Spectacular, live music in the gardens as part of the tour!
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Music in the Garden – 15th Annual Artists in the Garden Tour supporting Hearth Place Cancer Support Centre Oshawa
Peony Power
The peonies were blazing in the gardens of homeowners that participated in the 15th Annual Artists in the Garden Tour.
Garden Signs
Homemade garden signs rock! Check out these babies catching the sun yesterday during the 15th Annual Artists in the Garden tour…..
Artists in the Garden tour photos
This backyard was loaded with details – well tended plantings, sculptures, ornaments and musicians!
Outdoor gallery spaces in the gardens -sprung up along fence lines in this garden.
Clematis were in full bloom in the gardens I saw. This one was found in a Whitby garden.
15th Annual Artists In The Garden – garden Tour June 21
It’s Tuffy P – guest blogging again… off on another garden tour – this one took place in the gardens Durham region – Oshawa and Whitby. It featured artists, artisans and live music in just about every garden. Thank you to all those gardeners, home owners and volunteers who put together this year’s Artists in the Garden garden tour. It was their 15th annual such event. Proceeds raised from the tour and raffle tickets went to support Oshawa’s Hearth Place – Cancer Support Centre which first opened their doors on January 29, 1997 http://www.hearthplace.org/
Out and about…
We visited the Museum of Canadian Contemporay Art this afternoon for the opening of a show called Over the Rainbow. This show, which is part of World Pride Toronto celebrations features work from the fantastic collection of Salah Bachir and Jacob Yerex. The show was great, and we had a chance to talk to friends at the event.
We had left the dogs on their own at home while we were out so we decided to take them for a good romp out at Jack Darling Park
. The dogs had a blast. Georgie made friends with a little pooch named Casper who led him all around the park. 
Jack Darling is the best designed dog park I’ve ever seen. It’s huge and has loads of trails and loads of variety. Our dogs love it there.
Summer’s here and the time is right….
Go last night….
Played 6 games of Go last night with Vox. I won 4 of the 6 games but one of them was by just half a point, so overall we were close. I did well exploiting weaknesses and was able to kill a number of groups over the evening. Overall I was seeing the board well and I was fairly happy with my play.
Music from Little Egypt
I don’t know anything about Southern Illinois. I drove through it once on the way to or from somewhere else and I did it too fast and I failed to pay attention (not fair I know). Only recently I’ve learned it’s known by the nickname Little Egypt. It isn’t a place I would think to look for Old Time music, and yet I’ve recently learned there is some most excellent music to be heard from that area.
At the Midwest Banjo camp, I was introduced to a bit of this music by Cathy Barton Para. Specifically, she introduced 3 tunes – Bonaparte’s March (Pappy Taylor), Dull Chisel (Garry Harrison), and Cotton-eyed Joe Too (Dave Landreth), and pointed to some musicians to check out – the late Garry Harrison, Lynn “Chirps” Smith, the stringband they played in, the Indian Creek Delta Boys, and Dave Landreth. I’m sure there are also numerous other very interesting players from that area to learn about.
I’ve been playing a lot of clawhammer banjo (thanks Tuffy P for putting up with it!), convinced that if I work at it hard enough and long enough, I might eventually become a decent player. At the same time, I’ve been listening to loads of music, particularly on YouTube which is a fabulous resource for this kind of music – I’m like a kid in a candy store gobbling this stuff up.
I’ve started listening to a CD (a lot of this music isn’t available for download that I know of) this evening called Down in Little Egypt by Lynn “Chirps” Smith. I ordered it online and it arrived in today’s post. It features Chirps Smith on fiddle, Curtis Buckhannon on mandolin, mandola, and madocello, fred Campeau on banjo, guitar, Hawaiian guitar, banjo-uke and fiddle, Dave Landreth on banjo and guitar, Jeff Miller on banjo and Jim Nelson on guitar. I’m looking forward to getting my paws on any other recordings I can find from this area as well.
I searched around on the YouTube machine for some of these guys and sure enough there is some very good material online, including some interesting videos called Listen Up Illinois. Here’s one of those, in which Chirps Smith talks about early days with the Indian Creek Delta Boys, and how they came to find some Indiana old time music, and specifically Pappy Taylor.
There are also some videos of the Indian Creek Delta Boys online. Here they are performing a great stringband tune called Waterbound. This is from 1994…
Big Boy
Georgie is just over 10 months now, and although he still acts like a pup, he’s really becoming a big boy. 
Here he is with what he considers his new toy – the down-spout extension. For George, anything can become a toy.
I walked the dogs over to the vet’s yesterday evening and popped in to put Georgie up on the scale. He’s 127 lbs – just 10 pounds to go to catch Memphis. He’s still a little shorter than she is, and his body shape is a little different. Memphis was 108 lbs at a year. George is already 20 lbs past that and he won’t be a year until August 5. Yikes!
27th Street 