The Queensway Buttertart Festival

I can't remember when, how or why but I volunteered to help a friend with a festival this weekend. I may have been attracted to the name!
I spent Friday planting some free perennials in Flipside's patio flower boxes and then driving around Toronto picking up animal costumes and walkie talkies. Retirement makes room for a strange variety of activities.
8am I was at the park, rigged myself and the key players with walkie talkies and spent the next 8 hours manning Base Camp. This entailed (and this is just a smattering of the jobs) signing in volunteers, getting them their t-shirts and assigning them roles, pushing the coffee and timbits in the morning and water and pop in the afternoon, responding to radio and in person requests ("need power here", "need a table there", "where's Peggy", "get me Robin", "that ice cream truck needs to move", "need a volunteer at ...", "need water at ....".......), making sure supplies got where they needed to go, basically anything that was asked of me. I had an amazing volunteer with me all day who I gather from Peggy stayed right to the end, doing anything that was asked of her. The most fun were the young volunteers.

These 3 were asked to create colouring pages

and they did a great job. Then they went to an information booth and the Kids Zone (I think)

Being in an animal costume was a hot and tiring job, another one for a young person

But the animals without their human insides were a bit creepy.

It was a beautiful day. The park was a lovely location. A stage in the centre had bands playing all day and people danced, sat and watched or hung out at the beer tent beside it. There were vendors around the perimeter, many of them selling buttertarts.

Kids had "bouncy castles", games and activities as well as dogs doing tricks. Everyone seemed to have a great time, bought bags full of buttertarts and was blissfully unaware of the amount of work that it takes to put one of these events on.

I left at 4pm, picked up more plants at Eve's (she is renovating her garden) and was home and exhausted by 7:30.