In Canada, most of the water looks like this in January. 

Photo a day challenge – January 2012

1. You
2. Breakfast
3. Something you adore
4. Letterbox
5. Something you wore
6. Makes you smile
7. Favourite
8. Your sky
9. Daily routine
10. Childhood
11. Where you sleep
12. Close-up
13. In your bag
14. Something you’re reading
15. Happiness
16. Morning
17. Water
18. Something you bought
19. Sweet
20. Someone you love
21. Reflection
22. Your shoes
23. Something old
24. Guilty pleasure
25. Something you made
26. Colour
27. Lunch
28. Light
29. Inside your fridge
30. Nature
31. You, again

If you don’t know what these are, you’re lucky! 

Especially today in Ottawa. Freezing rain everywhere!

Photo a day challenge – January 2012

1. You
2. Breakfast
3. Something you adore
4. Letterbox
5. Something you wore
6. Makes you smile
7. Favourite
8. Your sky
9. Daily routine
10. Childhood
11. Where you sleep
12. Close-up
13. In your bag
14. Something you’re reading
15. Happiness
16. Morning
17. Water
18. Something you bought
19. Sweet
20. Someone you love
21. Reflection
22. Your shoes
23. Something old
24. Guilty pleasure
25. Something you made
26. Colour
27. Lunch
28. Light
29. Inside your fridge
30. Nature
31. You, again

Letterboxing is the practice of transferring film shot in a widescreenaspect ratio to standard-width video formats while preserving the film’s original aspect ratio. The resulting videographic image has mattes (black bars) above and below it; these mattes are part of the image (i.e., of each frame of the video signal). LTBX is the identifying abbreviation for films and images so formatted. The term refers to the shape of a letter box, a slot in a wall or door through which mail is delivered, being rectangular and wider than it is high.

Well, thanks Wikipedia.

 Much better.

I’m so sorry, I wasn’t at all inspired by this prompt. What would you do with it? Let me know…

Photo a day challenge – January 2012

1. You
2. Breakfast
3. Something you adore
4. Letterbox
5. Something you wore
6. Makes you smile
7. Favourite
8. Your sky
9. Daily routine
10. Childhood
11. Where you sleep
12. Close-up
13. In your bag
14. Something you’re reading
15. Happiness
16. Morning
17. Water
18. Something you bought
19. Sweet
20. Someone you love
21. Reflection
22. Your shoes
23. Something old
24. Guilty pleasure
25. Something you made
26. Colour
27. Lunch
28. Light
29. Inside your fridge
30. Nature
31. You, again

The toxic rays of dawn that condemn me to limbo
I am forced to dwell in grey Autumnal twilight
I am suspended in dusk
– Type O Negative, Suspended in Dusk [#]

It’s been 15 days since my last blog post.

Yes, this is one of those posts about not posting. Yes, this is a blog post about blogging, or not blogging as the case may be.

If you’re a fan of LeSombre, you most probably noticed that the blogging frequency here has been less than stellar in the past six months or so. There’s a whole lot of reasons for that, most of them too personal to mention here. To be honest, I have more than 20 incomplete drafts that will never see the light of day.

I know, I know. When you’re having fun publicly, it’s kind of expected that you’d be miserable publicly too. I don’t get this. I won’t abide by that rule.

In any event, this being the end of the year, it seemed a good moment to put some thoughts on paper. I read something on a blog recently – in the past few months – that really resonated with me. I forget the exact quote or the blog where it came from, I’m really sorry, but it went something like this:

The more I blog, the less I have to talk about.

That’s exactly what is happening with me. Not that I think I’m a world renown blogger, but I am more known now than I was when I started writing here. Way back when, it was easy to write stories about my life in a way where I could say all kinds of – sometimes nasty – stuff about people I knew without sounding like it was about them. Nowadays, I’m hard pressed to find a way to blog about a frustrating experience without people thinking it’s about them.

Sometimes it is, and I can live with that. Sometimes it’s not, and that’s when it gets hard to hit publish.

That’s the curse of being the guy who can see a thousand possibilities at once. You can be sure that somewhere, someone is thinking that this is about them.

It was never about you. I still need to vent. This is the place that I do that. It was never about you. It was always about me.

It’s always about me. I’m back baby.

Damn me father, for I must sin…

Duck Face Time

Scared Face Time

Normal Face Time.

I love my brother.

I know youre all dying for pictures and incredible stories from Scotland. Dont worry I have both of them and you will be subjected to them very shortly and for a long long time.

Im taking advantage of the free wifi here at the Castle to quickly update you.

I bought myself two bottles of whisky at this point: the Ardbeg Festival edition, only 1,000 of them bottled and the Caol Ila Moch edition, only available to the friends of Malt and at the distillery.

The distilleries tours are awesome. How often can I say that I sat in Lagavulins warehouse, drinking whisky straight from the hogs head?

Were having a blast.

Slainte!

All things considered, this move is a step up from our previous location. Previous location was a temporary swing space in a really old building. That being said, the previous previous building was flagged as marked for demolition in 1985. We moved out of there in 2009. The building was finally demolished in 2010. So who knows when our previous building will be renovated / demolished? Maybe 2057?

In the new freshly renovated space, we have new furniture, including state of the art computer tables in our lab with retractable monitors. It all works from a remote, it’s quite something to see. All the walls are new and not full of holes or Asbestos. Apparently the ceilings are full of Asbestos but it’s totally safe. Cough cough.

It seems the only rooms that have no been renovated are the bathrooms. The first week we moved, the men bathrooms were simply unavailable. The whole week. Now they’re open again, but with hindsight, it was probably better when we couldn’t use them. We have bathrooms without urinals now. This would not be a big deal – I can pee in a stall, really – if people using those bathrooms wouldn’t be complete pigs.

I was going to post pictures, but I won’t. You can thank me in the comments. Seriously.

I’m talking about pee everywhere, including in the bowl. I’m also talking about unflushed crap. Graffitis everywhere. Water all over the counter. Oh how I hope it’s water.

Seriously, are people that dumb?

Today I cleaned the fridge.

This is the before shot. Click to embiggify.

Now before I show you the after shot, let’s talk about the before state of my fridge a little. If you look closely, you can see a Styrofoam container with chicken breasts leaning against a Dijon mustard container. You can see mangoes in the vegetables drawer. You can see an eggplant right on the edge of the fist shelf, a ziploc container on the edge of the second shelf. Short containers in tall spaces, tall things in short spaces. Yogurts on two different shelves.

Chaos.

Now here’s what I did without throwing anything away. In fact, I even added a juice container.

This is the after shot. Click to embiggify.

Of course I started by cleaning the inside of the fridge and all the shelves themselves. I swear I’m the only guy in the world who knows that those glass inserts actually come out of the plastic frame if you pry hard enough.

Notice how all the yogurt is huddled together. Notice how tall items are on a tall shelf, and short items are on a short shelf. when they share a shelf, taller items go in the back, and shorter items go in front so we can read the labels – which are all facing forward in case you didn’t notice. Fruits are in the fruits drawer, vegetables in the vegetables drawer and meat is in… The meat drawer. Notice how nothing is precariously perched at the edge of a shelf, and how nothing touches the inside surface of the fridge to facilitate better airflow?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I just realized I didn’t clean the items in the door.