188 – Olympin Club Annual Show

First off, I would really like to thank everyone that is reading and commenting on my blog. It is wonderful to hear from you!! I feel that it is a personal challenge to me to blog every day, which really means if not experiencing something in the day then finding something that I want to know more about, but it is a personal joy that others are interested and reading! Thanks! Thanks for reading, it does make it more fun for me!

However, speaking of fun, today was a great, fun, interesting and educational day! Today was the first day of the annual Olympin Club Show at the Richmond Olympic Oval. I went partly because it’s in the Olympic Oval, so I had a chance to check it out, but also to find out more about pin trading!

Pin trading at the Richmond Olympic Oval

First off, I learned a bit about the Richmond “O Zone” for the Olympics. This will follow in a post soon as I think it deserves it’s own discussion! But if you can’t wait check it out here. There’s not much yet but they’ll get there. So from the City of Richmond I talked to Paul Otto, a pin collector and trader, and started learning the basics of trading (like don’t display things you aren’t interested in trading!). We had a lovely time chatting away!

Paul Otto, teaching me to trade

I also spoke to Larry from Washington DC, a trader partial to National Olympic Committee pins (I learned quickly that there are many categories of pins including government and sponsor). And then I spoke to pinhunter. I didn’t get his name but he has a website and also supports one of our Olympic luge hopefuls Ian Cockerline. I learned a lot about trading and collecting today and am so happy I went!

The oddest thing is that my favourite experience of the day came from meeting Jody Broomfield the First Nations artist I wrote about in a previous post! Jody is the artist that designed the logo for the Four Host First Nations! And here he was at the Olympin Show working on a wolf mask carving. I was (am!) beside myself with excitement. Somehow, I figured the artist would be completely inaccessible as some are, but Jody was lovely to talk to and (wonderfully for me!) had already read my blog about his work!

Jody Broomfield

So all in all, it was a great day! With a few things remaining to talk about in the coming days. I’m sure that I missed some things that I wanted to talk about today as well, but it’s late, and I’m going to bed. Wish all of you a wonderful sleep. Thank you, Merci.