Boozy Floats and a Trip to Caledonia

Friday night involved a "boozy float" party at Leigh and Shane's to celebrate Kate and Adam's recent engagement (congratulations, guys!). What is a "boozy float", you ask? Well, first of all, these floats are the drinking kind, not the get-drunk-and-participate-in-a-parade kind (although we decided at the party that we should seriously consider the latter as well). As in a traditional float, it involves ice cream mixed with some sort of pop, but these ones have booze as well.

We found it somewhat challenging to think of liquor that went well with ice cream as well as pop, so we came up with some interesting combinations. The first one I tried had vanilla ice cream and root beer with amaretto - a little sweet, but quite tasty overall. I also tried the gin and tonic with ice cream that Leigh concocted (strange, but pretty good), and then Kate made me a great "brown cow" (vanilla ice cream, milk, coffee liquer, and chocolate syrup). Yum. However, I was pretty ice creamed-out at that point, so I switched to beer. It's a concept that definitely deserves further experimentation, though! (Entertaining photos to follow soon...)

Saturday morning I headed to Calendonia with a bunch of people from CUPE at McMaster. We went to support the Six Nations peoples in a rally against the local racist group who protests at the site and is headed by the despisable Gary McHale. No one was sure how many people on either side were going to be there, or what type of interaction might ensue, so we organised ourselves into "grouplets" to make sure nobody was going to get lost. It was bitterly cold with the wind, but we stood behind the fence near the main road for a couple of hours. (A fire was started eventually, which was much appreciated once it really got going!) Despite the strong OPP presence, McHale's supporters showed up after a little while and congregated not far from us at one end of the property, exchanging verbal assaults over the fence with some of the First Nations protestors. All of us stayed away from it, as we really didn't want to get involved in that sort of negative interaction; we just wanted to demonstrate our support for the Six Nations and their land claim through our presence. We eventually headed inside their headquarters (one of the mostly-finished homes on the development property) for some food and heat, but right before we did I ended up meeting a guy who does wildlife conservation education at schools in Ontario for the Great Bear Foundation. We had a really interesting discussion, and he's offered to send me some info about what he does and the organisations he works for. A great contact for my thesis research! It's funny where you meet people... :)