This week is something quite unique for me. Andrée is away to a photographer convention in Florida while I am taking vacation and staying home with the girls. Two days into it, things are going pretty good. I’ve managed to get Evelyne to school this morning on time and then came back home and had a good time with Gabrielle. As I am writing this, both girls are taking a nice long nap. We’ll see how the next five days treat me but so far, it is nive to have time with the girls and they have not been too hard on me.

As I write this post, my oldest daughter turned 3 last week and my second one is 8 months and already crawling all over the place. Between work, traveling for work the kids and taking care of the house, time always seems to just fly by with no chance to do anything outside of our routine.

I still manage to write a DVD review once in while and watch a couple of good TV shows, but time always seem to be something that I could use more of.

Traveling has been relatively light through the summer but will be picking up again in the next month.

There is not much else new happening these days, which explains the lack of postings. Looking forward to the next break during the Christmas holidays.

Although I have not mentioned it for a while online, I am still writing DVD reviews for UnePorte.net. Some of my recent texts published have been reviews of Mission: Impossible III and Battlestar Galactica 2.5. I also submitted a text on Bon Cop, Bad Cop, a very interesting bilingual movie that was released in Québec last year and am currently working on reviews of The Illusionist, Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Special Edition and the new collector’s edition of A fish called Wanda.

As for Québec Micro, I have reduced greatly my number of contributions to that computer magazine. While I enjoy writing for them, I have not always had enough time to do both in the last few months and will have even less time now that our second daughter is right around the corner.

So keep an eye on UnePorte.net if you’re interested in reading some of my work.

A colleague of mine showed me this very interesting professional networking site called LinkedIn. The idea is to create a list of contacts and then create your personal network through these contacts and their own contacts. I just opened myself an account on there and started networking.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am extremely sorry for not taking the time to post some news here. I just can’t believe how incredibly busy the last couple of months have been. The first source of business has been all of my traveling. I have been to Detroit (4 times since September), Chicago, Phoenix, Houston and Orlando.

At home, we have been busy getting Évelyne’s big girl room ready and preparing her old room for Gabrielle (who should be born in the next two weeks!). Add to that a few more home renovation projects and the holidays and life just became very hectic.

We had a very good holiday season and Santa was very good to me. I got a copy of Final Fantasy III for my Nintendo DS Lite, along with some Swiss Army perfume, a new leather travel case and an iPod FM transmitter. All of these are great but I ended up giving the iPod transmitter to my brother-in-law since our new car has a built-in CD MP3 player. Some of the other gifts I got were the Children of Mana game for Nintendo DS and the music CD End of the World Party by Medeski, Martin and Wood.

Finally, while I was in Detroit this past week, I ended up picking up a second-hand copy of Super Mario 64 DS. That seems like a really well-done port of the Nintendo 64 classic that I will enjoy playing in the weeks to come.

I will try to start posting regularly (how many times am I going to say that) and will definitely let you all know when our second daughter is born.

My dear wife Andrée has started her own blog on which she posts her own news and thoughts and also publishes all of the digital scapbooking layouts that she creates. As you’ll see if you follow the link, she is quite talented. If you would like to get your own scapbooking page done, just drop her a note.

Today marks Évelyne’s first birthday. We celebrated a few days in advance with the family on Thanksgiving Monday but today is the actual day. You can see some pictures of her eating her birthday cake in our new photo album. Her presents includes a lot of nice books, a bit of clothing, a box of legos and an activity table. We also got her the Cinderella DVD after the fact.

Another long time without any posts… Things were a bit nuts for the last month and a half. Andrée foot healed well and she got her cast off last week. So she had it for a total of 5 weeks. This encumbrance really put a hold on a lot of the projects that we planned to do around the house.

We were in Chicago in mid-July for a reunion of about 15 mothers and their babies born in October 2004. About 6 dads also participated to the event. It was a lot of fun. We went to visit the Chicago Aquarium, the Navy Pier and had a nice, relaxing picnic at a park near our hotel.

There is not much else happening these days. I’ve started watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica at my wife’s urging and must say it is a very enjoyable series. I’ve only seen the mini-series and first two episodes of the season so far so it will still be a bit before I can chat about it.

We have now been in the new house for four weeks. Although Andrée’s accident has put a few things behind, we’re still making good progress in getting the house in shape and where we want it to be. We have moved the last few boxes that we had left in our old apartment.

We were also able to get a ramp for our main staircase between the main floor and second floor. One of the previous owners had removed and discarded the ramp, probably to make it a bit roomier. However, with a small child who’s starting to climb everywhere, the ramp is a necessity. Looking at our neighbor’s backyard, we saw that they had a ramp that is exactly the same style as other ramps in our house. We asked them they would be willing to sell it and they just gave it to us, not believing that it was missing in our house. After some good scrubbing and spray paint, it’s looking great on our staircase.

The week off that I took to help around the house was productive. Andrée got her real cast on Tuesday and we got the house babyproofed enough so that the first floor is pretty safe for Évelyne. Back to the office tomorrow after being away for two weeks.

I have just finished a review for MacGyver Season 2 that will probably be posted this week on uneporte.net. Next on my list is Les Aimants, a french comedy written and directed by Yves P. Pelletier.

I know it’s been a while since I last posted. We moved to our new house in Laval three weeks ago. The move went pretty well, although the overbearing heat in the following week and the change of scenery did give Évelyne a hard time for about 5 days.

I was then off to Ottawa last week to give a training class at a customer site. During that week, Andrée dropped off Évelyne at her mother’s place to get some work done around the house. What was supposed to be a highly productive day ground to a halt quickly as she missed a step and broke a bone on the side of her right foot. She will be getting a cast tomorrow that she will have to probably have to keep for 6 weeks or more.

So life continues to be quite busy but at least things are moving in the right direction with the house and life in general. The next post should sooner that the last one.