Leaving the house with kids can be very hard work. Such hard work that it is often tempting to just not do it. I can’t get away with staying home anymore; my kids need to be run like dogs and if we don’t leave the house in the morning, that morning will end with me getting tied up and scribbled on with Sharpie or with a guitar being smashed over someone’s head, ’70s-rock-band-style.

One of the long-held New Westminster traditions that I had never personally participated in is the perogy dinners offered by the Holy Eucharist Cathedral of the Ukrainian Catholic church (separate archbishop system, same Pope, not Orthodox). Last Friday night we decided to change all that so we loaded up the minivan and took our hungry selves over to 5th Street and 4th Ave for an Apostolic good meal. Perogy night is always a Friday, once a month. The next dinner is October 30.
The set up is classic church basement. Folding …

The 10th Annual Doggy Fun Day is set to happen Sunday, August 30th from 12:00pm to 3:00pm. It takes place, as in previous years, on the playing field above the dog park in Queens Park. Billed as “fun and games for dogs and their people”, this year’s DFD is being put together by the Pacific Volunteer Education and Assistance Team for Animals (VEATA, for short), which is a relatively new group helmed by long time well known animal volunteer, Cheryl Rogers (who some of you may simply know as “the lady …

This is a guest post by Rob Jones, who shares some of his first impressions of New Westminster as a new resident of our city. You can read more from Rob on his blog, The Delete Bin, and also find him on Twitter @clippernolan.
There are elements of every city that makes it unique, makes them feel like home.
My experience with big-small towns is well established, even if I am a recent resident of New Westminster. Like New West, my hometown of Oakville Ontario was founded next to a busy waterway; …

Note: Updated at 8 p.m. with new information from the Globe & Mail, CBC and Province websites.
New Westminster’s Canada Day celebrations took an upsetting turn towards the close of the Queen’s Park festivities when an elderly driver crashed a car into a park bench in the Rose Garden, injuring at least two people – one critically.
News reports about the injuries vary. CBC says four people were hurt in the crash, but the Globe & Mail and Province say only two. All sources agree that a couple in their sixties were …

Our family unit and other Tenth to the Fraser crew are heading out to Queen’s Park today, like so many other Royal City citizens. I have been attending Canada Day in this park almost my whole life. For a long time, I thought of it as a big town party just for me – and a thousand of my closest friends.
The boys and girls from town would stampede from one end of the park to the other (unsupervised – this was the 1980s) looking for flag pins, balloons, cookies, cake and …