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A Day in the (mundane) Life: The Leap Day

Well, this is my pathetic attempt to do the Leap Day web project. Had it been last Sunday I would have had lots to take photos of but this Sunday was my first day off in ages and I had nothing planned but to sit around the house and be a slob. They say "do something you wouldn't normally do and document your day through an hourly photograph. " Well, I don't normally spend an entire day doing nothing so in a way this is not a normal day for me!

So here it is:

12:10 a.m.

Cast Party

10:18 a.m.

Sleeping In

11:15 a.m.

Laundry

1:30 p.m.

Lunch (leftovers from restaurant on Friday)

2:05 p.m.

Dishes

3:00 p.m.

Watching World Golf Championships

5:30 p.m.

Dinner-Guacamole and nachos!

8:00 p.m.

Bath time

9:30 p.m.

Watching the Oscars

Wall of Shame

I work at a small non-profit responsible for job creation on the West Island section of Montreal. I provide IT support and web creation. I work with Nicolas who is responsible for some in-house programming projects.

When we get caught up in stressful projects such as the support website for a series of marketing and sale course we are sponsoring (make a site in two days that will allow people to sign up online and pay by PayPal if they wish) we have a tendancy to munch. People within our office know of our abilities to munch and either food leftover from meetings end up in our office or the others in the office come to room in search of something to eat.

Now it's bad enough that we are our own worse enemy as we buy ourselves goodies but then the boss is always dropping off bags of candy, as he says he's got to keep the beavers happy.

So we just started pinning up on the wall the empty bags of junk. We call it the Wall of Shame:

This doesn't even begin to represent the amount of junk that flows through our office.

For instance on Friday. We had chocolate covered almonds, licorice, chocolates that Alison gave out for Valentine's Day, apple cake left over from the board meeting the night before. In addition to that there was also leftove tarte au thon and salad from the board meeting, donuts from a meeting Thursday morning, croissants and other pasteries from a Chamber breakfast meeting Wednesday morning, a bag of candy cinnamon hearts that was actually in the back but kept filling up a little basket on our desk........and so on.

We'll go through periods where we will restrain ourselves but then we'll fall off the wagon and gorge. I had ended up putting on about 15 pounds from all this gorging over the last couple of years. Over the summer when I hit 150 I said enough is enough and readjusted my eating habits and restrained on the office junk just occasionally indulging. I lost those 15 pounds by the end of the summer and have managed to keep them off. I just hope this latest episode will not cause the weight to go back on.

Friday the 13th

Just want the date in my blog ;-)

Traveling

Visiting a few other blogs the last couple of days (FortySomething and Backup Brain) I came across this interesting site where you can generate maps of places visited, either in the US or the world.

I have been pretty lucky in my life to have been able to travel quite a bit, both across the US (and a bit of Canada) and throughout a major portion of Europe.

Here is my US map:

create your own visited states map
I have visited 34 states or 66%.

I have traversed the US five times from Southwest to Northeast. First two times were family vacations when I was 5 and 10 to go and visit relatives in Montreal (I grew up in LA).

I drove a drive-away car from LA to Montreal before my 2nd year of university to bring household items as I was moving from a dorm at McGill University to an apartment in the McGill Ghetto (to which I am still on the same corner some 25 years later). That same summer I took a bus from LA to Montreal, something I would not recommend to anyone. Four and a half miserable days on a cross country bus.

The last time was in 1995 after my brother died and I was driving the VW Golf back with a trailer carrying posessions of his for my sister and I. Most of that stuff is still sitting under the stairs in her basement. I don't think either one of us have wanted to dig through it all.

Some of the upper Mid-West states are the summers I spent with Pearl and Terry, a childless couple who lived around the corner from us in California who then moved to Denver, Colorado. When I was 10 and then 13 I spent summers there and went on trips with them (Colorado, Wyoming, Minnesota, North and South Dakota)

Some of the other states I have visited have had to do with music related activities. Michigan for music summer camp (Interlochen) and Ohio for the Baroque Performance Institute (Oberlin). While going to McGill I played orchestra concerts in Binghamton and New York City (Carnegie Hall no less!) in New York, band exchange concerts with Harvard University in Boston and a Wind Ensemble concert in Burlington, Vermont.

I helped organize a trip to Boston to play in a community concert band festival with the Lakeshore Concert Band.

With the Air Force Band (438 Squadron Band) I did a military tattoo show with along with the Black Watch Pipes and Drums in Springfield, Mass and last summer we did a parade with the 306 Pipes and Drums in New York state just south of here.

Any other states are just activities such as skiing or camping (New Hampshire) and summer work or music lessons (New Jersey).

I guess I'll have to do the typical Canadian thing and drive to Florida for a vacation so I can fill out the Southeast portion of the map ;-)

If they had such a map for Canada I would have Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, PEI and Nova Scotia. All of that travel would have been related to music or military (which is also music) except for the trip to Edmonton, Alberta which was for Grey Cup 2002.

I played in the McGill Umiversity Collegium Musicum (here is link to a recording we did where I am playing baroque bassoon, the excerpt in the one track that has baroque bassoon on it) and we were featured performers at an international conference on Buxtehude in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. As part of the National Band of the Naval Reserve (1998) I went to Halifax, Nova Scotia first for the International Tattoo before setting out for the Mid-West tour (Thunder Bay, Ont, Regina and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and Winnepeg, Manitoba). Took a couple of other military band trips to the Maritimes and did a tour last summer of the Maritimes with the Lakeshore Concert Band (tour website).

If you're all still with me the next map you can generate is places visited in the world:

create your own visited country map

Nothing really exciting here, I have visited 21 counties or 9% of the world, I assume they are talking percentage of countries in the world, not surface area ;-), I also went to Saint Lucia in the Carribean in 1982 but that country wasn't on the list. So it is actually 22 countries.

The standard Western European travel with a foray into Turkey and two trips to Morocco. I have done:

the Eurail/backpack thing (1984),
a Baroque Music master class in Antwerp, Belgium (88),
a two year posting with the military in Lahr, Germany (90-92) where I always say the Canadian government paid for me to be on vacation in Europe for two years. I had a '72 VW Beetle and drove over 35,000 kms in a year and a half,
a few weeks in Europe splitting my travel time between a trip with my sister, brother-in-law and the three nephews and a band tour with the Lakeshore Concert Band playing concerts with them in Valencia, Spain and Kerkrade, Holland (93),
a month long sojourn in the south of France (and Corsica) (94),
long gap before visiting my friends Bev and Fraser in London England (early 2001),
a longer trip to visit them again and to go on vacation with them to Southern Spain (late 2001).

I will be visiting them again in April (more on that at a later date) where we will be going somewhere over the long Easter weekend (Dublin, Amsterdam or France) and then a week in the Canary Islands (Gran Canaria).

I love traveling and could do nothing but that. When people ask what I would do if I won a lottery the first thing out of my mouth is travel.