#shambhalamf

Sorry for the long break in writing folks! Last weekend, not the one just gone, I attended Shambhala Music Festival in the beautiful Kootenays. I spent the week before working hard to prepare for the week I would have away both at my job and for my schoolwork. I had a major due date which was while I was away and I also had some small pieces to show in class for critique. I scrambled and got all my schoolwork done so that while I was away I wouldn't fall too far behind. 

Wednesday evening after work I handed in all the work I had completed and did my final running around to get supplies before leaving Vancouver at 7:30pm. It is quite a long drive to Salmo River Ranch and many mountain passes which have no cell phone service. For those tuning in from Australia, they call mobile phones cell phones here. I planned to arrive at the Venue at about 4am. For most people, this description of the drive would be scary enough, but I have made many drives like this within Canada so I wasn't super worried. It was only after starting the drive that the real terror began. 

I haven't been talking too much about my life outside of school here, but when I first arrived, I set out to buy a cheap car. I had a budget of $500 to work with and was put onto a 1985 Toyota Tercel (Tercedes). I purchased this car knowing there would be problems with it but as a cheap way for me to get from A to B. Now having only purchased this car a short amount of time ago, I knew of a few of its problems. The little frog, as she is now affectionately known as, has a pretty decent oil leak, a front left wheel bearing which needs replacing, and had been running rich for a while. 

I started the drive and noticed that the Tercedes has a pretty decent death wobble at around 60kph-115kph. I had checked all the fluids before leaving so knew that it would be good to go for at least a little while on the road and I had played with the carburetor to slow the flow of fuel. I stopped in Hope for some food and felt like everything was going ok and sleep would be my only problem.  When I got back into the car, it struggled to start, which was fairly normal but still a little jarring before the rest of the drive. Hope is where the mountain passes start on the way inland from the coast. It was on this first pass where the Little Frog started to overhead and I started to panic! 

I discovered that it was all because I was pushing it too hard to get up the really steep hills and after that was no more problems with overheating. 60kph was a fast speed for the uphills. Embarrassing! The whole drive felt like the wheels and undercarriage would fall off at any moment, but I made it to Shambhala in the end. Driving into the property at 3:45am actually worked out very well because I was through the line up, security, and parked by 4:30 and that was with me waiting in the wrong lines twice. Its pretty unheard of getting in that quickly! 

Shambhala was fantastic as usual, but an emotional rollercoaster because of the fire danger close by. I got to see and catch up with many of my close friends who live in Nelson which was amazing. A fire was burning about 16km away when we started the party and continued to get closer as the weekend progressed. Many people were fighting it but it kept coming our way with the heat and the wind. Saturday night it was announced that Sunday would be cancelled and we would have to evacuate by 9pm the next night. So many people went wild and partied hard on the Saturday because it would now be the last night. Some of the DJ’s stopped the music and asked us to do a rain dance so we could keep partying. I went to bed around 4:30am knowing I would have to pack up the next day. 

I slept pretty late on the Sunday and then leapt out of my tent planning to start packing when I was told the small amount of rain that we got was enough to un-cancel the party! Sunday night it poured rain for a while so it was great that we got to stay. I had a night staying with a friend in Nelson and catching up with other friends, and my dog, before I drove all the way home to Vancouver again for my class that evening. 

Straight back into school, and then work, has made the recovery from the festival nice and fast. I arrived back to find that I haven't missed too much and I will be able to catch up, but it may take me a couple of weeks. I came straight back into my Art Direction class where it was awesome to see that my group had done so much work in my absence. After that, my Ethics teacher informed me that I would be able to catch up on the assignment, which was completed in class so I am currently working on that. I also went into my Foundations of Electronic Production class completely unprepared but with a few magazine covers. I have since been working almost solely on the magazine! We rolled out a new project for that class which is to create some book jackets for a series of 3 books which will be due at the same time as the magazine so I have my work cut out for me. 

Tomorrow is a shooting day for my Art Direction magazine. We will go to Stanley  Park in our groups to get the photographs for the outdoor magazine. It’s going to be a long and tiring day, but I am hoping very rewarding. I thought I would attach my final branding guidelines for the city of Nelson BC for you to look at. It hasn't been graded yet but I was mildly happy with the outcome. I will only attach the first few very large pages because it is pretty boring to read and the page sizes are huge!

Thank you for reading!