Paint in my face

Today I went to Mirabel for some Paintball. Some 40 people from Enzyme and friends were there for a whole day of sharpshooting fun. Unfortunately, the weather decided to be entirely crappy on this particular day. I woke up at about quarter to eight, looked out the window and saw that it was snowing. I dressed up in four layers of clothing to stay warm, and off we went. In Mirabel it wasn't snowing, it was raining. And it kept raining for most of the day. The forest and the fields that the game was played in were not much better than mud pits and swamps. I was completely soaked by the time we were done. But it was fun anyway, we played a whole bunch of different scenarios, from hunt down Bin Laden and his terrorists to defend the castle and capture the flag.
The precision of the paintball guns sort of annoyed me, though. You could aim at someone standing 20 feet away and still miss by 6 feet or more because the bullet would spin off course, so being a decent shot didn't help you at all. The bullets were all over the place no matter how you aimed, so you just had to fire off a dozen shots or so and hope that at least one of them hit something. Getting shot didn't really hurt that much, since I was wearing a pretty decent amount of clothes to absorb the impact, but I managed to get shot in the face once. Someone must have managed to shoot me at the exact angle to get the bullet in under my mask from behind me. It stung like a sunovabitch and I had purple paint all over my face. That stuff tastes like shit. Seriously, it's disgusting...

The picture above shows Carlos and myself all dressed up and ready to go to war.

Jello and a haircut

Today was a somewhat boring day at work. I was supposed to work on one project, got moved to a different project, and then moved to a third project and finally ended up having nothing at all to do on that project anyway, so I did absolutely nothing all day. A bit weird, but hey... It's their money... My PM let me leave earlier since I didn't have anything to do anyway, so I went and got a haircut at the Concept Coiffure next to the Metro grocery store. They washed my hair and gave me a short but very nice scalp massage before they started snipping away with scissors and trimmer. Very nice and relaxing indeed, all for the humble price of $18,75. Haircuts are a whole lot cheaper here than in Sweden. The same thing back home would have cost me at the very least $45. And now my hair is out of my eyes again. Woohoo!
They didn't have time right away when I got there, so I spent about 20 minutes just walking around at Metro. I bought a whole bunch of jello that I'm going to send to Liza. Jello is kind of hard to find back home, and like myself, she loves the stuff. Yum... Tasty and fun all at the same time! :)

We went climbing again yesterday. My arms were still really tired from the previous session two days earlier so I got really tired quick and had to rest quite a bit between ascents, but it went really well anyway. I bonked my knee on a grip at one point though, so I have a colorful bruise now. But other than that, it was fun! The time before, I tried a red 5.9 trail without much success. It's really tricky because you have to make sure to be very well balanced to be able to get up. I tried the start some 15 times without getting it. I've done quite a lot of climbing in my mind since then, thinking about the start and how to get it. Yesterday I tried it again, and nailed the start on the first attempt. That felt great! 5.9 is still a bit beyond my abilities so I didn't get the rest of it yet, only a few steps further than the start, but I'm sure I will get it eventually.

Things are either simple or impossible. Everything in between is just a matter of practise. :)

Chilly day in Montreal

A while ago I met this girl on the internet. She asked me out for coffee, so yesterday I went to Montreal to meet her. I met with her at a place called Tutti Frutti, which is a really nice breakfast place on St Catherine, right next to Atwater. I had the biggest breakfast ever, with French toast, crépes, cappuccino and a big bowl of fresh fruits. The girl I was there to meet seemed like a really nice person, friendly and funny. We had a long conversation about all kinds of stuff. After that we went to this big movie theater close to the breakfast place. On the way in there, we met this elderly man who started talking to us about educating the hopeless drivers of Montreal. He seemed quite upset about their quality of driving. That was kind of weird. We walked on towards the ticket vendors, when the elderly man came back after us and started talking about this British movie, Keeping mum with Rowan Atkinson that was supposedly really good, and that we might want to check it out. Even weirder... Anyway, all the movies were starting a bit late, so I wouldn't have had time to see anything before I was supposed to meet up with Manu, who I rode into Montreal with, so we left again. After that we just walked around in town looking at stuff and talking. It was quite nice! It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining from a clear blue sky and it was pretty chilly outside. After that she had to go meet a friend of hers and I needed to get back to Chapters, where I was supposed to meet Manu, so we said goodbye. It was a nice day, I had fun. I'm definitely going to see her again.

I found a book at Chapters while waiting for Manu and the others to show up, the definitive edition of the Tao Te Ching. I read reviews about this book before and I've been wanting to buy it for some time. It contains both a literary translation and a verbatim translation of the text. Quite interesting! I already have two editions of the book, but it's fun to read new ones because the translations are quite different in both wording and inherent meaning. If you read a lot of different translations, maybe you'll get an idea of what is behind the words, what the author(s) actually meant.

After meeting up, we went to the botanical gardens. There was a crapload of cars there, I think there was a hockey match going on at the stadium. We wanted to see the Chinese lantern exhibition that was going on in the gardens. It was pretty nice, lamps made of wire frames clad with silk in all shapes and colors. There were bird lamps in the trees, and big boats with soldiers in them in the pond. It looked pretty cool. We also looked at the displays of traditional chinese instruments in the showrooms. There was also a small Halloween land display near the entrance, where they had a few pumpkins and ghosts and such, though it seemed more angled towards the younger crowd.

Did you know that "Goodbye" is originally a contraction of the expression "God be with you" ?

I keep on falling...

I went climbing again today with Antoine. It was really not the best climb I've had. I felt pretty tired already when we got there, but I figured I would wake up a bit once I got started. And at first it went ok, but after I while I just felt really drained and started falling off the wall. It didn't really get any better for the rest of the evening, I climbed pretty badly. I tried a trail I haven't managed to do before, but after about ten unsuccessful attempts at getting the start right I gave up. All I accomplished was hurting my left arm. Bleh...

And this goddamn motherfuckin' internet connection can go shove itself up a rabid monkey-ass! It blanks out several times a day for a couple of minutes at the time, it has stopped working every single night around midnight for the past week. I hate this crap... Grrrr...

Frozen grass

It was pretty cold this morning when I rode off to work. The thermometer showed 0 degrees and the lawn was all frosty. It was really sunny all day. I spent my lunchbreak outside, just basking in the sun and enjoying the fresh air. It was really a perfect weather! It reminded me of a nice autumn day in the mountains back home. Quite nice!

Me and Antoine went grocery shopping after we got home. Apart from the regular food stuff, we got a big pumpkin. Antoine is going to turn the contents of the pumpkin into soup, and I'm going to turn the "shell", or whatever you call it, into a jack-o-lantern. Halloween is creeping closer, and I'm in Canada. It would be a serious sin not to carve a pumpkin in these circumstances, don't you think? Halloween is sort of starting to catch on a little back home too, but it's nowhere near as big as in North America, and we don't do the whole pumpkin thing. So when in Canada, do as the Canadians, eh? :)

I wrote some more music today too. I have a few great ideas, but I can't really make them come true on my laptop. I would need to record some melodies, but the sound quality is really crappy if I record through a microphone on my laptop. Bleh... That particular tune will have to wait, I guess.

Saturday, lazy saturday

The last few weeks have been pretty interesting. Last monday was Thanksgiving, so I had a long weekend. Really nice after all the overtime, I must say. I went to the Mont Tremblant park on thanksgiving with Mikkel, Stephan and Antoine. It's the second time I've been there, it's a really nice area. We were away all day, so we didn't really celebrate thanksgiving in any way. Not that I would know anything about celebrating thanksgiving anyway, considering it's a holiday that doesn't exist back home... But I felt a little bit festive when I was having a turkey sandwich by a nice river in the park. There were some really pretty trees in the park that hadn't dropped their colorful autumn leaves yet. The picture of the maple with red leaves on the left was taken by Stephan with his new camera.

I went climbing again this week too. Climbing has been pretty sporadic lately, as either Antoine or I have had to work late a lot, but we managed to get one night in. It went pretty well. I climbed mostly 5.08 tracks, they are starting to feel quite comfortable to climb, so I guess I must be making progress. Feels pretty good! :)

Yesterday there was an Oktoberfest at the Hotel des Monts, which is really close to our house. There was a bunch of people there from work, having beer and playing pool. The place itself is kind of scungy, but it was pretty fun. I absolutely suck at pool. I managed to win against Antoine once out of sheer luck, as he messed up and accidentally dropped the nine in a corner pocket.
After a short visit to the Spanish people and Mikkel's place, a bunch of jelly bears and some food, we drove off to a place called Bourbon Street. It's a pretty cool place with bars and a dance floor where you can shake loose all night. I had some drinks and danced a bunch, it was lots of fun! I can't even remember the last time I went dancing.
There was some weird show on stage in front of the dance floor. They conferencier only spoke French, so I have no idea what he was talking about, but it looked like some kind of contest between four guys who were supposed to out-hot the others by dancing all sexy-like with a girl. Then four girls did pretty much the same thing with the guy who won. It was an overall pretty boring show. The four guys didn't seem to have much imagination, they all just did the exact same thing, one after the other.
"Oh, look, he took his shirt off and is trying to look buff. Now he pulled his belt out. And hey, now he pulled his pants down. Wow."
And the girls did even less. They just danced around, mostly looking a bit embarrassed to be there. But overall it was a nice evening with good music. I met a couple of girls who I guess seemed to like my dancing. At least they danced with me for a while, trying to dance the same way I did. They didn't have much success in imitating me, though, which is not really a big surprise since half the time *I* didn't even have a clue what the hell I was doing. I'm no dancer, I just make it up as I go and move around in a rythmical fashion because it's fun and because I like the music. Probably looks like crap, but hey, I don't care. It's fun!

Today was a really lazy day. I chatted with a friend in Sweden, talked to my brother and my mom on skype and had a pizza because I didn't feel like cooking. My brother showed me some songs he wrote. They were pretty good! The music he writes is pretty different from the stuff I write. He does more acoustic singer/songwriter kind of things. Anyways, I also did some laundry and played some games on the computer. A pretty laid-back day, I'd say. Whoo-pee.

Music by me

I finished another song today. I haven't found a good way to keep them online yet, but this should do for now. If you want to hear the songs, just download them from the links below. They will be available for download for seven days from the date of this blog entry.

You may download these files for free and share them with anyone you like, but the copyright will remain mine. Do not alter these songs or any portions of them, or try to take credit for composing them. You may also not alter the written information within these files. These songs may not be published, sold or otherwise reproduced for profit or other monetary compensation without express written permission from me.

Septimbre

Solitaire

End

Enjoy! :)