Putting Colours Together

Putting Colours Together

I think most of us need to know about colors and how to combine them effectively.   It may be something you know instinctively, but sometimes with the multitude of shades out there, you might need a little help!  I apologize to any interior decorators who obviously know so much more about this subject.  I do not pretend to be an expert, but simply want to share what I have found with other novices.

Thank you to Starr C. Osborne,  (2010) who's book Home Staging That Works was the inspiration for this post.  Her book was published by Amacom in New York and I found a copy at the Frances Morrison library in Saskatoon.  You can check out the library's website for other great reads at  www.saskatoonlibrary.ca.

Although the book focused on home staging, it is clearly valuable for many aspects of daily life, from getting dressed in the morning, to painting pictures, to selecting and combining colors for craft work such as crocheting and knitting.

Colour Schemes from previous decades you might want to avoid in 2014:
1940's - white, olive green, and cherry red
1950's - peach, mauve, and chalky grey-green
1960's - psychedelic color mixes, black, and white
1970's - harvest gold, autumn brown, and avacado green
1980's - denim blue, green and white, or dusty rose, and blue
1990's - all whites, neutrals, monochromatic rooms.

I found a free printable basic colour wheel that you can download as a reference from 

www.color-wheel-artist.com.  This one however is from www.google.ca

Complementary colours 

Complementary colours fall exactly opposite each other on the colour wheel.

Red and green      

Yellow and purple 

Blue and orange

These colors energize each other when together to the point of vibrating and are usually too much on a wall. They might be used as accents to spruce up other spots. The example from the past I'm thinking of were the crocheted toilet cover accessories.  Although the bright purple with yellow flowers was once popular and almost everybody had a variation of the set, they were just a little too vibrant for today.  In fact, you may have received a set for a shower or wedding gift!  Who knows, they may come back into fashion yet again some day.

A possible solution is to dilute or "grey down" one color to reduce the overwhelming effect.

Warm and Cool Colours

Whenever I hear talk about warm and cool colours, I glaze over because I have no idea what they're talking about.  Finally, here is an introductory list of which is which.

COOL COLOURS  

blues,blues, greens, greens, greys, greys, purples, purples,  silvers, silvers

WARM COLOURS

reds, reds, yellows, yellows, oranges, oranges, golds, golds, brown, brown

Specific warm and cool color hues can offset each other.  For example, one warm colour - off white accented by a cooler hue of intense white gives a nice effect.

APPEARANCES

Cool colours recede and seem farther away.

Light coloured objects appear larger and less weighty.

Dark objects appear smaller and heavier

The key is to balance warm and cool.  Such as balance a warm dominant colour with a cool secondary colour.  A room should be 2/3 the dominant colour followed by a secondary, then tertiary colour.  If you have too much sizzle, you can calm the room down with beige or tan.  Choose a colour 45-80 degrees away on the colour wheel from the colour you're working with.  NOT its exact complement because it's too jarring.

Accent Walls - Use a colour from the rug or go two shades darker than the dominant wall colour.  Don't add a new colour to the room.

COLOURS and MOODS

RED 

Stimulating, provocative, arouses sexuality and appetite.  Can be used in various hues in dining rooms, libraries and formal bedrooms.  Never use with green (unless it's Christmas).  Make sure it doesn't clash with wood tones or brick.

ORANGE

Intense and arousing.  Paler tones, such as peach or melon give a sophisticated touch.  Avoid oranges that border on tan.  Orange can add energy to a light neutral scheme and balance a too-blue scheme. Orange can brighten a cold or dark room.

YELLOW

Cheerful or mellow.  Avoid greenish yellow since it is like 'bitterness'.  Avoid yellow and purple.  Yellow is good for kitchens, bathrooms, sunrooms and children's rooms.  It can add energy to a 'too-blue' room.  North facing rooms always benefit from butter-yellow walls.

GREEN
Associated with nature and healing.  Green works well with warm colours, but olive and mint greens are hard to get right, so not good for staging.  Green is a strong colour to use on walls and is best used as an accent.

BLUE
Blue is the coolest of the cool palette, yet can be warm.  It soothes, replenishes and inspires confidence.  Navy blue is more nautical and governmental, while electric blue is dynamic and engaging.  Periwinkle blue is playful and warm.  Blue mixed with grey can be very cold, but effective if combined with an equally strong warm colour.  Blue is for bedrooms and living rooms and can be an excellent accent colour for almost any other hue.

PURPLE

A complex colour that produces strong reactions.  Lavenders and purples are better to avoid if you're doing home staging.  That reminds me of some time in the 1970's in a new neighbourhood in Saskatoon where there was a whole row of houses open to the public as show homes.  Each house was decorated in one colour theme.  So there was a yellow house, then a blue, then a purple.  I didn't mind them until I got to the green house....After I left I felt physically nauseated.  Who knew the power of colours!

PINK
If you decorate a house in pink, it likely won't sell to the men in your life.  Use pink sparingly.  In a girl's room, you can use pink accents or can dilute with white or green.  I personally don't know about pink and green, but you never know.  Apparently, putting pink on a wall is not a good idea.
My cousins got a new bedroom when a garage in their house was renovated.  Their parents decorated it in pure white dressers and walls, red bedspreads and pink accents.  In those days, it was absolutely stunning.


NEUTRAL COLOUR  PALETTE

WHITE

Innocent, timeless and pure simplicity.  It can be modern or sophisticated.  Pure whites throughout a house on walls can result in a stark interior unless relieved by a warming contrast.  Off whites of cream or vanilla are warm and friendly.  White is safe for large areas if offset with small areas of colour.  On walls, plain white is often the color of rentals.  To avoid this look, use tinted white on the walls with white trim.  White is most effective combined with textural variety.  Use white in the same ways as neutrals.  Remember if staging your home, all bedding and towels should be pure white.

NEUTRALS
Beige, grey, taupe and tinted whites.  Classic, contemporary, enduring and timeless.  Best in combination with well chosen accent colours or as a way to offset works of art, dark walls of wood or stone.  Interesting to accent architecture and dramatic views, but otherwise can be boring and lacking energy.  Greys can be effective but might come off as too cold and institutional.  I painted one of my houses a light grey with white trim and really liked it!

BROWN
Warm, rich and clubby for libraries and dens.  Tans are homelike and enduring, while dark browns are more masculine and strong.  Avoid dark brown in bathrooms and bedrooms.  My friend is an interior designer and she talked of decorating a living room with a brown accent wall, and different shades of gold as accent colours.  Her clients were a husband and wife, the female loved it...the male didn't know quite what to think.

BLACK
Power, mystery and strength.  Classic and elegant, especially when used with white.  For staging, use black as an accent colour only, but never on walls because it becomes easily oppressive.  I have read that rooms need a hint of black somewhere to help focus the eye.


I hope you enjoyed this post and especially if you found it helpful.  If you have encountered a colour matching combination that might be unusual, but works, it would be great to hear about it.  Please feel free to describe it in a comment below!  Thanks!

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Hallowe'en in Saskatchewan 2014

Hallowe'en in Saskatchewan 2014

Hallowe'en hasn't really changed much in the last 50 years or so.  I'm sitting here with my bowl full of miniature chocolate bars and case of mini Pringle chips ready to go.  I'm waiting for the first kids to ring my doorbell.  It's before supper, so generally I'm expecting the littlest people to arrive first because their bedtime isn't too far away.  The bigger ones show up after dark, and one of the better changes is there isn't nearly as much 'tricking' as there once was.  In fact, toilet tipping used to be an all time favorite, but outdoor toilets are pretty much a thing of the past.  Graffiti had it's day not that long ago, but once again, that comes and goes.

When I was a kid, because we lived in the country we could choose from either the town or the farm area or both.  If we got to drive around in town, the pickings although good tended to be a little slimmer than in the country.  I remember one place that only gave a half of one double-bubble....they must have had too many kids or were very poor.  When we drove around the farming community, it was so much different!  We would get whole brown, lunch bags full of goodies at each farm.  In those days you could get these trememdous popcorn balls...man they were the best.  You might get cookies, or apples, and all kinds of delicious candy.  Unfortunately, some kind of idiots started to put sharp objects like razor blades in apples, so those home-made items have all but gone by the wayside.  People do some weird things for no good reason it seems.

I wanted to share with you some of the trick or treaters I had at my door tonight.  They all consented to having their picture taken and even for me to share it on my blog.  Thanks everyone.

TV show characters....I think

Mario and Luigi aka my grandsons :-)   The littler the kid, the littler the snack container.

I don't know...hmmm...some junk food, ketchup (with the matching red Canadian mitt and red bag) and orange M&M, the guy in white looks like snow with skid marks across!

Cute little princess and her mama the skunk.....Incidentally, the skunk was probably the best costume I saw tonight!

Hockey players, painter or drywaller, Sherlock Holmes and sorry guy in the front....I think you're some kind of Star Wars person perhaps!

We possibly have a business man, a cat woman, a convict, Anne of Green Gables,  or maybe Annie.... a possible skiier, a possible Ninja, sorry guy in the front.....I just don't remember, but I see you have a pillowcase slung over your shoulder that's getting pretty full!

and finally, two of the cutest little girls....the one in the green wig could barely stop eating her potato chips long enough to have her picture taken.....By the direction her wig  was perched, it looked like she'd had a rough night already!

I didn't get everybody's picture, but that's okay....it was a fun night!

Happy Hallowe'en!

Fort Edmonton Park

Fort Edmonton Park 

Located on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River

The Fort - Fur Trading Era  1795 to 1870

Rowand House - A home within the fort built for the Chief Factor of the Hudson Bay Company's Saskatchewan District.  (Hence the term factory in later years).

A plaque on the Clerk's Quarters Building

One of the four towers at the corners of the enclosure

Clerk's Quarters

Entrance and an antique truck that we saw people driving :-)

Notice the grassy roof on what I think is the Ice House

The Watchtower

Clay Bake Oven

Wood Pile for fuelling everything!  Note pointed spikes on log fence to keep out the bears...guess that's the main reason they had to make it a fort because of the wild animals.

Brilliant three-holer outhouse :-)

It seems this might be the Horse Stable with some sheep in the foreground.

Off on our horse-drawn carriage ride....really two lovely and well-trained and behaved work horses...don't know their names, but they reminded me of our team from when I was a kid... [Peach and Jean]...and the carriage was really a wagon with benches...but we felt pretty special no matter how you look at it.

She was the gentlest of drivers with the softest voice and had those horses responding effortlessly to her requests.  She was phenomenal to watch!

Settlement Era 1871 to 1891

1885 Street 

Jasper House Hotel

McDougall's General Store

Secord Complex and Ross Brothers' Hardware

James McDonald's Carpentry Shop and Bellrose School

Municipal Era - 1892 - 1914

1905 Street

Anglican Church of St. Michael & All Angels

Rutherford House and Firkins House next door (supposedly haunted)

The Firkins House was built by a dentist from the U.S.A.  It was the first in the area to have stucco on the exterior.  The interpreter was telling us about who haunted the house.  A little girl had been pushed downstairs by the dentist's daughter for the second time.  She hit her head on a radiator....Once the tour was over the interpretor told us he had only made that story up for a laugh...It was kind of creepy at the time, though because it was just getting dusk and we were right across the street from "Tent City"...wish I had a picture, but it was a place where people were living for up to two years waiting for a decent home to be built.  The tents had to be built on a platform to avoid the damp and cold and stop a condition where a foot never dried out called Trenchfoot.

Original street lights.

One of the largest buildings on the street - the Masonic Hall.

Around the next corner was 1920 Street which was the Metropolitan Era from 1914 to 1929  (Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures here, because we became mesmerized watching a coyote playing around a big garbage bin!)

Fort Courtyard

Gunpowder Display

Family close by.

Kids playing.

Ear plugs?

The court yard soon filled with gunpowder smoke!

Lead pellets....buck shot?

Left a hole by the looks of it...

Next people got to practice building a fire by striking two flint rocks together and making sparks fly.

As you can imagine, this is only a sample of what is actually at the park.  If you would like to read more about this subject, go to the following link,

http://www.fortedmontonpark.ca

Later we were served a scrumptious meal in the Clerk's Quarters and bussed back to our hotel.  Thank you to our Alberta hosts for the wonderful experience!

De Plane

I arrived in Edmonton via a West Jet flight around noon and came straight over from the airport.  It was almost an hour's drive, which is ironically about how long the flight was.  Flying is a funny thing.  You have to be at the airport 90 minutes early, about 9:00 a.m. for a 10:35 a.m. flight.  You hang around and rush around.  You have far too much stuff to carry including coat, backpack, and purse.  You sweat.  You try to juggle a hot cup of coffee, a boarding pass that they're printing on thinner paper than ever. Pray to God that you don't spill coffee on it.  Did you remember your passport?  No....well then, dig out two pieces of government issued photo ID.  Well I only have one with a photo, so that has to suffice. I've smartened up and decided to buy the coffee after I go through security.   Now they have Keurig coffee makers on the 'other side'...  Of course, my first attempt was a malfunction and ran only clear water... so had to do it twice.   You know, you just lay all your bags down, and then you have to do it again.  After you drink the coffee, you head over to the ladies room so you don't have to use those God-forsaken units on the plane.  The stewardess reiterated this point during her announcements.  "The toilets are up front and very small".  It worked, I can't say I saw one person leave their seats to make the trek.  I guess most people can hold it for an hour. The toilets and sinks in the bathrooms at the airport worked absolutely fine and were exceptionally clean.  The stalls were even big enough for all my luggage and me.  The chairs were uber comfy in the waiting area and the overhead paging wasn't as bad as it can be.

They're renovating at the airpor,t so to board the plane, you have to go downstairs to the ground floor, walk through this massively long tunnel, that turns into a very long makeshift quonset. They have huge concrete blocks making up the path and they aren't really secure because with all the rolling luggage, there's quite a few extra clickety clacks. Oh, and don't bother putting your boarding pass and ID away while you're on that long walk, because although no stewardess has ever even hinted at wanting to see it...this time she does "because you're coming from the unsecure ground level" is what I thought I heard her say.  My hearing seems to be going somewhat...  So you stop and start rifling through your purse and hold everybody up who is behind you.    You smile and move aside slightly so they can force themselves by.  Smile again when jabbed by that buckle!

Go find your seat and realize the guy in front of you is sitting across the aisle from you in 12C.  He has just deposited two gigantic carry-ons and gone ahead, without asking, and filled your overhead bin spot with his luggage, the one obviously reserved for the 12B occupant -- you -- where you would normally put your backpack and coat....So you smile once again..(being Canadian, we do these things).  You have to back up at least two seats to find an open space above 10B.  Later when you get off, you will have to be the last one out, just so that you can retrieve your things.

This plane didn't have a bathroom in the rear, but it did have another exit there which sure helped when the time came.  For some reason, we were delayed being allowed to deplane because somebody from customer service had to be phoned to physically come out and either open the doors herself or give his permission to have someone else open the doors. There were at least 20 workers scurrying around outside...with not a thought to opening a door it appeared.  Personally,  I think they were racing to see if they could get the luggage moved to the terminal before any of the passengers got there.  They wanted to wow us and make our heavier bags already be  going round and round on the carousel, so that when we arrived we would be so thrilled....Sure enough mine was there before I was.... for the first time ever.  Was I thrilled, of course...

And, as we know, rules are rules, and some people follow them to the letter.  Even though the reasons can sometimes be rather obscure. Reminds me of the joke about the people on the escalator when it stalled...they had no idea what to do and stood there debating what to do for hours...  Hmmm...things you just don't know when you're the passenger.   Twenty or so minutes later the doors were opened and we started to move...  At least they kept the air flowing the whole time, so we were breathing fresh air, (I think- or at least a semblance of it as it comes to us through this gigantic hose attached to the plane).  I've been on planes, where there was suddenly NO air and a person actually passed out, no word of a lie.  They had to start oxygen on her.  If I had been closer I would have tried for the odd whiff myself, but alas, I was not, and just had to tough it out.

Two fairly young men were sitting ahead of me and gossiped all the way there.  Luckily for them I really couldn't tell much of what they were saying except things like, "did she really say that?"   You know so and so and he's just such a ....."  Is that any different than women?

Praise God, the girl beside me was young and wanted to sleep.  She wore a toque that she pulled down over her eyes and I was amazed at what a brainiac idea that was!  Because the band of the toque fit exactly around her ears so she couldn't hear anything either.  I loved sitting beside her because she was all curled up against the window and she didn't even try for the arm rest.  I got it all to myself!!  She did miss snack though, which was something I thoroughly enjoyed...Tomato juice and sesame bits.  I could have eaten a whole pail of them they were so good....but as usual, we were on the one pack limit.  Notice how they never offer you seconds on the plane?  They did offer complementary booze though....I've never seen that before, but you may have.  I think they were happy about their decision to sling free liquor prior to the door opening fiasco.  You can imagine the people who are always the first to leap out of their seats and grab their stuff from the overhead bins. The guy who filched my luggage spot was one of them.  He was also someone who had a nice big glass of red wine.  Those people got to stand and stand and stand and stand.  Again, it was only an hour flight, so if they had imbibed something without using the facilities prior to take-off, it might have been a tad uncomfortable for some.  With everybody standing up in the aisle, there was no way to reach the up front bathroom even if you had to.

Several people always have to be told to shut their devices off when about to take off.  In fact, the girl beside me was one of them...She turned it on again the second the wheels touched the ground.  I heard her tell somebody on the other end that she was starving....  The wind was whipping at about 60 mph when we walked across the open-air tarmack....are they renovating every where?

Count Down

Count Down

The count down is on....I'm 59 and closing in on 60 fast....Only a few more days .... and it'll be the big oh oh..... no...six oh.  But honestly, it sounds worse than it actually is.  At some point in my life, I realized these awkward, hard-aged milestones really do get easier....I'm not kidding.  You know, people will say they had a gruesome time turning 30 and didn't know what to do with themselves, or which way to turn. They fell into a funk and stayed there for a little too long.  Others say it was 40, or 50...Well, as of Monday, I will have now marked the sixth decade and looking back, it could definitely have been worse.  I have to say turning 60 seems alot more low key and uneventful, than I would have thought it would be when I was 20.  In fact, at 20, I would have shuddered at the thought.  Even emotionally, I haven't spent days on end navel gazing or feeling sorry for myself.  Some of you might be thinking, "just shut up already" and they are right because everybody is different and all I know is how I'm coping, and not how you're doing.

I think my family have been more on edge about it than me....basically because in our family, it's always a major event when someone approaches, reaches and gets past 59.  You see, some of us have gotten stuck on 59 and never left.  Others have stalled dramatically and only moved forward with a really good kick-start like open-heart surgery or something like that.  So far, I'm grateful to say, I'm still like the Easter Bunny with fully-charged batteries. Single, but still going strong.

There's just far more to life than worrying about your age.  After all, I have discovered since I've turned at least 40 the truth that people really do become more of what they are as they age.  If they were beautiful all their life, they will be even MORE beautiful as they age.  I see it all around me.  If you looked great with a tan as a teen-ager, imagine what you will look like with a tan and snow-white hair? Fabulous.  I wouldn't know personally because I don't have much grey hair, but my Mom does.  If you were a total jerk with a filthy temper and really ugly when you got mad....that just doesn't go away.  You may change your personality entirely though....Someone like King Henry VIII was said to have been extremely handsome and kind before his (head) injury, I believe it was jousting.  After that he became cruel and morbidly obese and nothing like he was in his youth...

And aging people might live to learn a very valuable lesson....They might learn to compare themselves to the other folks born in their own decade and not to those who are old enough to be their children or grandchildren. Why compare apples to oranges?  Do you know how ridiculous it is to feel bad because you have deeper crow's feet or laugh lines than someone much younger than you?    Look around at the people your own age...because they are your only true comparables....As a friend of mine used to say, "don't you know that wrinkles are in?"

I have listened to an excellent speaker over these last couple of days and learned about my greatest strengths and what that means.   The speaker's name is Idahlynn Karre and the work is from Gallup, Inc.  Our group had to complete a questionnaire from www.strengthsquest.com first to have our five  Clifton StrengthsFinder Themes compiled.  Out of all these types of tests taken in the past, this one was probably one of the most accurate for me.  I have taken others such as the Myers-Briggs Test (a couple of times).  It figures out what type of personality you have.   This is mainly like whether you're an introvert or an extrovert.  I know that when I was younger, I was more extroverted and have become more introverted with the passage of time. Go ahead and type it into your internet search and take the test if you've never done so.  Another test was a colors test also to do with personality style, I think it was called True Colors.  Again, it comes up when you type it into your search bar.  My main colors were yellow, with blue and green tied for second place.  I am an oddity in that I usually don't fall into the typical results categories.  I tend to be combinations of more than one.  For instance, although yellow shows up as my main color (shows my organizational and administrative thinking and skills),  blue is for relationships and green for analytical thinking.  Many of my colleagues were fully one colour without all these other tendencies, but I'm not sure why.

This week's latest strengths-based test showed me as someone who is responsible and does what they say they will do.  OK, generally that's true.  Secondly, I am an achiever and push hard for results. Ask any of my neighbors who watched me scrape my garage door and 'finally' get it painted a couple years ago. Funnily enough, an achiever gets a dopamine rush when they complete a task, so that would also explain my penchant for crocheting item after item after item!  A theme in my last three categories was taking the complex and simplifying it for others...giving main points and streamlining explanations.  Partly because I have a hard time understanding things myself, I need to figure out a way to get it through my thick skull and try to find a way to remember it down the road.  What's easier than if something reminds you of something you're already familiar with?  The other part of that is because I'm basically lazy.  I don't like to do something and then turn around and do it again and again if I don't have to. I want to find a way to bring simple meaning to something difficult to understand.  Back in the day, my students seemed to appreciate the pictures I would paint for them (in their minds), the stories I would tell, and the linkages I would help them to make across some of their more difficult theories.  I guess as it turns out, that's a  valuable tool for any teacher to have, because there are bound to be students who struggle to understand concepts just like you.   I also trust that others know what they're doing and am confident that the best work gets done by the best person.  Consequently, the final three categories for me were self-assured, arranger, and learner.   Arranger definitely goes with "yellow" and I never have less than three or four books on the go, crafts, hobbies, or writings set up around my house in "stations" at any given moment.  Consequently, since much of this is exactly me, they have hit the nail on the proverbial head.  These attributes come in handy not only as a program head, but as a realtor.  Again, I am someone who juggles a variety of things all the time.  (At least, I didn't get Input, which is basically someone who collects ideas, people, and things....a hoarder, if you will....just joking because some of my best friends and relatives are serious collectors with quonsets, garages, and barns filled to the brim!).

Some of the other categories of the 35 possible ones were those who see everything as pieces of a puzzle - connectors.  Others who seek consensus are harmonizors.  Fairness and equality shows a person with consistency.  Typically, an activator takes action.  Someone who is restorative fixes and a relator is always looking into deeper relationships.  Someone who sees other people's strengths has a theme of individualization.  Someone who has strong values has belief while spotting potential could make you a developer.  A communicator is a good story teller, and someone with empathy is able to sense the feelings of others.  No question that someone who is futuristic sees things in a future context.    My list doesn't cover all possible themes, but might give you an idea of why you do some of the things you do.  If you're interested, it might be an area you try to find more information about.

The other thing the speaker talked about was that 45 days after conception, these strengths are formed in all of us before we ever leave the womb.  The size of the learning and strength area in the brain at that time is the size of a super highway...This moves rapidly over time to the size of a regular highway and down to a country road at a very young age.  Amazing what they have uncovered about all of this.

The final talk on the second day was about "The Hero's Journey".  She showed us the 12 steps that occur in every movie you have ever seen.  It was amazing as she broke down three of the movies we all knew - the Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and Harry Potter.   The concept shows how the hero moves from their ordinary world to crossing the threshold of a new world and all the angst and support they need to get there.  How the hero meets with an ordeal that makese them seize the storm and move on to reap the reward.  They hit the wall, but eventually get back on track, resurrect themselves, and return back to their ordinary life as a master of two worlds and always with the elixir....  "There's no place like home" was Dorothy's elixir...what she learned.  The Hero's Journey is a comparison for us as educators because it is almost exactly the same journey faced by our students... So true and so very poignant!!

So here I am, turning 60....learning and thinking about my strengths....not focusing on my weaknesses you might note!  That was the other part of the speaker's research....Don't focus on you or your child's or other's weaknesses, but build on the strengths instead!  OK, I am all about that.  Performance can only benefit from focusing on strengths.  You may never be any good at math, so do a job that you're good at...

As a result of all this new information, I'm motivated more than ever to work on another whole new project. Now I know a new little secret about how to approach the book I have always had on the back burner.  I have so much to do and no time for worrying about my age...did I mention that?

Saskatoon Exhibition Kick-Off Parade

Saskatoon Exhibition Parade

Thought I'd share the parade experience in our city on Tuesday.  I haven't seen it in a long while and went with my daughter and kids.  Unfortunately, the family pictures didn't turn out, except for the ones of my son's children and their Mom who were part of the parade!  We were so proud of them and they did well, walking the whole way.

These photos are taken with an iPhone, so please forgive me.....The man sitting next to me has a lovely set of knees and you will see alot of them (and his wife's).... :-)

Back end of the Police Rescue vehicle that lead the way...

First band in the line up...and the top of my grandson's head with the spider-man cap on it!

Busy camera man...

Ye olde firetruck...

Nice cars...

Very cool bike from way back when?

Lotsa horses...

Whitecap Dakota First Nation...

Horses and Buggy....

Could it be a member of parliament?  I think Don Morgan and his lovely wife.

See the big blast of fire Also very loud music that caused my baby grandson to cry his little head off! and nobody other than me, standing over top of him, could even hear!

See the building at the back?  Believe it or not, there was a man dangling from a rope apparatus washing windows...I wish I would have thought to get him in the picture....That fire breathing dragon was SUPER HOT and there's no doubt the window washer would have felt it.

My daughter-in-law, granddaughter, and grandson...still walking (we were on 3rd Ave. between 21st and 22nd Street and the parade started on Spadina Crescent and 24th Street.  A few blocks, but pretty long for little legs!

Royal Canadian Legion...

Pipe and Drum Band...I used to play drums in the Melfort Pipe and Drum Band!!  :-)

Lots of RCMP cars, but generally they were too fast for me to take a picture of .... remember, I was also holding the baby by now...   :-)......All the three little boys were absolutely mesmerized by the parade and behaved grandly!

This was a beautiful horse and rider....with clown alongside...

Fancy Arabian, (I think)...

Horses and carts...

Clydesdales..

Shriners Orchestra...you can see the back of the bell lyra ... I used to play one of those in our Hudson Bay High School Band :-)

Walking to the music of "Who Let the Dogs Out?"

And the back of my other grandson's head and his Mario hat :-)

City Mayor and Chief ...

There were plenty more things in the parade such as firefighters, ambulance, Elks, John Deere tractor at the very end etc, far too numerous to capture...Overall, it was a great parade once again!  Congratulations to the organizers for all the hard work put into the event.  We certainly enjoyed it!