I attended the Calgary Stampede on Saturday. It was my first time in Calgary (if you don't count the airport), so it was nice to be in a city for a while, though it reminded me quite a bit of San Jose (downtown core of office buildings with some shopping surrounding by parks, parking lots, and houses) but with more cowboy hats. I headed into this downtown core to do a bit of shopping, as I needed some more work clothes, and ended up stopping in the central branch of the Calgary Public Library for a little while. It's a very nice-looking library, at least on the first floor, with low shelving and lots of windows and displays.
I did not get to the rodeo part of the Stampede, as I didn't realize it was the afternoon show. I was thinking of going to the evening show but it was going to be an hour and a half of chuck-wagon racing so I decided to skip that. Chuck-wagon racing, for those of you, like me, who never heard of it until now, is basically a contemporary version of Roman gladiator chariot racing. The equipment is updated but the concept and violence are apparently about the same. Instead I hung out on the grass by one of the music stages where I heard the Stampede Band show, which was pretty awesome. (I do have a soft spot for marching bands.) They marched off playing You Can Call Me Al. Paul Simon for marching band! It was great.
The food was quite impressive - primarily deep-fried (oreos, cheesecake, coke, donuts, bananas, funnel cake, etc.) and meat, but I did have a falafel wrap which was delicious. I have yet to find a falafel place in Banff and am not confident in my ability to make my own so I have been going without. I also had mini-donuts, kettle corn and a slice of deep-fried cheesecake, which was actually very good.
Sunday morning I moved into a new apartment where I have the single room. One of the girls who will be in the shared room moved in then, too, and the other will move in on Tuesday. I slept amazingly well last night. I still need to pick up things to make the apartment fully functional, like dish soap and trash cans but I am very glad that I got to move.
Tomorrow at work I get to go through the orders database and order a lot of stuff, mostly from what the previous music librarian selected but I've put some in too. I'm almost done with the backlog of cataloguing so I've been spending more time cleaning up the authority files and looking up various composers, conductors and performers, which has been both useful and interesting. I expect that I will have to do some more research to figure out what some of the items in the orders database are to determine if we should order them now.
The most exciting thing at work today was the arrival of a Haydn trumpet concerto from a publisher in Germany which smelled like rotten cheese.
