louisworld.ca

I simply just do not have enough time. Period. But other than that, in general I’m doing okay. My German class is progressing although I myself would progress a lot more if I had a little more time to spend in it to review what we’ve seen. I just need to practice more my listening skills. Either movies or just listening to stuff in German would help.

On the home renovation side, things are going slow as well. The stairwell to the basement is progressing too but more slowly than I want. The first coat of mud is done and sanded and I started the second coat. Since I suck at that another coat is going to be required but I knew that before I started. No progress at all has been made on the laundry room flooring project.

On the biking front, I’m still riding to work although it’s really cold. I learned that the comfort level is proportionally related to the technique of the scarf. Of course, some heated grips would be nice too for my hands. I am wondering how much a difference my future lower fairings would make as far as deflecting the winds from my legs. I had a plan on getting some extra money for them but that fell through so I’m still at $313 USD dollars and need $450 USD. I’m close, but not there yet.

Woodworking wise, well, with the rain and cold outside I haven’t done much. Still need to do some cleanup in the basement to try to have a place to do at least small projects inside the house during the winter but I’m not there yet. I completed an open box using my dovetail jig but the bottom sucks big time. I went too fast with it and thus it doesn’t fit properly. The more I look at stuff, boxes and turning is really what I think I’ll like. I’ve seen some very nice humidors and I’d love to be able to do that. I guess a book or too on box building is going to be a necessity though as well as an intro course to wood turning.

Hier se déroulait la 3ième édition de la la Chasse aux trésors GPS de la section régionale de l’Outaouais de l’OIQ. L’activité attire présentement entre 15 et 20 personnes. Puisque nous somme pas tellement des gens qui ont l’habitude d’aller se promner dans le bois cette activité nous force à bouger un peu plus, ce qui est très bien. Comme son nom l’indique, le but de cette activité est de trouver des trésors à l’aide d’un GPS. Il y a avait 11 trésors que les organisateurs avaient caché dans une des sentiers du Parc de la Gatineau. Ils nous avaient remis les coordonnées et nous devions trouver ces trésors.

Les trésors consistent en des plats de plastiques contenant quelques petits objets et des morceaux de cartons numérotés servant de preuve que nous avions réussi notre quête. Notre équipe a terminé en second avec 9 trésors trouvés, ce qui est pas mal. Merci à Alexandre, qui m’avait prêté son GPS et aux autres organisateurs Nathalie et Annie!

La saison de badminton est recommencé. Mon copain Sylvain et moi avons recommencé hier à jouer au badminton. La dernière fois partie remontait au 12 mars! Sylvain détenait la victoire depuis cette partie mais j’ai reprit le dessus hier avec une victoire de 15-5.

En écoutant les autres joueurs discuter, nous avons apprit qu’il y aurait eu des modifications au réglements. Nous allons donc devoir réviser ces derniers afin d’utiliser les bonnes règles de pointage.

Vous pouvez voir nos résultats sur la page Badminton de mon wiki.

No I haven’t started dance lessons. Our our little garden produced a ton of tomatoes again this year. Too many for us to eat in a “normal” way. So instead of losing them by letting them go bad, I made some salsa on the weekend. 7 litres of salsa to be exact and it’s quite good too! A little mild but delicious. I found a recipe on the net for salsa but as usual I modified it for my taste. Some of the ingredients I have somewhat measured but for the rest I usually just eyeball the quantity resulting in something that is good never always slightly different from the previous batch.

Want my recipe?

• 2 litres of diced fresh tomatoes
• 1 big Spanish onion
• 2 celery branches (is this the proper name?)
• 2 bell peppers (colour of your choice)
• 2-3 garlic bulbs
• 3/4 cup of white vinegar
• 2 table spoons of paprika
• 2 table spoons of cilantro
• 3 table spoons of chili powder
• 1 table spoons of salt
• 1/4 cup of brown sugar

Diced vegetables to desired size, the bigger the pieces, the chunkier the salsa. Pot all the ingredients into a big enough pot (duh!) and bring to boiling pot at medium heat. Let simmer at medium heat for about an hour. Stir occasionnaly. Gives 2.5 litres of salsa.

Seems like I’ve going through a quietter period, at least blogging wise. On the real world it ain’t quiet. With my role of president of the regional section of the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec, a member of the IT committee of the Le Génial, an admin at Motorcycle-Journal.com, a member of Engineering Department Council of the Université du Québec en Outaouais, a german class student (the class starts tonight!), a Father, a husband, an employee, … phew!! that’s a lot! No wonder the hair is thinning out, with so many changing of hats, the friction has got to be pulling a few hairs each time…

Yes, I’m busy. But of course, some of these aren’t full time, if they were I’d go nuts… but I certainly wouldn’t have taken all those either. What am I saying here? Well it certainly looks like I’m justifying the slowdown of blog posting on LouisWorld.

Of course, I could post some wine comments that I have in my backlog but according to my stats, they are not getting me a lot of traffic.

Just curious about my readers. I know there’s a few of them but some read and don’t comment. I don’t always leave comments either on the blogs/websites I visit, but now I’m asking you to comment. Don’t need to write an essay but I’d like to know why you come back to my site. Is the info good? The topics interesting? Just because you are a friend?

Leave your comments. (and remember comments will be locked after 5 days to my spam problem).

If you have suggestions/ideas leave them as well, I’m more than willing to make this little world a better place.

Thursday I rode my SV650S to Quebec City to attend meetings due to my new role. The trip is about 450 KM (300 miles) which is all on the highway. It took me 5 and a half hour to get to my hotel, Loews le Concorde just outside of the Vieux Québec. I arrived at the hotel at 6PM, dropped my stuff in the hotel room, unpacked my business suit which I hung in the bathroom that I had filled with steam from the shower to unwrinkle it from the tight packing from the motorcycle trip. After settling in, I went back outside on the street, Grande Allée, for a stroll and to find a place to eat. After a few hours of work in the morning, 5+ hours on the bike I went back my room pretty early. The room was very nice. I was on the 16th floor with a view of the St-Lawrence River and the Plaines d’Abraham. I was only able to take 2 pictures as I was dumb and when I packed the camera, I didn’t check the batteries…

Friday was filled with meetings. From 9AM to Noon was the meeting with the different presidents of the regional sections. From Noon to 2:30PM was a lunch-conference with Steven Guilbault, Director of Greenpeace Québec. Mr Guilbault is very well articulated and extremely interesting to listen to. At 2:30PM, yet another meeting. That one was the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the provincial association. Not much to say here. If you ever attended one of those, they are all similar. Around 5:20PM, the AGM wasn’t completed so I snuck out to go change for the evening gala and prepare my short speech. Yes, I also had to address a crowd of engineers to accept a prize our regional section had won. The gala was nice, interestingly mixed with the dinner, a dance group who interpreted a marvelous tango and a magician who went from table to table. The gala itself ended around 12:30AM (we got our dessert at 11:45PM). A few of us went for a drink as the evening was gorgeous outside.

Saturday came pretty soon. The presidents had another event, a breakfast, organized by another association. Pretty uneventful. I has prepared all my luggage before the breakfast so I only had to dress back up, check-out and strap the luggage back unto the bike. The ride back took 45 minutes less than on Thursday, I guess I twisted the throttle a little more…

One of the key highlights was when I registered at the hotel. Now I still had all my riding gear and the helmet on the counter. The clerk was a young woman, cute too, and although she had my name in the computer she had trouble finding my room. At one point, I told that I was with the engineer group and she looked at me and said “Wow, you’re a cool engineer!” That made my day!

Je me suis récemment inscrit à un site intitulé PetMed Outlet où se déroulait un concours de l’animal de compagnie le plus cute. J’y ai inscrit Bartók avec la photo ci-contre. Le concours se déroulait en deux phases. La première étant la nomination des finalistes où chaque personne nominait 3 animaux. La deuxième phase était le vote proprement dit où s’affrontait 3 candidats.

Merci Nick pour ce concours!