THE WEEKLY EH?! // December 11th, 2023
The latest highlight of FIVE things happening in the Kimberley/Cranbrook area this week + FOUR other items of some locals' interests (also a FREE email newsletter).
Hi!
Welcome to the 11/12/23 edition of ‘THE WEEKLY EH?!’ newsletter!
Here’s Five Things
Since The 95EH Events Calendar gets updated with Kimberley AND Cranbrook area events on the regular (and it’s FREE for anybody to get their local events listed, just visit moun.town/events for the simple details), I find it helpful to do a weekly HIGHlight of FIVE things happening FOR the current week EVERY Monday… and, believe it or not, it’s Monday again:
THING #1: ‘Tis the season for hanging festive wreaths on doors, and this Tuesday (December 12th) there’s a Holiday Wreath Making event happening at Flora Bora Blooms — and this one is being held with the East Kootenay Invasive Species Council, so not only will you be doing something artistic and functional… but you’ll also be doing something educational (how’s that for a holy trinity, eh). “Make a beautiful wreath at our flower shop, enjoy some treats, and learn about invasive species!”
THING #2: The Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) Holiday Train is making its stop in Cranbrook on Tuesday, December 12th (8:45pm arrival time)… and besides some holiday cheer & “supporting food banks and food shelves by raising money, food and awareness for food insecurity issues”, it’s also bringing Tyler Shaw and Kiesza for a 9pm-9:30pm show (check the video below for a sample of what London, Ontario recently got):
And then keep in mind that: “The Cranbrook History Centre will also be hosting a warm-up event prior to the train's arrival from 7-9 p.m. Come enjoy a hot chocolate and explore the centre's galleries prior to the arrival of the train! For the warm-up event, guests are asked to bring a non-perishable food item donation for the Cranbrook Food Bank.”
THING #3: Keep the holiday cheer rolling, except make it cuter with the 2nd Annual Toddler Sing-Along with Heather Gemmel at Biscuit this Thursday, December 14th (“Moving our quarterly toddler sing along indoors to do some old fashioned Christmas carolling. There will be a piano and a couple guitars playing some of the classics. No pressure to sing… but it always helps your kiddos gain confidence when mom or dad sings along.”)
And for even more local area sing-songing, Darin Welch will be at Grist & Mash on Thursday, December 14th + Pretty for the People will be putting on a rockin’ Christmas spectacular at Key City Theatre on December 15th + Jon Burden will be playing Stonefire on December 15th & 16th + Dani Strong will be playing Stemwinder up on the ski hill on Friday, December 15th.
THING #4: Speaking of ‘up on the ski hill on Friday, December 15th’ (and talk about burying the lede, hopefully under a bunch of snow #amirite)… OPENING DAY at Kimberley Alpine Resort is tentatively scheduled for this Saturday, December 15th (9am)! “How early will you line up to get first chair!? Not only do first chair winners get bragging rights, you get your photo on social media and in newspaper, AND a lunch voucher to Buckhorn and Main Mountain Eatery!”
THING #5: And as has been the case for the last handful of THE WEEKLY EH?! newsletters, of course there’s some more Christmas/Seasonal markets to tell you about! First up, is the aptly named ‘Christmas Market’ that is happening on Friday, December 15th (4:30pm - 8:30pm) + Saturday, December 16th (10am - 4pm) at Centre 64 (“We will have live music and last minute Christmas shopping!!!”):
And then the Cranbrook Farmer’s Market is holding their aptly named ‘Last Minute Market’ on Saturday December 16th (10am - 1pm) at the Ktunaxa Gym (220 Cranbrook St. N):
Of course, there's always more than Five Things happening in any given week, so don't forget you can punch “moun.town/events” into any browser window at any time and be magically taken away to THE 95EH EVENTS CALENDAR… where you can always easily find the full gamut of Kimberley/Cranbrook area events happening this week & beyond (because there’s always way more going on than I can mention here, with new events added on the regular)!
+ Four Ehs
And because there’s also always way more going on than just the local area events that get added to The 95EH Events Calendar, here’s 4 other things that are proving to be top of mind for at least one local area person:
EH #1: If you missed the hints that I was dropping in the previous newsletters, I am now officially writing this newsletter from 8hrs in the future (and about 8000 kms to the East), in a quiet suburb of Svendborg on the Danish seaside. So if my usual “EH’s” feel a bit more like “Æ’s” for the next handful of weeks, that is probably why. In fact, I’ve even dusted off an old blog post of mine entitled “SO YOU WANT TO LEARN DANISH?” that I put together the last time I spent a good chunk of time in “Danmark” (fyi - that’s Danish for “Denmark”) so that I can once again work on being able to better communicate with the sweet danish mor-in-law that makes sure my belly is always full with rye bread (whatever the hour in mountown time).
EH #2: Speaking of ‘mountown time’, me and the missus’s body clocks still seem to be very much set to whatever the time is back in Kimberley, resulting in some majorly restless nights lying wide awake until the early hours of the Danish morning and then sleeping in late out of exhaustion and missing most of the small window when the sun is out over here (which has not been helped by mostly rainy/grey days since arriving late Friday evening). Luckily, my main responsibility over here has been to be hygge and help eat fibre-rich rye bread + drink coffee, which has definitely got a different part of my body on a new ‘regular’ schedule quite quickly (if you catch my tmi drift) 🙃
EH #3: As you may have seen the other week, Shane MacGowan, the great Irish songwriter/poet and lead singer for Celtic punks the Pogues passed away — BUT — what you may not have seen was the wonderful performance of Fairytale of New York that Glenn Hansard and Lisa O’Neill (and a whole church of friends & family) sang out in celebration at the funeral (a joyous salute to a creative human’s life that also works as a great holiday season listen, especially if, like me, you’ve played the original version to death over the previous holiday seasons).
EH #4: Besides getting hygge over here, I also have a handful of blahg’n things that I am hoping to work on in the background, one of those being my annual massive ‘20X Current Year’ end of year playlist (which, for 2023, would mean making a ‘20x23= 460 Tunes from 460 different artists/projects released in 2023’ playlist). And as big of a sorting/organizational task as this yearly task already is (even for someone who keeps an ongoing ‘EVERYTHING LIKED IN <insert current year>’ playlist and already has 675 songs/artists filed away from releases in 2023), it appears that Spotify has gone and made things even more of a major undertaking by getting rid of the ability to ‘like/heart’ individual songs, instead making any song that is added to ANY of my playlists completely indistinguishable from each other (for context: I use private playlists to keep track of music that I have not got around to listening to and ‘hearting’ the stuff I like is how I keep track of what I’ve already listened to / have already included in my public playlists… and now all of that visual organization has been made completely moot, which is a massively niche blow to me specifically).
Thankfully, I’ve already been thinking out loud about making this the last year that I use Spotify (as they’ve always been increasingly unfriendly to small/independent artists and their service keeps moving even further in the wrong direction), so this latest (un)functionality move by them just makes my personal decision to stop using Spotify that much easier (as the involved musical organization system that I’ve been using on Spotify for the last decade of music blogging has been one of the main reasons that I have not moved on already, something I’ve talked about before).
I guess the big question left for me to figure out is whether I bother switching to another music streamer OR just get out of that whole exploitive system altogether until something genuinely better comes along (ie. all the other streamers also pay independent artists fractions of pennies, they just do so at a slightly higher fraction than Spotify). But until I make that final decision (which probably won’t be until I get done with long plane rides in Feb 2024), here’s a massive sample of a whole bunch of great music that came out this year that my ears have enjoyed (a massive sample that I will need to cut down to only 460 tracks/artists for my 20x23 EOY list… before officially cutting Spotify out of my life once and for all):
And that’ll be that from me for this week.
Of course, there’s always more ‘eh?!’ to share than the 4 EHs that came to my mind while putting together this week’s newsletter, so please make sure to follow/frequent 95EH on the Facebook & Instagram & Tumblr (as I share “ehs” on the daily). And for more Jeremy/HI54-specific stuff, you can also follow @HI54LOFI on the Instagram & Twitter & Facebook.
Because, hey… there’s a lot of stuff going on out there, eh?!
And until next week…
Please feel free to reach out to ‘hey@95eh.ca’ if you have any questions, comments, ideas and/or schemes — AND — if you think you know anybody else that might enjoy receiving this weekly newsletter about “some locals’ interests” in the highway 95/a area, please feel warmly encouraged to send them a link so they can have a think about signing up too!
And I’ll see you out on the URLs and/or IRLs… whichever comes first 🤘
🍻
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Jeremy // HI54LOFI