Update:

- The holidays have interrupted my blogging, and although today is supposed to be a holiday although it technically isn't, I'm back in the blogging world.

- I have started to read the Art of War while on the toilet. There's a funny metaphor for this but I can't quite get it out.

- I went to work today, there was only one student.

- I used to find Usher annoying but then Chris Brown came around and I found out what that word really means.

- Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven?

- Samechlaus Beer is, how you say? . . . aaah, yes, disgusting.

- It's time to put Marduk back into Solstice.

- Oh, and bring back the ritual sacrifice of criminals posing as kings.

- Next time you see Laurianne ask her for some butterscotch life savers.

- Don't you hate inside jokes?

- I don't, especially when I'm in on them.

- I still laugh at inside jokes when I'm technically on the outside of them.

- Maybe you can follow my lead here.

- Happy New Year to all those people who follow the Gregorian Calendar. Shout out to all my homees using the Persian calendar and all the yutes on the Hebrew and Chinese calendars, but the Gregorian takes the cake. Big up Pope Gregory XIII, the reason for the season.

- Would it be the same . . . if I saw you in heaven?

- Samechlaus beer is 14% alcohol, and 16% syrup, and 70% Rhine water.

- Angelo Ahmed Arifi, Marie-Ange is very much alive and well and living in Ottawa. She studies something or other at Carleton University and she's just as funny as ever. I'll tell her you said hey.

- I should clarify that that whole thing about the Olympics (winter actually, not paralympics after all) was not original work by me. I copied it from somewhere else where they presumably copied it from somewhere else.

- I apologize to all the people I didn't end up seeing over Christmas. We had a limited time in Hamilton and spent most of it with family where we were spoiled without mercy.

- Some people call Hamilton "the Hammer." I lived in Hamilton for fifteen years before I heard it called this name.

- My mother used to refer to "the mountain" as "the hill" and "downtown" as "the pit."

- Our door in Gatineau is always open to visitors. Just warn us before you come because we're not very tidy.

- Video Super Choix refused to exchange a scratched DVD or offer me a refund. In return, I am offering a thorough denunciation of their badly organized and competely mismanaged excuse for a Video Rental Outlet.

- When I say that Video Super Choix is poorly organized I mean that the VHS are with the DVD's and the action movies are categorized by their majors stars for the first two shelves and then it suddenly switches into some kind of casual alphabetization. There's a movie about Jesus in the Science Fiction section, a DVD section with no discernable pattern whatsoever, and a bunch of dirty movies that for some reason were placed under the letter Q on the outside wall (all this when there is a curtained section for all those connoisseurs of the art of filmed prostitution.)

- Don't worry, there was no loud verbal confrontation when they refused to exchange my DVD. I was a very polite Anglophone.

- In "the Hammer" Laurianne almost got pulled over by a cop who thought she was missing her front plate. She never did get pulled over but he did turn on his lights and do a U-turn. Vive le Quebec!

- Christmas dinner X 4 . . . it's a beautiful thing.