The weather's been so good lately, I'm looking forward to doing stuff outside. When Ross called from Boston on Monday, he said it was snowing. I took this pic this afternoon, and as you can see, the blossoms are out in full force on Beach Avenue.
What I have slotted for this weekend, work-wise, is:
1) finally finish off my taxes so I can get my refund!
2) attend Anglican Church to collect data for my ethnography paper about religious rhetoric.
In case there are any Anglicans reading this, I'd just like to say that I have never been to Anglican Church, and that my use of the word rhetoric is not in the pejorative sense. I'm taking Advanced University writing, so the entire field is referred to as rhetoric studies. Just thought I'd clear that up. Why did I choose the Anglican Church?
a) there are several in the West End and around the downtown core
b) if I attend my brother's church (the one I grew up with), I would be less objective, and it would mean waking up early on a Saturday; somehow, this seems harder after a tough week -- I need to break myself into the weekend!
c) the Anglican Church is an old church, and one of my objectives is to examine the modernization of religious messages. The reason why I didn't choose Catholic is because it's more of an inherited religion -- people will more likely identify themselves as Catholic if their parents were Catholic, even if they were non-practicing. There seems somewhat less of a need to modernize Catholicism, although this is more my impression rather than a statement of fact and I'm certain that there are Catholics out there who would argue this. In any case, I chose Anglican because although it is an old church, it has adopted some (relative to Catholic) progressive policies (ordination of women as ministers, gay marriage) and appears to position itself as attempting to be more relevant to its constituents. I understand that within the Anglican Church there are different levels of conservatism/liberalism, but I chose to study a church in an urban setting as it would seem to address relevancy to a modern way of life more than a suburban or rural church.
Fun Fair at Kits Point??
Dining Out For Life
Eliza and I had much more fun this year working Dining Out For Life. Last year it was pissing down with rain, there was a hockey game (in Vancouver that does tend to keep people indoors), and the restaurants we had assigned to us were all over the city -- Kitsilano, Main Street, downtown. Some restaurants closed early, one didn't even know why I was there, and the rest all mentioned at some point or another that it was a pretty slow night. This year, the weather was good, people were dining out, and there was no hockey game going on. Everyone was in good spirits, I never had to wait long to get the boxes, and I'm very certain we made a lot more money than last year and hopefully beat the total raised from two years ago.
What Eliza and I had to do was pick up the donation boxes that were placed at each of the participating restaurants. There were about 150 in total, but we were assigned about 10. In some places, people found us a pretty curious sight: me with a name tag, running in and grabbing a box, then running out again to jump into a canary yellow Mercedes SLK. Kam, of Kam's Place Singaporean restaurant, joked that he would only give me the box as a trade for the car. Driving around in a yellow sports car is like putting wheels on a neon sign!
Project Empty Bowl
