The Artsy Craftsy Show

It never occurred to me that it was my responsibility at work to make sure that our air ducts got cleaned.  I mean, it's not something that I ever thought about.  Would you?  At our last two facilities, building management took care of all that jazz, and no one mentioned it to me when we moved in here.  But when the question came up as part of a health and safety meeting, I realized that it hasn't been done in the past four years.  And as the de facto Facilities Manager (basically it's up to me because no one else can be bothered) it became my problem.

To make a long story short, I finally managed to get a couple of quotes and booked the job for next weekend.  Which means that I have to work next weekend in order to supervise.  :-(  In order to compensate myself, I declared a couple of lieu days off, including this past Friday, which I used to go with my Mom to the One of a Kind Show, known to me as the Artsy Craftsy show.  Known to Ken as the Stuff White People Like show.

He's totally right.  Both the vendors and the shoppers are mostly white.  (Note to Americans: this is very unusual in Toronto.)  In fact, there were so many slightly overweight, sixty-ish women with the same dyed blond, cut short, parted on the side hairstyle that I had a moment when I wondered if I was in the Matrix and these women were like the hundreds of Agent Smith clones.

The booths fall into a few basic categories.  There's jewellery, stationary, clothing, fine art, knick knacks, and food.  Styles range from super-trendy (mugs with moustaches painted on, for example) to twee (delicate ceramic fairies posed in bonsai-sized gardens covered in glitter) to fashions for the aging baby boomer set.  My Mom, by her own admission, favours the twee.

I'm not sure what category I fall into, if any, but I didn't have to use much willpower to resist buying stuff.  Mostly I was thinking "Yeah, that's cute, but I can definitely live without it."  Super-trendy stuff actively irritates me.  Like: yes, yes, we know, moustaches on everything, whales, silhouettes of birds, WHATEVER.  Can we get a little originality over here?

I also felt a little sorry for the fine artists.  90% of them had done extremely similar oil paintings of trees.  Some of them were a bit more impressionistic, and others leaned more towards impasto, but essentially they were variations on a theme.  By the time I passed the tenth painting of a trail through a vibrant, sun-lit autumnal wood, dwindling to a single vanishing point, I wondered what the artists must be thinking.  It's like high school girls showing up at prom all wearing the same dress.  They should have called each other.

My mom splurged on a pretty, hand-smocked flannel nightgown.  That was her only purchase, except for a fresh, catnip-filled mouse toy for the cats.  For myself, I picked this electric-blue handbag.  There's something about the proportions that I find profoundly satisfying.

I had to fiddle a bit with the photo settings to capture the vibrancy of the blue.  The colour might be just titch off, still, but this is more or less it, believe it or not.  I like how it almost knocks your eyeballs out, but does so with elegance.