The Unofficial Blue Skies Music Festival Lineup 2011

[Update: Here is the 2012 version]

The Blue Skies Music Festival in Clarendon Ontario has no website and does not announce its lineup in advance.
However, a little work on Google has turned up a number of artists who say they will be there this year.

• Ball and Chain (reliable sources tell me they are participating in a workshop)
• Callum Graham
• Danny Michel
• David Ross Macdonald
• Ferron (not confirmed on her website. Pollstar says she’ll be there. )
• Fred Penner
• Kim Churchill
• Lehera - songs
• Magoo (no indication that he’ll be at Blue Skies on his website, but come on.)
• Matt Anderson
• Saritah - youtube

If you want to go to the festival and you don’t have tickets, my experience is that you may be able to get day passes at the gate and if you’re really lucky, someone may show up with a camping pass just when you do. For more unofficial information on Blue Skies, see my other postings:

• Guide to the Blue Skies Music Festival: Getting There
• Guide to the Blue Skies Music Festival: Jamming
• Guide to the Blue Skies Music Festival: Dancing
• Guide to the Blue Skies Music Festival: Things to Acquire and Bring
• The Unofficial 2009 Blue Skies Music Festival Page

And here's the Environment Canada Forecast for Sharbot Lake

as of Weds, July 27:

Fri

• 29°C
• 18°C

Sat

• 28°C
• 17°C

Sun

• 29°C
• 17°C

Mon

• 30°C
• 18°C

Post festival updates:
I've learned not to trust the Environment Canada forecast even for 1 day in advance when it comes to Blue Skies. It rained for most of Friday until the late afternoon!
Some other artists who were at Blue Skies this year:

• Jonathan Byrd (the fantastic cowboy singer from North Cackalacky)
• Fred Penner (the 20-somethings went berzerk over him)
• Marky Weinstock (performed in children's area on Sunday at 10am)

Other social media on Blue Skies 2011

• Boffin + Wonk - Performers at Blue Skies 2011 - video collection
• Youtube - The Parade
• Flickr Group

A new time saver for me

This week, I found a way to shave time off the food preparation portion of my morning routine.

Almost every day, I heat my breakfast in the microwave. Whether it is a leftover pasta dish or fried rice, I give it one minute and thirty seconds. Since I left my parents home where the microwave timer is a knob and began using keypad timers, I have typed 1-3-0-start. But this week, it finally occurred to me that I could type 9-0-start.

If it takes me a tenth of a second to push that extra button, this innovation will save me 18 minutes over the next 30 years. It will save even more time if one day it makes the difference between catching a bus and missing a bus.

Ancient Greek Graffitti

Manon and I had the pleasure of dining this weekend with her brother and nephews. Before supper arrived, young Daniel illustrated a problem that occurred in ancient Greece when the authorities posted Kraken warnings and then young miscreants came along.

Big Showing for Kaye

Remember in March when I asked you to vote for Kaye in the National Gallery's So You Want to Be an Artist competition?

Not only did Kaye place in the top 12, she wound up showing as the 3rd place finisher. $500 in arts supplies!

Great Glebe Garage Sale

Saturday is the Great Glebe Garage Sale.

You should stay home.

The weather forecast is 60% chance of showers. Bank Street is under construction. It’s Ottawa Race Weekend [see Notes below].

But if you insist on going anyway, you might want to:

• Read the excellent advice I provided two years ago in Garage Sale - My Schema,
• Consider Zoom’s well-written but misguided response: GGGS: Breaking Scrimshaw's rules, and
• Listen to Real Grouchy’s The Great Glebe Garage Sale Song!

Notes:

• Rain will cut down on how many people put stuff out, and will seriously affect book sales, but sales will go on.
• Sure Bank Street is under construction, but it's not like traffic actually moves on Bank Street on a Saturday anyway, never mind during the garage sale.
• Ottawa Race Weekend always falls on the GGGS weekend. Any Saturday road closures that affect the Glebe start after 3pm when the sales are over anyway.

Parking Meter Planter in Chinatown

There's an old parking meter in Chinatown that has been converted into a planter.

I suppose it would cost too much to have done it with all of the old meters.

Grape bags

So here’s the thing. There are all sorts of big things going on - tsunamis, earth quakes, nuclear disasters, wars, revolutions, elections - but the top item on my “blog about this” list for the past month has been something that bothers me about the bags they put the grapes in at the grocery store. All those other things are more important, but anything I would say has been said and if I don’t get this out of my system, I may never blog again.

It used to be you’d pull a plastic bag off the roller and bag your own grapes. Now they’re bagged for you. I suspect that if I ask Loblaws or one of the other grocers why, they’ll tell me it is for my convenience.

However, I suspect it is so that they can sell more of the grapes that have fallen off the stems. As an experienced grape eater I can tell you that these are the first grapes to go rotten. Back when we bagged our own, the loose grapes would stay in the produce bin and Loblaws would have to throw them out. Now they go home with any customer who isn’t obsessive about choosing a bag without loose grapes.

This is not what bothers me. I see pre-bagged grapes as just another tactic in the retail industry program to sell us things we don’t want. I don’t like taking home bad grapes, but saving a few seconds bagging is almost worth the trade-off.

What bothers me is this: Given that the bags have many holes (for air flow? draining moisture?) do they really need airtight Ziploc seals?

And if they do need airtight Ziploc seals, shouldn’t they be seals that actually work and not ones that won’t stay closed no matter how hard you try to line up the grooves and press on them?