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Published: June 28th 2023
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26 June
It’s a day of wedding domestics. First up Issy and I are summoned to take Emma to pick up her dress. I’m strictly forbidden from venturing anywhere near the fitting room, on pain of death. As another father of the bride tells me as we sit patiently in the waiting room - “you’ve got two jobs. You have to wait, and you have to pay”. Hmmm. Next up is a stop to pick up enough ice cream to feed a small African country. Then it’s off to a session at the local spray tan salon, which is proving a bit hard to find hidden away in the back blocks of an industrial estate. I hope they know what they’re doing. I think it was in the movie “Bride Wars” where one of the brides fiddled with the tanning machine controls so that the other one came out painted bright orange.
It‘s been a relatively uneventful day, well that’s assuming picking up your only daughter’s wedding dress can be classified as “uneventful”, so a couple of random observations about life here in Lethbridge.
Now in Oz there are traffic lights on both sides of intersections - as you approach and as you leave - but not here - there’s only one set, and they’re on the “leave“ side. So far this has nearly cost us our lives three times … well that’s what it felt like. It seems that here in Lethbridge, if you stop right before the first set of lights you see, as you would at home, you suddenly find yourself stranded mid-intersection about to get mown down by a bus.
Now if you happen to be into nude sunbathing in your backyard, Lethbridge probably isn’t for you, well at least not the part we’re staying in. It’s a new estate so there are no trees, all the houses are slightly elevated to accommodate the obligatory basements, and all the fences are really low. So if you stand on your back porch you can see what all the neighbours are doing for about ten houses away in every direction. Are we perhaps just a bit too protective of our privacy back in Oz … or maybe it’s just too cold here for nude sunbathing….?
27 June
… and it’s another day of wedding domestics as the clans start to gather. Michael’s parents LeeAnne and Steve arrive from their farm up in Hanna. Then it’s one of Emma’s bridesmaids Bethany, and partner Jake, who are the only people other than us coming to the wedding from Australia. They’ve broken up the journey with four days in Vancouver, and only flew into Calgary last night. Emma and Michael’s apartment isn’t all that big, so we beat a retreat to the mall to free up some seats.
LeeAnne and Steve are heading up to the wedding venue in Crows Nest Pass tonight, leaving the rest of us to enjoy a very pleasant meal at Lethbridge’s water tower restaurant overlooking the town. The tower was built back in 1959, but became redundant for water supply purposes in the late 1990s. It was then bought by a local entrepreneur to “save it from destruction”. They’ve left various water supply gadgets sticking out of the walls as decoration … well we assume they’re decoration. The temptation to turn on one of the valves and see what happens is almost overwhelming .…
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