August 25th: No Facebook posting to cut and paste, for some reason. I went down the road to the Tea Party, for what I thought was an oddly timed poetry event - 10am on a Sunday. Turned out it was an informal weekly writing group, and I was very welcome to join. I ordered some maple tea and joined the table. There were 3 other regulars there, and 2 more arrived a bit later than me. We started by having a prompt: a sentence and a genre. ("When I woke up things were different"; fiction.) Rick, the facilitator, introduced a brainstorm of ideas for how this could be interperted, and then we started writing. It was my first short story for about a decade (I'm sure I"ve already written about this somewhere!). After an hour we stopped and read to each other. It was fun - my main criterion for a successful event. Afterwards, I nipped over to the Market for something I can't now remember, and then headed back to the flat. I met Urs and Nellie on the way, and we headed for the route of the Pride Parade, to start at 1pm. It took an hour and a half to pass by (I've definitely written that before!), and by the time it was finished we were all really hungry,. There was a fair going on outside CitY Hall, at the end of the parade route, so we paid our $5 each (maybe $10) and found a food stall we could all enjoy. It was run by caterers, so really good food, and still quite cheap. Since we'd paid to get in, we wandered around collecting free stuff, and by then it was too late to join a protest outside the Russian Embassy against their anti-gay laws. We headed in that direction, but passed some of the people U&P knew coming back the other way, so we knew it was over. Watched YouTube all evening.