August Long Week-End

In France, we have lots of statutory holidays, so there's no need to invent more. But in Ontario, there are long stretches between days-off, or at least there were. They filled in the gaps and what I find both funny and smart is the way they chose their days, yes their days, not dates. They want/need a day off and that day might as well make it a long week-end, so it's going to be the first Monday of  August and the first Monday of September (why not Friday, I'm not sure. By the way, if the French were to choose their day it would obviously be a Thursday and everybody would "make the bridge" and take Friday off as well). Anyway, in September, the excuse is Labor Day (which we do celebrate in France but it's always on Keld's birthday, no matter what day it is). In August, the excuse is...not clear. Keld had no clue, so I searched on Wikipedia and found out that it could historically be linked to the end of slavery in the British Empire. I guess it explains why that day is mostly known as Civic Holiday. Well, this year it coincided with the Swiss National Day, which, of course, we didn't forget!

I did try to take a family picture with the Swiss colors but it didn't work at all, this is the best we got.

This long week-end we also celebrated Brother Veritsky's 85th birthday. His actual birthday is not until Saturday but the ward wanted to surprise him.

I think he was very happy! He was lucky too as plenty of people were there. We had a few visitors that Sunday.

Aunt Janet is in Timmins for about a week, so she gets to celebrate her mom's birthday today. Happy Birthday Granny!
For Brother Veritsky's party, there was a cake contest. Everybody was asked to judge three categories: best appearance, best taste, best overall. Keld went around telling everybody to vote for my cake, but he didn't even convince his own daughter who voted for the "cake-pops" in every category.

I had no chance of winning best appearance (as you may have noticed, there is no picture of my cake anywhere) but I did win best overall and Keld was pretty proud!
Otherwise, the rest of the week-end was spent at the cottage, of course.

This last one is my favorite, too bad Zack isn't wearing his hat!