at the Moore Theater, because I’m sure she’s still regretting not taking me to see Pearl Jam in 1995 when I had free fan club tickets to a show there… or maybe she would have long forgotten about that if I didn’t still bring it up to this day. Either way, I’m sure she checked that item off her bucket list as soon as she got home today (only 24 years later than necessary.)

My list when I got home was to paint the trim on the basement door, return my library books and write my blog post. Done, done and done. Time for dinner and some TV. Mid-week weekends are tiring, but I highly recommend them.

Week 11: Pentastic Weekend (pt 2)

If you’ve read last week’s post, you’re already pretty well informed about what the Pentastic Hot Jazz and Music Festival is, and how it works. There are a bunch of different bands playing around town in a number of venues, and it’s up to you to decide who you want to see and where. In some cases, it’s a no-brainer, but there are other time slots where you have multiple great options and it becomes necessary to start weighing them against previous and future options, so you can fit as much good stuff into the weekend as possible. It becomes mentally exhausting.

I left off last week on Saturday after lunch. Michel and I had decided to check out the Farmer’s Market because we’d heard about it last year but couldn’t tear ourselves away from jazz to actually see it. This year, we almost made it!

We hit Main St right as the vendors were starting to pack up their merchandise. We were just able to do a quick walk-through and get an idea of what kind of things were for sale. It looked pretty great, but I am ¾ of the way through a year of trying not to spend money on ‘things’ so I wasn’t super disappointed to miss out.

It was nice to have a little break though. We still had a good hour before the next set, so we wandered around town a bit, stopped back at the house for a little rest, and still made it to the 2:30 pm show at the Elks Hall, which had been decided on over lunch.

The Elks Hall was our favourite venue last year because it’s small and intimate, but also has a great floor. The major downside of the venue is, as Andrew described it, the “Draconian water bottle policy”. I am not entirely clear on who or what necessitates this rule, or why it only affects this particular venue, but the Elks Hall does not allow any outside food or drinks, including plain old tap water. They want to check inside your bag as you enter, and if you have a reusable bottle, they make you leave it at the front. Then, when you’re thirsty from dancing, you have to spend $1.25 and commit the unnecessary environmental crime of using a disposable plastic bottle so that you don’t die of dehydration. I’m sure there must be a law against this, but too lazy to look into it. If there isn’t, there should be!

The reactions of our group ranged from voluntary surrender of water bottles to avoid wasting valuable seconds with bag searching, to outright refusal of bag access and the sneaking in of bottles just to make a point. I don’t think any of us had the courage to actually bring a water bottle out into the open though; we just had to be secretly satisfied that we had gotten past the formidable Elks at the door. We still bought drinks from the venue though, because we want the old people to like us. If they hadn’t already heard that swing dancers are cheap, we didn’t want them to find out from us.

Saturday is the busiest day of the jazz fest, and while the Cocuzzi Coots Cortet put on a good show, the venue was full and it was getting pretty warm in there. When their set was finished, we were all ready to move on.

We had made the tough decision to go back to Orchard House to see Dave Bennett and the Memphis Speed Kings for the 4pm slot. What made this a difficult choice was the competition in this time slot. Our other, very appealing, option was to see The Black Market Trust again at the Sicamous.

The Sicamous is a very unique venue. It’s actually a boat. During the rest of the year, it is a museum located on the Sternwheeler SS Sicamous, but for the jazz fest, it’s a ‘listening venue’. It is a cool place to see the show because it’s so different from the other venues and it holds the least amount of people, but it also has very little room for dancing. (One might say there’s NO room for dancing, but you can make it happen if you’re careful and determined.) At this point in the day, that wasn’t unappealing, but we felt that if we were going to see the Speed Kings, then Orchard House was the best place to do it.

First though, time for ice-cream. We knew that Ogo’s was a few blocks away and we were unanimously in favour of a mid-afternoon treat, so off we went. We didn’t have the foresight to consider how long it would take a group of 7 tired dancers to walk a few blocks, individually decide on ice-cream flavours, take one photo and make our way a few blocks to the next venue, but we soon found out that it was just long enough for Orchard House to reach capacity. We actually weren’t even late for the show, but we hadn’t taken into consideration that Saturdays are busier than the rest of the weekend and Orchard House is pretty small. No regrets on the ice-cream though.

Dave Bennett and the Memphis Speed Kings are not what would be considered “hot jazz”; in fact, they are not really jazzy at all. They fall under the category of “And Music” that was added to the title of the festival this year in order to “encourage an interest with the millennials and younger crowd”. I’m not really sure how that’s working out for them, but we were definitely among the youngest attendees and we were very much there for the jazz.

That being said, the Speed Kings are an energetic vintage rockabilly band and Dave Bennett is a Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano player, which we thought would be fun to check out at Orchard House. Apparently, quite a few other people had similar ideas.

Re-invigorated by our ice-cream and already having another option at the ready, we quickly changed gears and squeezed our entire group into a jazz van to head to the Sicamous, which also turned out to be full. This really should have come as no surprise to us, but we were tired.

Luckily, the Sicamous is just a few minutes’ walk from our house, so we took a beach break to dip our tired feet in the lake and then headed home to figure out dinner. The new plan was unusually realistic: we were going to skip not just the 4pm show, but the 5:30pm one as well, giving ourselves almost 3 hours to eat, refresh and relax before the evening.

Decision-making skills were rapidly declining, but we managed to make some food choices in a reasonable amount of time. Michel and I opted to break away from the group and get tacos at Taco Del Norte, a cute little taco stand a few minutes away. I ordered the 4 taco meal and almost had to give up and go home when the person taking our orders wanted me to also choose which salsa to go with which taco flavour. I was just about beyond the ability to choose anything else for the day and I didn’t want to waste one of my remaining decisions on salsa of all things, so it was a great relief when the girl taking our orders was willing to make recommendations for me. I don’t know what she said, I just agreed.

Amazingly, our entire group was fed, showered and dressed in time to get back to the Elks Hall for another serving of The Black Market Trust. They were great, again. This time they ended the show with a couple of a cappella numbers that sounded fantastic and gave our feet a rest. We stuck around a bit after the show to get our CDs signed and chat with the band before heading to the Convention Centre.

The Black Market Trust at the Elks Hall – photo stolen from Facebook

The shuttle line-up outside the Elks was ridiculous, so we took advantage of our relative youth and decided to walk. The weather forecast was calling for a lot of rain, but it hadn’t hit yet, and the air had cooled down to a refreshing temperature, which was good because we needed to hurry if we wanted to catch the beginning of the 8:30 show. While we walked we could see a lot of lightning in the distance, and by the time we got to “Bourbon Street” for Bob Draga With Friends, a few fat drops of rain had started to come down.

Bob Draga is a staple of the jazz fest. He plays clarinet, and in between songs he tells jokes that should have been retired decades ago. I can’t say I enjoy his sense of humour, although there were a couple of jokes here and there that did make me chuckle, but his “friends” that accompany him change from year to year, and this time he had a young singer/pianist named Todd Morgan, who was really great. He sounded a bit like Elton John and he seemed to be the bandleader, although I’m not sure if Bob Draga realized this. Also accompanying him was a bass player who looked like he was about 18 years old and was clearly having a hard time enduring all the dated and offensive jokes. His bass playing was great, his poker face, not so much. I’m sure it was a character-building experience for him though.

The set, as usual, was reliable and danceable, but also punctuated with great claps of thunder and a torrential downpour that could be heard over the music. It was still raining heavily by the end of the set, but Dave and Catie opted to brave the elements in order to go back to the house and get to some much-needed rest.

We lost Chris somewhere along the way to his local skating friends, so it was down to four of us for the last set. We decided to head next door to “The French Quarter” and finally catch Dave Bennett and the Memphis Speed Kings for our last set of the night.

As you may recall, they are part of the “and music” category and they do indeed attract a different crowd. I didn’t catch sight of any millennials, but the average age in the room had dropped noticeably from 80-ish, to about 65 or so. It’s possible that this was due to the 10pm timeslot, but it was still an almost packed house, in one of the largest venues, and the dance floor was crowded with mainly women dancing up a storm, so I believe it was more because of sexy Dave Bennett and his piano shenanigans. I don’t find him particularly appealing, but there were multiple women at the table next to ours that were filming the entire show on their phones. And by show, I mean the projector screen, which was mostly a close-up view of Dave bashing at the piano with his big muscled arms.

While initially entertaining, we found it all to be a bit too much for us at this point in the day, so we headed home for night-time nachos, a house tradition. Friday night nachos had included the whole gang, plus guests, but Saturday night was a much quieter affair, due to extreme exhaustion and the need to be up, fed, dressed and out the door for a 9am show on Sunday morning. (This blog post is just about done, but to answer the unasked question: Yes, we succeeded.)

While I wouldn’t recommend Pentastic for a quiet and relaxing vacation, it is definitely a fun and unique way to spend a weekend. I suppose it would be possible to turn it into a more laid back getaway, but I don’t know why you would want to do that. We do have some ideas for how to improve our experience for next year, but those are more along the lines of meal planning and matching outfits. I don’t recall anyone saying anything about taking things easier.

Week 10: Pentastic Weekend (pt 1)

This weekend, for the second year in a row, I attended the Pentastic Hot Jazz and Music Festival in Penticton. This event has been taking place for 23 years and is a super fun time. Starting on Friday afternoon and going until Sunday afternoon, there are 5 bands playing in 5 different venues around the city, every hour and a half. (There were 11 bands total, so they did get a few breaks here and there.)

Weekend jazz events like this are a whole culture of their own. Until last year, it was something I was unaware of, and I’m guessing most other people are too. Generally, it’s probably not going to appeal to a broad audience, but for a select group, it’s practically a lifestyle. I’m not there yet, but when you’re fully immersed, you own an RV and spend half the year travelling around North America attending jazz festivals. As a Pearl Jam fan, this makes a lot of sense to me, because it would be a great option for concert tours as well, if you can pull it off.

This year, we had a group of 7 people sharing a rental house, plus a few other dancers who came out for a day or evening here and there. There were enough of us to ensure that we could dance as much as we wanted, and have a variety of partners to keep things interesting. (This is where someone with a less refined sense of humour would include a swinger joke, but after a weekend of listening to old jazz guys make lame and offensive jokes, I can’t stoop to doing something so obvious.)

I’ll walk through our Saturday*, to give you a feel for how we spent the weekend:

As devoted jazz fans, we got up bright and early so that we could have a proper breakfast before heading out for the day. We did a decent amount of organizing beforehand this year, so most of the necessary groceries were on hand and we all knew what the plan was. Catie and Dave prepared a delicious breakfast of gluten-free French toast, fresh fruit, bacon and coffee to sustain us for a morning of dancing. Amazingly, we were all fed, showered, dressed and out the door by just after 10am for the first set.

To start the day, there were just two options to choose from, both located at the Convention Centre, which is the largest venue, and my least favourite. On the plus side, it is where the merch table is located and that’s a big draw for the DJs in the group who are always on the search for new music.

The Black Swan Classic Jazz Band was our choice for the first show. As described in the official brochure, they are “a hot dance band dedicated to the preservation and performance of Dixieland, old-time gospel, early jazz and ragtime music”. They played a good variety of songs, and there were quite a few other dancers on the floor besides us. The dance floor in the “French Quarter” is beside the stage and under a large screen, so unlike the smaller venues, the dancers can be easily ignored by the audience. I don’t know if this encourages casual dancers to venture out, or if there are just more of them at this venue purely based on the larger capacity, but the dance floor always seems to be quite active in this room.

After the show we hopped in JAZZ 5, one of the free shuttles available to chauffer us to our next location. The shuttle service is both handy and adorable. It is a fleet of mini-vans and small buses, driven by volunteers with walkie-talkies and white hair. Most of the venues are within a reasonable walking distance from each other, but we were motivated to save time because we were all excited about the next show and didn’t want to be late.

Orchard House was a new venue for this year and we were curious to see what it was like, plus the band scheduled for the 11:30am slot was The Black Market Trust. Also new to the jazz fest this year, TBMT is a band that we were all curious about pre-festival, and they had already impressed us on Friday afternoon at our soon-to-be-former favourite venue, Elks Hall.

You may be wondering, what makes one venue better than another. And I will tell you:

Dance floor – this is a quality over quantity thing. We don’t need a ton of room, but we do require a nice wood floor with some slide
Smaller space – this is huge for the vibe of the show. In an intimate venue, the crowd can interact more with the band, which often means we have a bit of influence on their song choices, the sound is better and it just has a nicer feel overall
Water bottle policy – This is generally not a thing, but more on this later…

When we got to Orchard House, we were pleasantly surprised. It was a small venue with a decent sized stage that had some dance space right in front. We walked in, no one wanted to search our bags for contraband, and there was a table by the side of the stage, close to the dance floor, totally empty.

As expected, The Black Market Trust was great. These guys are super talented and extremely cute. There are 5 of them; they each play an instrument (or multiple instruments) and sing. They are amazingly tight and their harmonies are unbelievable. Here’s a taste: My Baby Just Cares For Me

Not all of their songs are good for swing dancing, which we were okay with, but it was very much appreciated when they offered to play more danceable songs and asked us what speed we would like. It caused a surprising amount of confusion, however; when Michel asked for “180 (bpm)”. The band claimed to love how specific our request was, but they had to get out their metronome app in order to comply. Totally worth the wait though, because they totally delivered on their last few songs.

As swing dancers, especially at the smaller venues, we really stood out. The majority of the people that attend the jazz festival are in their senior years, and while some of them definitely do some dancing, most of the audience is there for watching and listening only. This means that when a group of young (mid-30’s to mid-40’s) swing dancers show up, we become instant celebrities.

We were asked a great number of times throughout the weekend if we’re in a dance club together. I don’t know exactly what that is, or what would be involved, but it was a very common assumption. We took turns explaining that no, we just like to dance, we don’t all live in the same city, we’re just here to have fun… but we did come up with a catchy name for ourselves when we were put on the spot.

Julie, Michel and Chris are from New Westminster; Dave, Catie and Andrew are from Victoria; and Holly is from Kelowna, but for one weekend a year, we are the Churchill Street Gang. We are famous throughout the Pentastic Jazz Festival for our fancy footwork and smiling faces.

With such a tight schedule of sets, we had to figure out how to fit in lunch. Luckily, both Orchard House and the Elks Hall are very close to each other, and also to Il Vecchio, an excellent Italian deli. We had lunch there last year and I wanted to make a point of going back. Their system for dealing with numerous customers at once is mysterious and illogical, but before too long we all had delicious sandwiches to keep us going for the afternoon.

While the others carried on to the Elks Hall, Michel and I decided to take a break from jazz and walk through the farmer’s market, which was taking place on Main St.

This is probably more than enough for the average reader, but if you want to hear more, I’ll be back next week with tales of our adventure-filled afternoon and evening…

Stay tuned!

*Those that were actually there may notice that details from Friday or Sunday shows have been used for Saturday shows, strictly to fit the highlights into a single day (but sadly, not into a single post).

Week 9: Going Dutch

This week’s blog is a crossover post with our best brunchmates, Catie and Dave, from Late for Breakfast, Early for Lunch. This long weekend they are in town for some swing dancing-related activities, and we felt it was important to get a brunch in, so we’re back at Angelina’s, our go-to breakfast spot.

As mentioned in my previous post about Angelina’s, they are in a new, much larger location than they used to be. This is very helpful in situations where you want to meet friends at a specific time and don’t want to wait around for ages to get seated.

We had a new waitress today who I had never seen before. She was cheerful and prompt and she checked in with us enough, but not too much. We had coffees ($3.25) or in Dave’s case, orange juice ($5) within minutes of sitting down, and our breakfasts followed shortly thereafter. We had lots of time to eat and chat, but when we were ready to leave, we were taken care of and on our way without a lot of arm waving or waiting around.

I ordered my usual breakfast of French Toast with Raspberries and Whipped Cream ($13). When it arrived it seemed like maybe there were slightly fewer raspberries than usual, but I did manage to make them last until the final bite, so it could have been my imagination. I do have photo evidence and will compare next time we go there to keep an eye out for any downward trend in raspberries.

Catie also ordered Raspberries and Whipped Cream, but on a waffle instead of French toast. I know from experience that this was an excellent choice on her part. She also added crispy bacon ($4) on the side, which arrived as round bacon, not strips – it looked good, but I wasn’t thinking of this blog post as we were eating so I didn’t ask if she has a preference for a particular shape.

Dave and Michel each ordered the Big Pannekoeken ($18), which comes with eggs, baby potatoes and various fried meats. Again, not thinking ahead to this post, I didn’t follow up on their experiences, but they both ate every last bite so I’m thinking they were pleased.

Over breakfast we discussed our plans for next weekend’s getaway to the Pentastic Hot Jazz Festival in Penticton, which is guaranteed to be the topic of next week’s blog post. We’ll be spending the weekend dancing and listening to jazz with many elderly people. For me and Michel, this will be our second year attending, and likely not our last.

This morning’s breakfast was a fun change of pace, and a nice chance to catch up with friends over good food, but I do have one regret: It just occurred to me now that I have an Entertainment Book coupon for Angelina’s in my purse and I didn’t use it. Fingers crossed, I will remember next time.