Essentially A Sad Goodbye

So I have to say Goodbye to my wonderful class ACE 30 at Vancouver Film School.  Orientation Day came and left four months ago, Presentation Day has come and gone.  We have seen each other at our best and our worst, both in acting and in life.  We have been pissed at each other, and we have celebrated each other.  The fact is that in the last four months the ups and downs have brought me closer to this group than any other group at any other time in my life.  These people became family, and that is one of the great things about the program in VFS.

I had a class of eighteen people to start out with, we lost two people that I wish I had a chance to get to know through the rest of the course, but alas, the time we have together cannot be extended.  So we move on, we move to all sorts of destinations, Some of us move along to the one-year Acting for Film and Television Program, some of us move back home to wherever home is for us. Some of us Boston, Tennessee, Edmonton, and many other places. We move home, we move back, we move forward, we move on.  , This is my committing friendship, this is my I miss you, this is my love, my hate, my annoyance, and my final goodbye to some people that I love dearly.

To Ben, Rayn, Natasha, Suvini, Sidartha, Emily, Heajee, Arik, Stephanie, Michael, Jeff, Jesse, Gyu Hee, and Alex, I will miss you all and I hope to work with you into the future wherever you may be working.

Although I am sad to be done Acting Essentials, I am very glad to be moving forward to the one-year Acting for Film and Television Program.  I missed orientation day to be home for the holiday between programs.  I have been in Saskatchewan for the last few days, happy to be home.  It is really an odd feeling though, I have made a decision to make Vancouver my home, but Prince Albert still feels like home. It really does, but that doesn’t make Vancouver feel any less then like home.  They say that home is where the heart is, and that is something that I really believe, and I love Prince Albert, yet I love the work in Vancouver, and I love the people in both places.  It is an odd feeling, and I have come to the conclusion that right now, I have two homes.

I spent a weekend at Greenwater National Park with my family, here are a few pictures for my friends to see:

This is the picture of my Niece, Zoe Kinley, she is one of the cutest children ever, and she is awesome…, I’m beginning to think that I’m a face on an ipod screen, it is kind of annoying, but I love her a lot.  I didn’t get a picture of me with my amazing Nephew, dubbed ninja baby, I will get one soon and I will post it…, eventually. And here it is, the promised picture of ninja-baby in the flesh…, well photographic flesh anyways.

I love how freaked out he looks…, like, who is this guy holding me, and where do I recognize him from?

    

I was going to upload more pictures of my brother in law, Dwight wake boarding, but I want to go to sleep tonight, so I will keep writing to finish.

So at 30,000-ish feet in the air I took a picture of the wing, so I ask you, what why would you be stepping on that area anyways…, and for all you people that are going to make say how stupid this comment is…. IT WAS A JOKE! jus sayin….

and how can you not do blue steel in a smurfs cut-out, like it was like so totally the thing to do.

I came home and I have a great opportunity to play with my home church band and give Jody a day or two off. It was so much fun. I love being able to play, I haven’t picked up my bass since I first arrived in BC in April. I love playing with the band.  Sometimes, I think about the people in my Essentials class and I get a tad sad and I miss them, but I know that they will move on to what they really want to do with their lives.  I really hope to work with them later.

Last but not least, I want to thank my fabled readers for letting me know that they were actually reading this blog, because I would have stopped a long time ago otherwise, just for the simple reason that I have a really short attention span.  It is so short that I

The Last Saskatchewan Poet…, or not

Well , I decided to try something new and innovative, or just something in general.  Tomorrow I am going to be shooting a video, this will be my first where I am just there to act, not as part of the creative team (producer, director, etc.).  I’m hoping that it will turn out well, we are wanting to enter it into a Vimeo competition, you can find the link below: http://vimeo.com/videoschool/lesson/404/weekend-challenge-one-shot-video .This will be fun, I just met the creative team leader today and we are shooting tomorrow, quick turn around I’m thinking, I will post a link when it is done to show you what we did.  I think that it will be fun.

I have a friend from my life group, Noah, who is a digital photographer, and he is scouting locations tomorrow and I kind of want to go with him, maybe I can get the people that are coming over to come with us, it will be fun!  I’m thinking that this is going to be a fantastic time.  If everything goes according to plan, tomorrow is going to be a busy, yet fun day.

This week in school, we all wrote a poem. The reason why is because they need us to reach into the mind of the artist who wrote the piece and bring out what they may have been thinking, so they wanted us to become an artist, and perform our own piece.  Here is the piece that I wrote.

I remember a day kinder then this
Where life was simple, play and bliss
Soon the pressures arise and I lose
All trace of life once a brilliant rose
Still on I go, searching for a Clue
Where can I go, what do I do
To live a life so true and real
Where I’m free to live, love, and feel
It’s not a place, a job, or a group
If that’s where I look its an endless loop
This truth that I continually searched for
is an ability to walk through an open door
When I see opportunity fly right by
I become alone, depressed, and cry.
To live a life strong and true
Grab life by the horns and walk right through
The door at 12, open and wide
Walk right through forget your pride
The reason I can be so down and low
Pride keeps me locked up, alone and cold
In a prison so deep I can barely see
The life so brilliant surrounding me
To say I don’t need help, to let pride win
Is to slip back into depression again
The last I know, I see and find
A God that directs life so bright and alive
In these things my happiness I find
Where I can finally see and open my eyes
The beauty of grace that’s all around me
From guilt and shame I can be free
Happiness is here right in front of you
Live free, live brave, fight for what’s true

That’s the piece, I shouldn’t have made it so long, it would have been nice to know that I needed to memorize it before I wrote it. So apparently now I have to perform it memorized in class, hopefully not in front of everybody in the acting program, which apparently some people have had to do.

I have a few pictures that I thought that you might enjoy from my last week or so.

All The Small Things

So in acting class we are working on having details of a character ready, as they will make your character more believable on screen and on stage. However, there are some after affects to learning about this.  I have a great many things now that I’m looking for the details in.

The details are some of the most important things in a character, they are what makes a character react a certain way.  I know that I can’t really speak a lot about it, but there is some great things I want to write about in school, but it is so intense that the people you are with are becoming super close friends.  It is kind of funny how passionate people become about different things.

My tell in Poker came up in a scene, not that I was playing poker in that scene, but when I’m insincere, after lots of analysis I find that I have a hard time looking people in the eye when I’m insincere and I was having a hard time getting into character, and was insincere in a scene with a friend.  I lost all confidence after that scene.  That was on Tuesday and it took me until Thursday night to pick myself back up and I’m learning how to forgive quickly and bounce back quicker then that.  It’s a process, but I’m learning it.

I miss home.  They say that home is where the heart is, but that isn’t necessarily true.  My heart is where I am, this is what I want to do, but I miss the little things.  I realized that one of the things that I really miss, although my friends I do miss, its the small things.  I found myself sitting on a small patch of grass about 5×5 leaning up against a tree.  I miss grass and/or snow. I love the space.  The small things are the things that remind me of home.  When I was Kayaking with my Surrey Dad a couple weeks ago, it was so nice to go into a forest, because it kinda reminds me of home.  It is kind of funny how things work out that way.

You would be amazed in the details that make me think of home. The big things aren’t the things that do it, but the small things.  For example, a friend will do something that reminds me of friends back home, and I’m lost for five minutes in my head. Nobody has lawns out here.  Mowing your grass is almost nonexistent where I currently reside.  Whereas its almost like a national sport back home, I’m happy I don’t have to do the work, but I miss the strands of green in my hands and under my feet.  I now understand the white picket fence dream.

On an interesting note, I’m find it pretty funny that nobody living in Vancouver is actually from Vancouver.  I met a new person today in my life group, Laura, shes a Neufy I think, just moved here to go to…, you guessed it VFS! either way, I think only about 10% of the people that I know are actually from the Vancouver area.

So I’m stepping out to try more new things this weekend, I have agreed to go salsa dancing tonight, this should be fun. I have never been dancing before, so this is going to be fun.  There is a whole group of us going and I think that it will be an interesting experience. So that is my week this week, I really wish that I could post more about things that I’m learning.  I’m hoping that I won’t want some sort of chips to go with the Salsa!

A Deliberate Man

It is funny how busy I am for ‘acting school’  They are handing out assignments like it is candy at Halloween, there isn’t much time for much else other than school. I mean even today, there are a bunch of people going for a hike, but I am going to school to work on assignments.  I probably would have went with them if I’m not babying a tweaked sprained ankle from 10-ish days ago…, but I am and I have assignments due tomorrow as it stands anyways, so complain I shall not.

I know that I’m not supposed to say a whole lot about school, but that’s basically all that is happening, so I’m going to say a little bit about it without giving away the big stuff.

I love the work in school.  It makes you study out everything that is possible to study. I spent the morning today with one person from my class working on the Text Analysis for Good Will Hunting by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. It is a very good script, a little much language, however, great story.  Never seen the movie yet, not allowed to until we finish analyzing the script.  Something to look forward to in a couple of months.

I get to do another dialogue tomorrow, I’m super pumped, but I’m not happy about the language in the dialogue.  The amount of swears in the dialogue, even though not being said be me makes me uncomfortable, but I’m not sure I ever want to be comfortable doing that.  I’m going to see if I can make some changes to the script before tomorrow, we’ll see how my scene partner takes it.This is another role that I really want as it will stretch me a bit.  The scene is that I am a highly paid escort, and I fell in love with an actress who is now leaving me for a director and a ‘big part’ in a movie.

The whole exercise is for us to learn how to incorporate different breathing styles into different characters.  So I’m happy to learn this stuff.

So stress around the school is high this week as the people nearing the end of their schooling had Bill week, which is a one week intensive workshop with Bill Marchant that is just that, intense.  Bill is so passionate about what he does that if you aren’t taking it as seriously as he does, then he will tear you down.  He will tear you down or praise you incessantly depending on your performance, I have heard that there is no middle ground!  I get excited when I  hear about that.  It makes me want to get to that class and give my best to see what he thinks about it. I can’t wait for that.

I wrote the previous part on the weekend, and I wanted to complete the assignment before I posted this, so I could tell you how it went.  It didn’t go well, not this one. I thought I was prepared and now that I did it, I thought that I could have been a lot better.  The worst part is that I feel like I could have done things to be better, I feel like I didn’t give it my all, that I didn’t risk anything, even though it was something that I had never done before.  I was hoping to give a better report than that.

There is a bright side to this.  Because I know that I can do better, there is nothing stopping me from taking it higher and actually being better.  So from this point, I need to make sure that my performances are true, and that I risk everything, leaving it all up there for the script. Everything from this point on will be deliberate!

End of Prologue

This week was our prologue week.  This means that we were basically getting ready for what was to come in the future weeks.  This was the end of week one. I’m super tired. This is not a good sign.  I have a great deal of weeks ahead of me, and if I am already tired…. Either way  I can’t wait for Monday to see what is coming next.

I finally have pictures of the people in my class, this said these pictures are not the best, just cell phone pictures, but here they are below:

This is Ben and Emily

This is Brian, Sivini, Alex, Jesse, and Rayn

David, Jeff, and Michael

Teachers Jen and Duncan

Natasha and myself

These are Rayn, our local Tennessean

Sid, Heajee (look her up on imdb) Natasha, Ahmen, and Alice

Brian, Alex, Sivini Jesse

These are the people that I am working with day in and day out in Acting Essentials class 30 (ACE 30)

I got to sit in a Lamborghini today, I can’t believe how nice those cars are inside.  I may not have driven one yet, but I was lucky to meet a guy nice enough to let me sit in his car and look around.  It was a really really nice car

That is basically my week in pictures and a nutshell.

I look at my new friends and I can`t help but thinking of the people that I left behind.  Seriously, I keep pulling out my phone to look at pictures of the people in Prince Albert.  The only pictures that I wish I had were ones of my Children`s church kids.  I only seem to have a picture of Chelei.

I`m not sentimental as a general rule, but I`m missing home now that I`m just sitting around waiting to go to bed.  Pictures of the four of us (Rachel, Rebecca, myself, and Adam) with Chelie and Moose pulling tricks in the background.

I did miss a wedding today, that hurt…, a lot.  Was hoping to distract myself from the thought of what I was missing.  This only works until I slow myself down enough to remember it.

Jessica and Dallas, I`m sorry I missed your wedding.  I wish could have been there this weekend to celebrate you guys today. Sarah was kind enough to send me a picture or two.  I may not have been there with you two in person today, but I wish I was.  I was thinking of you two.   I wish you the best in your married future.  I love you two!

As Far As I Can Go About VFS

So the last couple of days have been a little bit hectic around VFS.  This is good for me because I am doing something, not just siting around waiting to do something.  I’m not allowed to say what happens in class to the world, so everything that happens out of class is the only thing that I can tell you about.

We have a fantastic class filled with people that are amazing.  It is kind of funny, I’m not quite used to clicking with people so fast, but after two days, I can’t believe how close I am to these people.  We have eighteen people in our class, of those people we have one person from Vancouver, four people from BC (I think), about nine people from Canada, and the rest are foreign.  From Korea to the United States.  The diversity in our class is absolutely phenomenal.  I don’t have any pictures as of yet for you guys, however, I’m sure that I will soon.  I’m really not a picture guy, however, for my people at home, I will step out of my box.

One thing that I can say is that I am amazed at how many church kids there are in my class.  I thought that I would be alone in that, but there are at least four that I can think of off the top of my head, a couple with the same morals that I have or possibly higher.  This is a great thing, I have the opportunity to get to know them and their beliefs, see how much they differ from mine.  I love it!

VFS is more of a community of artists then anything else.  They are a school where you learn your craft, but you learn by doing, and by doing with others.  I had the opportunity to go to a acting workshop that they alumni were putting on just to keep their acting skills honed.  This was a fantastic opportunity to get to know people who are actually working in the business, some of them had just graduated a couple of weeks ago.  Maybe workshop was the wrong word, but it was a group of actors getting together to hone their skills.  Awesome people!  It is amazing how little people judge in this business, because everybody makes idiots of themselves “almost on a monthly basis in this business” as we are told.

Outside of VFS there isn’t a whole lot happening right now.  I found a group of guys that play basketball in a local mall with a basketball court in it, so I’ve been playing basketball with these guys.  It is funny, because at home, I never really had a whole lot of time to get out into the community, but here, at night, there isn’t much more to do…, so I find this fun.  Just an odd point, it seems like the short guys are the ones that are the best at basketball.

I would write that my time hasn’t been one to write home about, but that would be a little ironic, so…. That’s all I have for now.  Have a Good One!

Mousetrap

So today I wanted to tell a story so I wrote a short story below, I hope you enjoy it, and it is all based on the true events of the following paragraph and picture.

So I have a mouse in the apartment, and it ate one of my muffins.  I hope you got that from the story, because the story is true.  I don’t like it, but it is. It is funny though, all I can think of is that movie mouse hunt that I watched with my dad how many years ago.  I hope I’m smarter then this mouse.

I promised pictures of the Stanley Park visit, and here are all that I got.

“It’s only six” he muttered in a low voice, “its too early.”  This, however, was no time to for sleep.  Joel woke up groggily to the sound of a paper bag moving around.  A crime was taking place at that very moment.  A crime that would make him sick to his very stomach.  Every time he thought of this crime, his stomach would churn.

Joel waited groggily listening for any more noise. Suddenly he heard a noise, an electronic vibration, “Come On!” Joel thought out loud, “this couldn’t happen”.  Joel realized that he had left his phone alarm on, and the vibrating must have been what woke him up.  Even though he was barely awake, he thought of a Christmas four plus years before, when he ACCIDENTLY set his aunty’s alarm clock to go off at three in the morning, he thought of his phone and of how much he needed the extra hour of sleep before his day.  He shut his phone off and closed his eyes.

That’s when he heard what had really jarred him awake. It was a paper bag shivering, almost as if it were human and left out in the cold for too long. Then it hit him, there was only one paper bag in his room. This paper bag had his snacks in it.  The muffins that his relatives had packed for him two nights before.

A few days before Joel had been playing video games when he thought he saw a rodent out of the corner of his eye, dismissing it as nothing, he continued what he was doing, but the thought of a rodent never sat well with him.  He had never seen it, but thought that it would never hurt to be safe, so he moved all of his groceries onto his dresser just to be safe, but the thought of a rodent never left his mind.

He heard the rustling one more time of that poor paper bag, and the thought of a mouse jolted Joel out of bed.  He lept to the desk, where his paper bag was lying.  He picked it up and looked at the bottom. The paper bag had been violated, by the suspected rodent, but not just that, the rodent had taken a bite out of his favorite muffin.

“This means War!” Joel declared softly so that the mouse who was faster then he was at this time in the morning could hear, but not to wake up his sleeping room mates.  He hoped that he said it loud enough that the mouse would not only hear his words, but that dread would course through its small evil veins.  It ruined his muffins.  Most else may have been forgiven, but this…, not this.  This was too far!

The thinker was awakened, the giant the slept, was now up and planning. Joel concocted a plan, daring to be done.  He thought of how he could capture this mouse and hold it on trial for the crimes that it had committed to humanity.  The crimes so unthinkable…, it had destroyed had destroyed something so precious.

He set his trap, this trap cannot be explained by just mere words, but must have be seen to see its true brilliance. I must try to explain it.  There were steps leading up to the trap and crumbs on every step. These steps lead up to the Mecca of sorts for this mouse.  it lead to the remainder of the muffin so dreadfully violated in the wee small hours of the morning.  Once the mouse went for the bait, the weight of the mouse would cause the last book to fall into a bucket that the mouse would be unable to get out of.  The plan was genius.

NO way out! This mouse would stand Trial!

A Life in groups.

So it is my second Friday here, and this one was better then the last.  Last Friday, for the sake of not knowing anybody, I stuck inside my loft and I played video games with my room mates, roomies, loft mates, lofties, err, the people I live with. This time around, I actually had something to do.  I’m trying to get more involved in the church up here.  This means that whenever the doors are open, I’m going to try to be there. Tonight, this Friday night, was way better then the last.

Up until this point, the only people that I got to know enjoy bar hopping and partying, and frankly, that just aint* my cup of tea, no interest in it. I went to the worship night at Coastal church tonight.  Great Night!  I love the Praise and Worship when they actually have more then 20 minutes.  Not that Sunday mornings service is bad, but the flow kinda reminds me of home a tad.  This said, It was a great service, and I will definitely be going to any of their worship services that I can again.

They have this system here called life groups.  Essentially it is a bunch of people getting together and hanging out and talking about God.  Basically what Adam and I did at home, just a group of people that get together regularly and do it. So I’m kinda excited to get into that. It is something that I really need, because it will help get me connected to a group, and especially when I’m new to a city.  That is really hard.

It is funny when I was at home and I was ‘the comfortable one’ and somebody from out of town would come, I would almost be scared to go to talk to them because I didn’t want to make an idiot of myself.  Now being on the other end of that, it brings everything into perspective.  Service by yourself isn’t a bad thing, because as a general rule, when I’m not beside Adam, I don’t normally talk to the people beside me, but when you are waiting for service to start and you don’t have anybody to talk to, 5 minutes can feel like 5 hours.

I wish I could remember names, but I was sitting by myself tonight at the worship service for about 10 hours waiting for everything to start, at least that is how long it felt like. A man came up to me and invited me to sit with him and his wife.  I had nothing better to do so I joined him.  It was nice to actually meet some of the people from church.

When you are new to a church and everybody has their group it is hard to get in there and introduce yourself.  There are a few things that race through your mind: “I don’t want to break up a conversation”, “Are the house rules different here then what I’m used to?” and the like of that sort of thought line.  So you end up sitting in the back waiting for church to start for 10 hours.

One person is all it takes to make you feel at home.  One person taking time out of their social schedule to talk to you, the newcomer, can make the day, especially, when the number of people they know in the city can be counted on their hands.

This is a great day! This is a great city! It may not be home, but home is what you make it.

*      That was just for you Aunty Evonne

The European Factor – No Regrets

So a Danish, a German, a Canadian, and a Suede were sitting in a bar.  Sounds like the start to a bad joke, huh? Well, it wasn’t.  I went to Orientation day #2 today and decided I was going to go against my normal routine for finding and meeting new people.

This second day was for people who were new to Vancouver, I figured that they would be looking for new friends as well, so I went to meet new people mostly, because everything that I thought that they would talk about I already knew. Which was true, they mostly mentioned stuff like Visa’s, study and work permits, student services, healthcare, transit, etc.

I met a man named Fredrick, he was Swedish, I finally found somebody who loved hockey as much as I do…, and he wasn’t Canadian.  He is your typical Swedish guy with a couple exceptions, he doesn’t have a typical Swedish accent, and he hates the Sedin Twins.  He is the only person that I know in Vancouver other then me that think the Canuck twins are a scourge on the game of hockey.

Fred likes his Football (Soccer) and he invited me to watch the game with him and a couple of his friends, it was a blast.  I went to his side of town, and then he tells me we are going to a bar to watch it as he doesn’t have the game. Still not a big deal, I’ve been to a bar before.

We went in and sat down with his friends to watch the game.  It wasn’t so much about the game as it was about networking.  Getting to know people in the industry. There we met Michael and his pal, the German.  We sit down and they proceed to order a ‘The List’ as they liked to call it.  I’ve never heard the term before and then they explained it this way.  Whenever they are in a new place that they haven’t yet tried all of the different kinds of beer.  They order the list, which is every beer that the bar has, this way they get to know what they like and what they don’t like.  This is what they did for lunch.  It was definitely interesting.

I sat with my Coca Cola, watching them drink one beer after another after another.  Other then the alcohol they consumed, they were great guys and what I was amazed at, was they never got drunk.  It was stupid.  Don’t take this post the wrong way.  I firmly believe that getting drunk is wrong, and I won’t do it.

After talking a bit more, I found out that Michael is in my program, and Fred is in the 12 month acting program.  These are guys that I’m going to get to know, but I’m not a bar guy, so I am going to have to get to know them outside of their natural habitat. It is funny that when I’m talking to the three of them that I got into asking why they are going to the school? What made them decide that they wanted to go into acting.  Their responses were very similar to mine.  All three of us had been in good jobs, all three of us probably could have stayed in those jobs and made a living, and all three of us were not happy doing the work.  We had all decided that money wasn’t the main objective and that we would rather wake up every morning excited to go to work, then to work a dreary job for the rest of our lives.

Everybody has something to offer you if you look for it.  with these three guys, I may not agree with their choices, I may not agree with their living styles or their hangout places. They had a saying that I quite enjoyed. “There are two ways that you can take everything, it can be creepy or a compliment”, later on it was changed to “it could be creepy, or creative.”  Either way, all of us were optimists, and all of us wanted to live a life that was free from regret.

Welcome to Canada – an Orientation

So there we have it.  Orientation day, FINALLY.  It feels like I have been sitting around waiting for Jesus to come back here in Vancouver, but alas, things are looking up.  I have met a few people and now am starting to get some friends outside of the loft. This will be nice, as up until this point, the only people that I have talked to have been my Loftmates, and school admissions people.  So it is nice to meet some people outside. However, it seems like everybody here is either exotically foreign or from Saskatchewan.  I’m not complaining, the SK people know what I’m talking about, and the foreign people are just as lost as I am.

I met Anna Prein, who is in Game design, she is interesting, Kinda reminds me of Sandra Heron, without the knowledge and interest in art History. She was born in Russia, is from Texas, and has a degree from UBC, and has no accent confused…, yeah tell me about it.  She is pretty decent though, and very friendly. Possbily a spy? …,hmmm, something may be afoot. Imagination is a wonderful thing isn’t it?

The second person that I got to know was Nelsinho Piquet Sobrinho, you can ask me how to pronounce his name, but I can’t remember.  He was from the warm climate of Brasilia Brazil.  He thought that it was cold outside today at around 12 degrees.  He wasn’t as surprised as I thought that he would be that in Prince Albert, we get to -50 sometimes.  He was a pretty good guy, good English for being from Brazil, not much of an accent though.

Back to Orientation Day.  One of the things that I love about Vancouver Film School is how much they expect out of their students.  If you aren’t planning on giving it your all, then you might as well go home. They expect you to make waves in the industry, and if you don’t it’s almost like a disappointment. Their business card’s have “Results Matter” on the back, and the videos show the students some of the projects that the people did the year before.  This is a little intimidating, seeing award winning games, not just from VFS, but student projects that have competed among industry professionals and have won awards with them.  It is definitely a hard task that I set out to accomplish.  I can’t wait to tackle it.

VFS expects every year to raise the bar, they may not win awards, but they want us to raise the bar, I can’t wait to get things started, learn more, and use it to bring glory to God.  One of the things that they press on you at VFS is that the industry is not all about you and if you go in with that attitude, then you will fail. They are saying that it is all about community and networking, helping others selflessly with their projects, in helping others, that’s normally when you get the recognition that everybody needs in the industry.  I can’t wait.

Also my Toronto Maple Leafs made it to the playoffs, I’m pretty happy about that too!

I don’t get photos much of people, I will have to change that, however, I do have another photo of a building to show you.

This is a picture of…, you guessed it, a Grand Hotel in Vancouver.  This is such a nice building, I wanted to take a picture of it the last time that I was hanging around that area of town, but it was raining, so I waited for today.  I love the lions on the sides of the stairs.  This building takes the cake so far as my favorite…, and now that I have said that, the public library building comes into mind.  Now it is a hard fought battle between the two.