Yesterday was the shortest day of the year. Well, the day still went for 24 hours, but it’s the shortest daylight duration in the whole year, with 8 hours and 18 minutes of daylight. You know what a solstice is right?

So what did I do during those 8 hours and 18 minutes of daylight?

Well, I got up, had some peanut butter and banana toasts, and a little bit of rice pudding for breakfast. Then I surfed the web for about one hour, reading blogs, writing interview questions and just chillin’. Then I thought it was time for an espresso, and walked to the kitchen… and kept walking past the kitchen, up the stairs and in the bedroom, where I lay down and proceeded to have a 6-hour nap. 

Of course, when I woke up it was already dark outside. I still had to shovel the 8-10 inches of snow I had in the driveway. 

Needless to say, this day went by like a cheetah with it’s ass on fire.

Let me take a moment here to send great vibes to Dave2 from Blogography, who spent the whole day stuck in Sea-Tac, to finally decide to spend the week in Seattle. I’m guessing this day didn’t feel go by as quickly for him.

My friends Peter and Natasha recently had a baby, Kole. 

I have found a few useful tips for the new parents. 

As usual, my only valid parenting advice is:

Disregard all parenting advice  you receive. 

You should print and frame that.

Sheila decided to participate in Avitable’s five question interview revival. And since I’m still wating for Adam’s questions, I asked her to interview me.

If you want me to interview you, the instructions are at the bottom of the post. Enjoy!

1) So you finally got that Zazzle store going – when are you going to put a tee shirt that is designed specifically for me on there? I joined your fan club – I think that this should earn me the right to a tee shirt design.

Yes, I got an e-mail about you “joining” my fan club. I didn’t even know I had one! I guess that makes you the Fan Club President, I’ll be calling on you to organize meetings, send membership cards and produce and distribute the bi-weekly newsletter. 

And you’re absolutely right, this totally gives you the right to a T-Shirt design. I should mention that you’re already responsible for this one  but it was not specifically designed for you, it was inspired from something you wrote to me about my typos. In honor of your Presidency, I just designed one just for you – although my keen business sense tell me that other could get it too. Here it is, I hope you like it!

2) Have you decided on the quirky name of the LeSombre Travel Fund yet? We’ve got a lot of Blogger Gatherings coming up and you have to be there.

Well, the first thing is that I would consider doing a maximum of two blogger-related events per year. The first one would be the Avitables’ Halloween party, and the second one would be TequilaCon, depending on where it’s located. Of course, if I travel for business to a city where some blogger friends reside, I would gladly meet with them. All that being said, I’m not opposed to smaller unofficial gatherings.   

If you hung out in the chatroom during Karl’s radio show yesterday, you probably noticed me trying to convince Dave2 to have a Davettawa in the future. He likes the tulips, so that sounds like a 3rd weekend of May event. No pressure!  

So I’m thinking about a few names for the Travel Fund:

1. Haulin’Ass
2. Movin’Mike
3. Worldwide Travel Fund (WTF)

What do you think?

3) When you got on that plane to come to Florida, did you have any inkling that you would be meeting someone as awesome as me? I mean, Adam and all the others are pretty great but…..damn.  How do I finish this question without sounding insanely conceited?  Aw hell – they already know I am so go ahead and answer it!

Who are you again?

4) Does your LovelyWife “get” this blogging thing or does she think you (and all of us) are retarded? It took my husband two years to get it so I am curious. 

LovelyWife gets the blogging thing, she lurks on many blogs and even leaves one or two comments here occasionally. I’m trying to get her to start her own blog, so you could read her side of my stories. I think that might make things interesting. More importantly, LovelyWife gets me so she never thinks I’m retarded, she knows it.  

5)  If I move to Canada, will the fact that I am your BlogWifey give me any kind of tuition breaks if I decide to further my education?  There has to be some other perks to this relationship.  Your jokes are funny but I’m looking for a little bit more.

If you move to Canada, I’ll further your education for free. Now that’s a lot better than a tuition break, yes?

For example, I’ll take you downtown and have you eat a beaver tail, and then I would take you to the peanut brittle place (and damn, I just realized I could have gone yesterday while I was off), and then I’d take you to a sushi place, and then we’d hve some Jägermeister tonics, and sing some karaoke. We would visit the Parliment, the War Museum, the Civilisation Museum, the Museum of Technology. We’d catch a play, go to a hockey game in Montreal (Go Habs Go!), go to the best Irish pub in the whole city.

Then on the second day…

So there you have it! Want to be part of it? Follow these instructions:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

 Off : OMFS*!!! I can’t believe I’m done with work until next year! W00t! 13 sweet sweet days of not having to work. I flirted with the idea of stepping off the grid for 13 days, but that would be madness I tell you! MADNESS!

Yes we are battling round 3 of the lice battle.

Except this time, this might actually cancel all Christmas traveling for us. On one hand, the families might might get mad at us for cancelling at the last minute, but on the other hand, it seems like spreading lice over two families is hardly worth the risk.

Plus I couldn’t stand being responsible of passing the Minor Plague to unwilling hosts.

Time for some Internet Assvice: What would the Internet do (WWtID)?

+++++

Follow-up on yesterday’s post:

Some people asked on-line and off-line what a WACOM tablet was. Here’s mine:

It’s an Intuos 4×6, worth about 220$. You can get to the WACOM website by clicking the picture. Of course I had jokingly asked for this model, but my little scribbles appear just fine with the model I got. 

While visiting Orlando – that seems a lifetime ago – I sang this song with Sheila. I mentioned that I didn’t know the original version of the song, but that a French version existed when I was a young kid and got all kinds of puzzled expressions from fellow American bloggers. 

I now present to you the French version of Knock Three Times, called Trois P’tits Coups. Please note that this is not the original French signer, but he does a pretty good job and it’s the only version available on YouTube. 

I totally expect you guys to learn this version, and next time we meet, we’ll sing it. Preferably after a few drinks.

Frenchising songs used to be a common thing in the province of Quebec. Many artists had their big break reprising / translating an American hit.

This is the name of the restaurant we went to for our Saturday night date. It roughly translates to “no other like it”, and it lived up to its name. 

The Sans Pareil is a Belgian restaurant. I was expecting it to be fairly snub, so  I threw an an actual dress shirt over a t-shirt to go there. I wore jeans. Surprisingly, the place was fairly casual, and most guys had jeans on. That was a relief because I don’t like stuffy places and I don’t own dress pants. 

The menu is just a couple of letter sized pieces of paper glued inside a Tintin et Milou (Tintin and Snowy). I had L’affaire Tournesol and LovelyWife had Les bijoux de la Castafiore. I hoped she didn’t take this as a comment on wearing make-up.

As an aside, LovelyWife rarely wears make-up, so I knew I was in for quite a night of romance. ::wiggle eyebrows::

Everything on the menu sounded delicious, from the duck confit to the venison medallions. So of course we opted for the weirdest thing on the menu: The surprise menu. The concept is really simple. It’s a 4 service meal: 2 appetizers, the entrée and the dessert, with three glasses of wine – one per appetizers and one for the entrée – but you don’t know what you’re eating before it gets to your table. That works out well for us because I like surprises and LovelyWife can never decide what she wants to order.

We had a Pineau for an aperitif, and I was pleased with the drink. LovelyWife decided to have one as well, which is another event in itself. They brought us a delicious terrine of deer and duck on a cracker. The first appetizer was a salmon duet (wild salmon and fresh salmon) cooked like a Wellignton and served with an avocado puree. The wine was a lovely Pinot Gris. We then had a Pleurote (oyster mushroom) vol-au-vent – well not exactly but it looked like  a vol-au-vent - served with veggies marslala sauce with a nice Cabernet Sauvignon. The entrée was a bison medallion perfectly cooked served with gratin dauphinois, veggies and fried plantains. Dessert was a heavenly mango mousse.

We drove back home to kids already in bed. The place was ours. So of course, LovelyWife promptly fell asleep, leaving me to “wiggle my own eyebrows” if you will. Take away the really great dining experience, and this reminded me a lot of my teenage dating years.

And hey, I’ll take any chance I get to feel 20 years younger.

My friend Sheila, from Charm-School-Reject.com was feeling a little blue Friday. So was I, so I decided to try to cheer her up and have some fun myself. 

Angry.

Disconnected.

Lost.

You can find all the set on my Picasa page, because my gallery plugin is not compatible with version 2.7. of WordPress. You’ll be able to see the famous typo we Twat about yesterday.

In other shameless self-promotion news

I got my very own Zazzle store, that you can find here. This is your chance to wear some LeSombre merchandise! Impress you friends, piss you coworkers off or simply proudly show that you know me (or that you wanted to shop online). It’s all the rage! You know you want to do it.

That’s it.

I am turning this frown upside down. I think I reached rock bottom this morning when Karl replied this to my sweet innocent Tweet: “Uh oh. Crankypants is in the house.” Granted, I *might* have mentioned something about killing people in my Tweet, but still.

Than I dug a little deeper during the day. In my defence, this day was craptastic on many many levels. It culminated in my BNL show of tomorrow being cancelled. I was mad. Then I found it was only postponed because :

Ed’s mother has been admitted suddenly to the hospital with a serious illness. The band have decided to postpone their two shows scheduled for tomorrow, December 13, in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre until further notice. This is all the information we have at this time. Our thoughts and prayers are with Ed, his mother and their family. (from BNL’s website)

And I instantly felt like the biggest jerk ever. 

So when LovelyWife asked me over dinner – chicken wings and nachos and cheese sticks and beer – if I was aware that there was a typo on my t-shirt, I couldn’t stop laughing. 

I’m turning all the negatives into positives now. 

Typos on shirt? I’ll get new shirts!

Show postponed? Let’s go out to a nice restaurant for a date night with LovelyWife instead. We already have the sitter, so why not?

Life gives me lemons, I’ll make lemon drops.

Come on, You can only expect me to tackle one problem at a time here.