Mom's Birthday

Today is Mom's birthday and I'm in Guelph to celebrate it.

I'm not really in a financial position to cash out on presents this year, but I got her a few things.

One of the people I'm associated with does chainmail jewellery, so I got her a multi-colour bracelet from this guy. It's kind of cool, because it's similar to what Mom used to do when she had that entrepreneur jewellery business. I got this at the Side by Side Art Show at The Museum, which is run by Planned Lifetime Networks.

Planned Lifetime Networks is an organization that helps people diagnosed with developmental disabilities to create support networks and friendship circles. The Side by Side Art Show was an event where pieces done by local artists, from people with and without disabilities are put on display and sold. They had their most successful year this year, about triple the turnout of the year previous, enough to fill the entire bottom floor of The Museum.

I also got her a painting at this event. Made by an artist I'm not familiar with in this case. I won't be able to give it to her until The Museum is done with the display, though.

The Museum is a museum in downtown Kitchener. I don't really like the name, it sounds arrogant. It's kind of like saying "We are the one and only museum, compared to us, those other places don't deserve to call themselves such." We even have another major museum, the Waterloo Region Museum. Although I don't really like the name of that one either, because it's on the farside of Kitchener, and even though Kitchener is part of the Waterloo Region, considering the rivalry between the two cities, showcasing Waterloo's prominence in the heart of Kitchener feels uncool. I still prefer it to The Museum though.

We have a couple of smaller museum's too. There's one in the University of Waterloo, and one in Conestoga Mall, and we have a more specified Clay and Glass Art Museum. And while The Museum is a nice museum, it really only has one major exhibit going at a time, which the swap out to keep things varied. It's a relatively small museum compared to, say, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, which has enough space to maintain a variety of stable exhibits. It might not be fair to compare Kitchener's major museum to Toronto, considering Toronto's status, but it still goes to show you that between the to of them, if one of them is going to be The Museum, it isn't Kitchener's.

The Museum also has a pub attached to it named "B @ The Museum". The "B" doesn't stand for anything, it's just trying to be modern, I guess, by misspelling the word "be" as if it were text or chat. But people do that because they're firing off a  quick message and don't want to waste time. When they do it, it comes across like they were in a hurry to get their market out and couldn't bother to waste time spelling the words "be" or "at". The person in charge of naming things @ The Museum doesn't know what they are doing.

Mom's birthday always falls near Mother's Day, so she kind of gets the two celebrated in one. Since Mother's Day was last Sunday, I couldn't really get to Guelph for it, because I'd have the awkward decision of taking a whole week off or going back Monday, staying in Kitchener for one full day and leaving the day after. I guess she's got a similar problem to a kid whose birthday is near Christmas.