I’m blown away, thank you.
11:43 p.m.
Another mind-blowing experience I had this weekend was Buddy Boy’s delivery of his speech at the Canadian Aviati0n Museum. He talked about his great-great-uncle who was a WWI flying ace and died over Provin, France. He’d prepared a CD-ROM with a powerpoint file containing some photographs--the pilot in uniform, the house where his relative (and his grandfather as well) grew up in rural Nova Scotia, the airplane he flew, etc.--and ended up not being able to use it as the photos themselves didn’t appear. Instead of agonizing over it, he just read his speech. He had incredible poise, clear enunciation, excellent timing, and I was practically in tears when he finished. The curator who had set up the event was also overwhelmed. She told me she too, even though he wasn’t her son, was proud of him.
He was followed by a pilot who is a member of the armed forces and who has seen service in many parts of the world. He was to speak about his uncle who fought and died in WWII, and he did, with a powerpoint presentation that worked, but he followed this with another talk about his own experiences in Iraq. Apparently he was supposed to have spoken only 15% about himself and the rest about his uncle, but it ended up being the other way around. The curator confided in me that this man’s brother had taught them at the museum about powerpoint, saying that you never have more than ten slides or you will lose your audience. Obviously this guy never took his brother’s course; he had dozens of slides. I lost interest very quickly and escaped to the toilet.
My husband’s cousin and her husband live in Ottawa and came to the talk. We met them later on for supper at a vegetarian restaurant which had truly fantastic food. We all ate like little piggies, then we went back to their house for a visit and sat around in their bare living room on their hard-as-rock couch. They had recently repainted and the walls and revarnished the floors and hadn’t yet moved their furniture back in place. But we enjoyed each other’s company anyway.
We took Buddy Boy to the bus station this morning and saw him off, then hit the road for the four-hour drive back home. It was pretty cold, but sunny and clear, and coming around Mt. Orford I saw snow on the ground and there were icicles on the rock faces beside the road. The tamaracks are yellow and their needles will be gone soon. Yet, we saw a weeping willow that was still green as we drove through Montreal. This has been a very strange fall.
Hubby informed me that he’d managed to get a-hold of our son on the phone to make sure he’d arrived back at his residence and found that his bus had broken down on the way. The bus company sent a new vehicle, but it only seated 40 passengers and there were 44 of them. So our son gallantly said he would stand (we’re talking another four-hour trip) and as a result, was refunded the price of the trip home. Yet another reason to be proud.
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