Hooray, hooray, hooray, it's the Queen's birthday.

Whether you call it "The Queen's Birthday", "May 24th", or "Victoria Day", the first long weekend of the summer was a bummer this year. Traditionally the weekend when Canadians open their cottages and cabins and open up their RVs and travel trailers for another season, I don't recall the last year when the weather was this miserable - rain every day and temperatures in the single digits (celsius, of course).

It's also the first big gardening weekend of the year, but the rain and cold meant that I didn't get to do any of the prep work I'd intended to do on the garden.

Well, y'know, a long weekend is a long weekend, regardless; and any weekend I have more time to hang out with Husband and the cats is a good weekend. We ate out a few times (and I had lunch with a really good friend on Sunday, someone I see far too often); and today we took a very long drive through some beautiful countryside and some quite ... eccentric communities; so I am not complaining.

I mean, that hostas plant came back so I am not complainin' about that garden or the weather noway nohow for a while.

When I was a kid in elementary school in Newfoundland, on the Friday before the long weekend, as soon as the teacher appeared in the classroom after the morning bell, we'd all chant:

"Hooray, hooray, hooray
it's the Queen's birthday!
If you don't give us a holiday
we'll all run away!"

I'm not sure where that tradition comes from - a Google search of the lyrics turns up nothing - but I have an inkling it is rooted in Newfoundland's very, very old connection with England and English tradition; and I am also guessing that, having gone to school in the 1970s, we were one of the last classes of schoolchildren to do that. I'm betting that Sis, who is 9 years younger than me, never did it - but I'd be pleased to hear that she had :)

Anyway, by then it was a well-established statutory holiday so we never had to "all run away".

ronnie