Hanging out with the girls

As my wife was (and still is) undertaking a large part of our kitchen renovations over the past month and a half, I spent a lot of time with our two girls, going to the park, enjoying the water games near our place and running various errands. Here are a few pictures from one of our recent treks to the Chomedey Park.

Summer’s here, time for a new theme

One thing that I have always loved about WordPress is the ability to quickly change my site’s theme in an hour or two and preserve all of its data while completely changing how it looks. As you can see if you are visiting my actual site, I had fun and changed the visual theme for my blog once again. I hope that you like it. Let me know if you see anything not working correctly.

A great April Fool’s joke

I know, I know… April’s Fool was a week ago. I’ve been meaning to write about this hilarious video that Microsoft made to advertise one of their “new” upcoming games called Alpine Legends. The video that they made has very good production values and could definitely fool someone at a quick glance. Check it out for a good laugh:

Now on Twitter

Everybody, from radio announcers to podcast hosts to bloggers seem to be jumping on the Twitter bandwagon these days, so I decided to give it a shot as well. You can see my latest tweets on my personal site sidebar or obviously by following me on Twitter.

Suggaring off, gluten-free style

My oldest daughter Évelyne, who is now 4 1/2 years old, has Celiac’s disease. Because of this illness, she cannot eat more commercial food, including of course going to the restaurant. Well, we got a nice treat today as an italian restaurant called Ottavio that has a location in Laval and recently opened a second location in Saint-Laurent organized a gluten-free sugar shack style lunch! We had a chance to eat all of the traditional dishes, including pea soup, pancakes, beans, eggs, potatoes. It was very delicious and very nice not to have to bring food for the kids for once. They have a gluten-free as part of their regular menu so we will definitely have to go back.

Alone with the girls

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.

Time flies

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.

Still writing reviews

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.

LinkedIn: An interesting professional networking site

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.

The beginning of a new phase in our lives

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.