Pembroke III

OK, well, back to my stunning and amazing adventures... :)
One thing of note: It's amazing at how people know people in small towns. They sit and they chat to each other if they bump into each other in the emergency department, or in the doctor's waiting rooms, instead of studiously avoiding each other's gazes, reading four year old issues of Reader's Digest. There's no such thing as six degrees of separation here. Try more like three. "Oh well, Moira did the flowers for my best friend's cousin's wedding. And boy, she makes a mean apple pie"... that kind of thing.
But, I think, that helps make things a little bit more community-minded. Yesterday afternoon, we went out to ride the "Big Bike" for the Heart and Stroke Foundation, which involves 30 (36?) people all riding this big honking machine that kind of looks like a bicycle... kinda... kind of like a bicycle on steroids, maybe... or maybe like a deformed Tonka truck.. or maybe like an engineering experiment gone wrong... well anyways, we had our little hats made out of coffee filters, windmills and heart-shaped stickers, and our team shirts, and went along our merry little way through town to "It's a Small World after all" and "Itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow-polka-dot bikini" and yelling all the way along. That wasn't the scary part. The scary part was that people on the bike were yelling hello to specific people through downtown and vice versa. That was scary.
What the heck? I don't go bicycling through downtown TO (well, I don't like deliberately dying, maybe that has something to do with it), yelling hello to people... on the other hand, why would I? I wouldn't know their name from a hole in the ground... :) On the other hand, I don't think I usually look that ridiculous either... (I hope...)
Hope you're all having a wonderful day!
julia