Last week we went to see “A Night with Mary Walsh”. Organized by the Canadian North Arctic Comedy Festival, it was held in our historical Palace Grand theatre.

If you are Canadian, you probably know Mary Walsh, or you’d recognize one of the characters she’s played on Canadian television – like on This Hour has 22 Minutes. We were expecting a comedy show, but it was set up as a casual interview(? it really was more of a conversation, so the event was aptly named). It seems to have been casually organized too. One of our friends ran into Mary on the street the day before asking for a hotel recommendation. Imagine being the star of a show and not having a hotel reserved for you? And they didn’t have anyone also on the show tour planned to share the stage, so they asked a local Dawson City film maker/artist/author Lulu Keating (from Antigonish originally, small world (we lived there for 8 years)) to join her on stage.

It was an interesting night. I didn’t know much about Mary Walsh previously. She has a strong, and memorable, Newfoundland woman’s voice and personality. With a few humorous sidetracks into our current political hot topics, her stories were really funny! And at the end there was a Q&A session. I really enjoyed getting to know more about her, and in between her conversations with Lulu, they showed clips of her past shows and some from a current show – The Missus Downstairs.

Overall, the night was unconventional, and perhaps even a bit rough around the edges, but that seems to match Dawson City pretty well. We enjoyed it!

My friend Janet and her sister got an upstairs booth for the show! The light was so dim, but I still managed to get a fuzzy picture of them looking down upon us peasants!

It is so fun to live in a small town where you know, or recognize most people in the theatre with you!

Firewood

We’re spoiling ourselves again this year with firewood that is preprocessed (bucked and split!) because I’ll be away later this summer and won’t be available to go harvest it with Jeff. Our wood guy had an order cancel, so he asked on Friday if he could deliver it that day! Jeff scrambled to move some stuff out of the way and then took all our rolled up change to the bank for cash to pay for the wood!

Again this year, the wood was delivered in two loads of 1.5 cords each. And it was delivered by a fully electric dump truck!

We have next winter’s firewood in MAY! High five!

We spent a few hours on Saturday working away at getting it stacked in the empty wood racks inside of our fence.

We got about 3/4 of it stacked before we got rained out.

Which was okay because we had to go out for our friend Tim’s birthday dinner. Which expanded long past dinner when us youngsters carried in a long night of bar hopping and gambling!

I really feel like I found a winning combination. I quit drinking, so I can drink for free at most establishments in town (free pops). And I’m a really thrifty gambler! I did play the tables for the first time too! I didn’t like how fast you can lose money on the tables though. Wow! So over a couple of hours, I was slow and thrifty, and turned $20 in $47, mostly on slots. Not bad, eh?

We were at Gerties, then the Midnight Sun (where there was an odd crowd and an incredibly bad series of karaoke performances leaving us doubled over in (polite) laughter.

Then we were in the street for a while (I think it’s a Dawson thing to stand around in the middle of the streets in the summer), then back into the Midnight Sun, and the Pit to watch a live local band for a few numbers, and then back to Gertie’s for more live entertainment and gambling.

There is nothing better than a night full of laughs with good friends!

The next day Jeff had me cranking the sausage press as he tried stuffing some sausages with a moose meat with cheese and jalapeno mix he made! (Pretty glad I wasn’t hung over!)

Unfortunately the lamb casings just weren’t cooperating, so he ended up freezing it in 1lb bags instead, so we can cook it as sausage meat, or even use it in quesadillas or tacos or pasta or really anything. Like the burgers he made us for supper that night!

Delicious!

Looking ahead, I’ve got museum events this week, possibly another night out at Gertie’s, and under 6 weeks left of work until my sabbatical starts! Jeff’s truck isn’t scheduled to have its DEF fluid pump replaced until the end of JUNE! Here’s hoping it goes smoothly because Jeff and I (and Hank) plan to be camping in our new camper for the month of July, and we’ll need the truck for that!