Antibalas with Kiltlifters

Last Friday was an exciting night for a couple of reasons. The first reason was that we went to check out Antibalas as part of the Victoria Jazz Festival, the second was that we fianlly got to meet the mysterious Marie-France. This post will only deal with the show, so we'll leave a little mystery.

The show was at Centennial Square downtown and got started early. The opening act, the Kiltlifters, were already playing when we got there. They're a fun ska band from Nanaimo and fiercely proud islanders. They got the crowd warmed up well and there was a small crowd dancing by the time they had to wrap things up.

Rockin' it.

One interesting thing about the Kiltlifters frontman was that throughout the show he played a mean air guitar on his saxophone.

Antibalas were awesome. There were eleven of them, and they were all bang on. There were multiple incredible solos. The two main guys held the crowd in the palms of their hands. The crowd adored them so much that when the sax player did his last solo he barely had to do anything and people were screaming and throwing their hands in the air. It was one of those moments when it's a thrill just to be in a crowd and feel yourself fill with their positive energy.

Stage left.

Unfortunately it was darker when Antibalas was on so we didn't really get any good pictures. The only big negative from the night was that it was over too quickly. Because the concert was outdoors and downtown they had to wrap it up obscenely early. The median age of Victoria is somewhere around 73, so the show was over at 10pm.

Sax player.

Apparently the guy above in the blue shirt is named Dr. Acid Head Ted. We thought you should know that.

Big thanks to Uncle Bill and Aunt Marianne for treating us (and James and Marie-France) to the concert. We all had a great time.

Nan's BC Adventure

We had a very special guest this month, Brenda's Mom! Her arrival caused much excitement here, even picking her up at the airport was an adventure since her plane came in at 2 AM, about four hours late.

Once Nan settled in we did our best to show her around and check out some of our favourite spots as well as make our first foray out to Salt Spring Island. Here are some highlights:

Checking out the bunny infestation at UVic.

Nan on top of Mount Doug.

Nan was a big fan of the Oak Bay Marina. Our blog already has a surpringly high seal content, but we'll put in one seal pic for Nan.

The smartest of the bunch, this seal will slap for food.



Some more of local wildlife. Mmmmm . . . crab.

Not local, but still pretty wild. Nan in the Pacific.

We wish we could say we got some great pictures from our trip to Salt Spring, but we didn't. For most of Nan's stay the weather was lousy and rainy.

Nan and Brenda on the ferry.

For our grand finale we went over to Vancouver to visit the aquarium. There's lots of neat things to see at there, but Nan was much more excited by the whales we saw off the side of the ferry on the way home.

Back off humans, it's nap time.

If you look really closely, you can find a whale.

See you next time Nan!

Running a long way even though we didn't do anything wrong.

On Victoria Day weekend Brenda and Cam ran a half-marathon in Oak Bay. We're still not really sure why we did, but it had something do with pushing ourselves and trying to do new things. Our times might not have been anything spectacular, but our goal was to finish the race and we did.

Before the start.

We trained for six months (six months!), and I don't think we would've been able to maintain our dedication and enthusiasm without our awesome run group, so a big thanks to Brenda Lee, Mary, Julie, Heather, Heather-Ann, Kashmir and Jeff.

Julie, Brenda, Cam, Mary and Brenda are ready to roll.

With one big goal accomplished we're going to set our sights on running another half-marathon in Victoria in the fall. Wish us luck.

Showing off our finisher medals.