Last year I made a post about a local event called the Central Art Walk. For a weekend, local artists display their work from their homes, and the public is invited in to browse and make purchases. Art can be on the more traditional side in the form of paintings, but can be anything including sculptures, woodworking, jewellery, homemade soap, etc. Last year we got some wooden spoons, a canvas with colourful buttons attached to it, and Lee-Anne got some mittens.
It was inspired by another event called the Frederick Art Walk, which has been going on for longer and is larger in scale. I went to that one once, but I was alone and too shy to look at things closely.
This year we made it to both. On the Central Art Walk we didn't see our spoon guy, which is too bad because we have a few more wooden bowls and would have made a purchase to accompany them. We did see the person we got our button canvas from.
There was an Artists's Co-Op, which I think is pretty established but was new to the walk. A piece that caught our eye was a painting of a sliding scale of citrus fruits, with a lime at one end and a grapefruit at the other. The artist wasn't present that day, but Lee-Anne took her contact information and contacted her later to make a purchase. It's paid for now and we just have to pick it up.
One of the addresses was located on Waterloo Street. We went there but it didn't have a display. Before we could decide whether or not we should knock, the home owner took the initiative to poke her head out and say that if we were looking for art, the address number was the same, but it was in the city of Waterloo. We were at Waterloo St, Kitchener, but we needed Waterloo St, Waterloo. I got the impression that she'd needed to give this explanation a lot over the weekend.
Our neighbourhood borders the two cities. The place we were looking for was on the same physical street, just in the opposite direction. I've always thought having Waterloo Street so close to Waterloo was a problem. Having a Waterloo Street in Waterloo shouldn't be allowed.
Lee-Anne's mom expressed disappointment that she wasn't able to come to the Central Art Walk. Lucky for her we still had Frederick. She came with us to that one and got a couple of new Christmas stockings, as a new child had recently been born in the family, and another one is on the way. She also got some soap. Lee-Anne got a handbag and some wool balls that are supposed to replace dryer sheets while doing laundry. I've tried them since and I guess they work. To be fair, I haven't used dryer sheets since college.
I was bolder at this walk and got a 2025 calendar, a sketchbook, and some bookmarks. We also got a cat toy. Part of me felt bad for making more purchases at the Frederick Art Walk than the one in our own neighbourhood, although Lee-Anne did later get that citrus painting.
I ran into the guy that made my wooden bowls. Because I'd bought some for my family as gifts and we rescued them, we currently have two households worth and weren't in need of any more. Since I hadn't seen him at the Central Art Walk, I was worried I'd bought too much of his supply and he couldn't justify doing a stand, but I was glad to see he still had a good quantity.
I ran into some old colleagues from when I was an Independent Facilitator. The Frederick neighbourhood is basically social work central.
It was Lee-Anne's 31st birthday recently. We got Detroit style pizza from a nearby place, and on her request I made a fattoush salad to go with it and brownies for dessert. Normally I'd make a chocolate coconut cream pie, but that wasn't the birthday wish this year. Maybe I'll make one this Tuesday for the US election, since Kamala has that coconut symbolism.
We gave out candy on Halloween. Mom is still staying with us, and she hasn't lived on a street with active trick-or-treaters for at least as long as I've been alive. Last year I tried to keep track of how many kids came, but a bunch showed up in a huge wave near the end and I lost count. I estimated that we had about 40.
I was told standard trick-or-treating hours were 6-9. Things were slow at first, picked up around 7, and died around 8. Because we live in the basement apartment, we have to set up a stand in the front yard or nobody will approach us. At 8:30 it started to rain in a serious way so we went in. At this time we had 40 trick-or-treaters. Even one of the kids from upstairs said she was sorry I "didn't break the record".
But later, after 9, Mom was sitting outside and two trick-or-treaters came by, raising us to a final count of 42.
Best costume of the night goes to the kid that dressed up as a recycling bin. Apparently his dad was wearing a matching costume. I didn't see the father, but I like to imagine that one was paper and the other containers. I'm pretty sure I remember the kid was paper.
