Button Maker

I have started volunteering at Britannia Community Centre. I like the idea of Britannia, which has the community centre, high school, elementary school and library all at the same location, sharing resources. We used to live quite close and our family has done a lot of the programs there. On Canada Day I did a volunteer shift at the events they had in Victoria Park. There was the usual work of unloading tables, chairs and tents and setting them up, then decorating. In many of the things I have done as a volunteer my main utility is as heavy lifter, so quite a different value than my paid work. Normally there would have been a long period of inactivity during the event and then I would help taking down all the equipment and loading it back into the truck. However, there was someone I knew who was running the button making machine that needed help. She had pencils and sets of oil pastels for people to hand make their own designs. I never knew there was such a device, you could have a lot of fun with it. I could have spent the whole afternoon covering myself with buttons, but the activity became quite popular. This is a great thing to have and if you added some premium features (fridge magnet or hand mirror backs and a colour printer for e-mailed designs) could be a good fund raiser as well.

Waterloo King Street North

Last month I was at the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society (CAIMS) annual meeting, held at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. It was on my way home from my stay at Michigan State University. I like the CAIMS meetings. The scientific quality is quite good. There are a number of parallel sessions so you can go to things of interest, but even in a session on a given topic, it is not so specialized that you don't see something new. I have been to these meetings often enough now that there are many familiar faces. I should say that these are faces I enjoy seeing. Always some new people on the scene, notable this year was David Shirokoff at NJIT who showed me how to prove a conjecture that I had from previous work.

I was pleasantly surprised by several great restaurants and pubs nearby. Two that I really enjoyed were Ethel's Lounge (retro - or preserved from the 50s - interior but modern food and drink) and Jane Bond (vegetarian hip). There were others that looked interesting that I didn't get to try, including DVLB (Death Valley's Little Brother) which advertised specialty espresso, whiskey and bread.