February 2025

It's Parade Season!

Chinatown Parade

We have been to a lot of Chinatown parades 2024, 2023 (two years of COVID), 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2006. While they are often cold, this is the parade in the snow I've been to. We followed our usual procedure - arrive about an hour early so we can get free street parking, walk into Chinatown, buy some snacks and then pick a spot on the curb to take in the parade. This year was about the same as other years except there was snow on the ground and the crowd was about 1/10th of what it normally is.

Chinatown still has a number of "benevolent societies", many of which are over 100 years old. These societies forms more than 100 years ago when Chinese labour was imported to build the province (including a new transnational railway) and workers came together to help themselves and other people from their family, village or region. These societies often have small schools teaching language, martial arts or other traditional practicies. For the parade, many of the lion dance and dragon teams come from these societies and they walk to the start of the parade route before the parade begins. It's fun to see a dragon or lion just walking down the road like it could be any day.

Did I mention snacks? New Town has a great selection of warm, hand held food so getting a box for the parade and another box for home also fits with the tradition.

The parade starts with a truck burning fire crackers. The truck drives a bit, stops and burns fire crackers and then drives a little further up the route.

Next up are the politicians. We have seen quite a few and this years highlight was Jagmeet Sing, the national leader of the NDP. There are many MLA's and even more city politicians. Many of them give out red packets with a mint or chocolate. This year was so quite that every person on the parade route got packets.

The parade is section after section of organizations with performers. Early on there were a lot of dancing performers.

The dancing groups are high energy and this year most of them had clear plastic jackets to keep their costumes dry.

Two of the dance groups had "God of Money or Wealth" character with them which are always loved by the crowds.

The snow was hardest when we first arrived and came and went as we watched the parade. Claira tried to catch snowflakes on her tongue and when that failed, she tried to catch one on her hand.

Pandas are not that common of a Chinese Parade them, but one came through the parade saying hi to the kids. It was a bit tricky because the edge of the road had a small lake of slush and snow

There are two common themes in the parade - dragons and dancing lions. The Dragons come in a variety of forms - some are very sedate and basically walk in a line over the course of the parade. Most dragons are populated by "Athletic Clubs" and then run from edge to and sometimes do tricks like cross over itself and pulling into spirals.

The other kinds theme is dancing lions. Generally these are two person costumes (but there are a few single person costumes) and again they people performing are quite athletic.

Family Day in Victoria

We went to the Victoria for the long weekend but the weather was mostly rain for the weekend. We decided to work on two projects in the garage. First is an enclosure for an underwater trail camera. The second is Claira wanted to make a bird box for owls. We went shopping for supplies.

The underwater trail camera uses schedule 40 pipe and fittings to make underwater enclosure that should be waterproof to reasonable depths. Four inch schedule 40 pipe is a bit exotic - most projects can use smaller or thinner pipe so I had to stop by a specialty store to get the fittings. Our encloses only require a 1 foot of pipe, but the minimum size I could by was 20 feet.

The enclosure uses stock components like end caps and joining segments. To make an opening, the joiner pieces need to be cut apart and a small segment of pipe is needed. To make square joints we used my Dads mini-lathe.

PVC is really nice to work with on a lathe - it's soft so the cutters easily trim them. That said, if you accidentally take too aggressive of a cut, the lath will chatter and the pipe will slip on chuck. For people learning to use a lathe, it's a low consequence material to learn the basics.

A camera enclosure is only effective if you can see out. I bought a 30cm by 30cm sheet of 1/2 inch thick acrylic. This needs to be cut into disks that fit the inside the 4 inch pipe. We cut the sheet into roughly sized lenses and then used the lathe to trim the disk to just fit the pipe. I didn't have the required glue so we took all of the parts back to Vancouver.

Nara is taking photos for a school project. We had a had a break in the rainy days so we went for a walk around Chinatown to add to Nara's portfolio.

Finally, Claira had a project she wanted to do. She is in girl guides and there is a badge for making bird houses. She didn't want the badge, but she did like the idea of making a bird house. She wanted a bird house for owls. We looked online to find what medium sized owls (barred owls or barn owls) need a decent amount of space. We took a trip to Home Depot and bought a few sheets. Claira traced out the plan onto the sheets.

My dad has a small bandsaw which was big enough to cut the sheets to the panels we needed. We bought some 1x2 strips to drive the screws into. Claira cut the panels and strips and piloted the holes.

Once assembled, Claira picked the paint color (Mocha) and we painted it. With help from her sister, the box was pulled up into the tree canopy. The box was then tied to the tree. The box is visible from the kitchen window. Now we just need an owl to decide to move in.