Fireworks!

After spending Sunday walking around Toronto and feeding various mosquito populations in the idyllic weather, R. and I watched the fireworks at the [sponsor company's] Festival of Fire. We also found a suitable boathouse for R., and many, many bodies of standing water just waiting for a malaria vector to breed therein.

Lovely park or urban malaria headquarters?

These will be the only fireworks I see in Canada this year, since the usual Canada Day (July 1) fireworks were canceled. (The municipal workers required are members of the same union as the garbage collectors, who are currently on strike.)

We both took this opportunity to play with the "fireworks" setting on our cameras. I also set my camera to continuously shoot, so now I have a lot of mediocre pictures of fireworks and a few good ones. A few of the ones I like shall be posted here shortly.
From a perspective of no human history, it is very strange that we shoot explosives into the air and watch them burn above us as a means of celebration.


This post's theme word: doolally, "irrational, deranged, insane."

Toronto Nautical Festival

This is how I spent my Sunday: photographing R. photographing boats.
It was the Toronto Nautical Festival. We witnessed the lovely Empire Sandy cruise around and shoot her cannons twice. (The first time, I joked: "As she passes that ship, they open fire on each other and the crews swing from rigging to rigging brandishing cutlasses." Then the cannons fired. It was eerie and neat. No swordplay ensued, though, to everyone's great disappointment.)

We also managed to sign up for a free 45 minute ride on a sailboat (R., please correct me if that is the wrong boat-term), which was nice and breezy. The day was hot and sunny, words too simple to explain the discomfort of the weather. We got sunburned on all of R. and a tiny corner of me that didn't have enough sunscreen.


This post's theme word: reeve, "to pass a rope through."