Apple Picking

Every year about now we go apple picking. It's become a family tradition where we go to orchard, eat tons of different kinds of apples and bring back two or three bags full. These apples are used for lunches, snacks, pies and other kinds of excellent deserts.

The place we go to uses an old firetruck to take us up the mountain. The kids really like it (and so do the parents).

As you can see, we enjoy eating apples after apples. So good! It's a very pleasant activity I hope Mathieu and Sabrina will continue with their kids.

You can even see a bit of bizarre artwork in the orchard.

Léa and Sabrina worked on a culture of a book character. It's a cool thing to have a friend that lives close by.

SSIAA Cross Country Race 2013

Today is a PED day, but it's also Sabrina's SSIAA race, a friendly race that pits English elementary schools from the South Shore against one another. Sabrina's been training for a few weeks now, and her and I have even gone running early in the morning to help her.

Mostly it was a chance for all the kids to spend some time together, Sabrina with her friends, and Mathieu with his.

The girls got ready for the race. They were almost last to participate.

And it was a go. As you can see Sabrina had the look of hmmm, but was still about to look at me while I was taking pictures and yelling encouragements.

She arrived 48th (out of 72) which is quite an improvement to her 69th (from 80) arrival last year. It took her a few minutes, but she was able to recuperate pretty quickly.

Everyone had a good time. Pascal and I spent some time finding some places to stay for our next trip. Really fun.

A BIrthday is Coming

And Mathieu is making some place for perhaps some new Lego ???

I love it when they clean and I don't need to ask... The more it goes the more they're doing it from their own accord.

The day after

I felt funny. Here's Mathieu taking care of Sabrina's hair.

Melanie, Donna's Birhtday

Melanie came to visit us for a few days. She's on a mission, purchasing all the things they're missing for their new house that she can't find in the Rimouski area.

Tonight we were invited by Sylvain for a surprise birthday party he organized for Donna. We were able to try out a new babysitter for the occasion, a girl who has just started high school and lives right across the street. Considering that the party was three houses down, it was a perfect occasion to try someone new.

The party was really fun. Suzanne met Donna and Sylvain when she worked at TAL (I know, quite a coincidence that they live a few doors down) and she knew a few of the people that were there since most of them had worked at TAL at one point or another. Donna was really surprised.

A cook was there for the food (that was interesting and quite good), a jazz band and Scotch tasting which taught me a thing or two about my capacity to drink hard alcohol (I'll stick to wine).

We had a great time, the babysitter was fantastic and I think I will call these people one day:

Comicon 2013 in Montreal

The kids and I were fortunate enough to be able to go to Comicon 2013. The convention is unreal, it cannot be described. It's made for anyone who has an ounce of nerdness in her/him, and is paradise to full blown nerds.

Sabrina, Mathieu and I got there around 11:00am. Mathieu was disguised in his Ironman costume. He was a hit. Often someone would ask him to take a picture with them. It was quite weird.

Mathieu also took pictures with very many characters, some of whom you may know, some you won't.

I got to see, from a far, a few sci-fi actors that I really admire like Edward James Olmos (Cmdr Adama), George Takei (Sulu from the original Star Trek) and Felicia Day... (from The Guild). The kids were not interested enough to meet them so that didn't happen.

If you've read this blog, you know that some of us (Sabrina and I) are big Doctor Who fans. We just can't wait for the new season.

And of course there were lots of toys, comics and stuff like that. Real paradise.

We had a great, great day.

Of Montreal, Megaphone, and Baton Rouge

Even though it was quite grey today, we had a great time. We went on a road trip to the island to see Suzanne's company's project: Megaphone. We decided to make an evening out of it, to walk around the place, eat at a food truck and then go to the exhibition.

The Quartier des Spectacles is a really cool place worthy of any other in North America. We walked around a bit trying to find a food truck that unfortunately was not there.

So we decided to have dinner at Le Baton Rouge. A step up from going to St-Hubert, the food was quite excellent, surprisingly and the service was really good. For once, everyone was happy with their meal which is quite pleasant.

After dinner we walked to Megaphone. It's a really cool setup by Moment Factory for UQAM where people speak in a microphone and the words appear in large on the University's building. Very nice. Mathieu went to the microphone twice.