When I went to Indonesia in 1996, I remember seeing an ornate “window” in a hostel, which was essentially a nicely-shaped hole right in the concrete wall, with no glass or screen. I saw this and had the thought, “but what do they do in wint-? oh… right”. It’s those little things that make you realize that a lot of what we take for granted are really special features of Canada.

I was in Scotland over the holidays and I made a lot of fun of the country for being paralyzed by so little snow. Snow that grass poked through created enough havoc to cancel some of the family’s holiday festivities, including a dinner. But although it was a wuss of a winter (-8C at worst I saw there), it was definitely harder to live with than here. I remember feeling and hearing drafts in every pub and house I entered, and in most places the heating couldn’t cope well enough to warm the interior completely. Ever since I’ve been back, I’ve been appreciating the simple fact of being able to actually be toasty when inside, or walk confidently on the sidewalk (on which abrasives are used). If Britain is so unused to what little winter I saw there, I’m not shocked that the prolonged frost they’ve been getting is screwing them up completely, and I feel for them.

My friend Charles, on a sabbatical in New Zealand, has noticed that the doors there are often left wide open, leading to birds often being seen in cafés. He adds, “nobody seems to consider this a public health hazard”. That fear that beasties, including domestic ones, are unsanitary, seems typically North American. Everywhere I’ve gone (including Europe), I’ve seen owners bring well-behaved dogs to restaurants, and on trains. There were at least 5 dogs (leashed, not caged) in our one crowded compartment on the train to Glasgow. In Indonesia I dined in a restaurant where I could see a rat walking on the awning of the bar. My hotel in Venezuela, the same one where the UN Secretary General had recently stayed, had cockroaches. Sure, I wouldn’t like to eat next to rats and dead birds, but I think we’re a little overcareful when it comes to dogs, cats, birds, squirrels, geckos, and the like. People aren’t that afraid everywhere. They really are especially afraid here.

I was recently talking to my friend Thierry, who moved to L.A. last year, about the American healthcare reform. He felt that a key difference between American and Canadian attitudes with respect to this was that in America, it’s accepted as common sense that a public figure or richer person should get better and faster treatment than the rest of the population, in all things. Conversely in Canada, according to my friend, we expect all to be equal, for better or worse. This is definitely supported by the indignation we saw when Claude Dubois jumped the H1N1 vaccination line this fall, and last week when Halle Berry skipped the queue at Trudeau airport. One commenter said that the outrage over this is strictly Canadian, as in most places people expect stars to get VIP treatment everywhere, including at security checks.

This is how travelling makes you know your own country better. Some things others may soon have to learn from us, while for some other things… I wish we’d learn from them.

I was motivated to write something about Halle Berry skipping the airport line in Montreal, but it seemed inappropriate for the first post of the year.

A lot of links and articles are going around these days about how to keep one’s resolutions, with most advising to make your objectives specific, and share them. As with any resolution, New Year’s or otherwise, I’m always reluctant to share because it seems to give the ol’ entourage licence to nag, but I guess that’s kind of the point.

Well, licence or no, here are mine:

1 - Hit a BMI of 22 (that’s about 10 pounds away)
2 - Take piano lessons and practice (my least likely to be observed)
3 - Do something social once at week at least (must observe, as I think it’ll be hard to do this in 2011 when the new game is due)
4 - Read at least one book a month
5 - Find real ways of worrying less, other than waiting for the wisdom of old age to set in
6 - Make that cool website idea of mine a reality (another long shot)

Yours?

Hi again,

After trying my hand at freelancing, I found that while it was a successful endeavor, it wasn’t really an enjoyable one. Although I saw people every day, they were never the same ones and I missed being part of a team and creating the bonds one does through repeated exposure. So after getting the freelancing curiosity out of my system, I became an employee of Ubisoft this year, and after helping complete and ship James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game, I’m now producing my own project again.

I’d like to become more blog-active (ie. writing, but also reading and commenting) in the next year. My reasons for neglecting by blog all this time had mainly to do with the fact that readers increasingly call you on every half-baked opinion, requiring in-depth support for seemingly everything you say, and there’s always the possibility that some client or upper manager will find your half-baked opinions online. All this can be quite castrating. But what the hell. This space is mine, and after all, it’s opt-in for everyone else.

Here’s hoping you find it worth opting in.

- I signed up to give some money monthly to the AIDS foundation and they gave me a bag of goodies. Inside, among other things, was a condom with word AIDS printed all over the wrapper. I think that would kinda kill the mood… but I guess abstinence is good prevention too.

- This week I’m finishing a game project I’ve been producing for the Ubisoft Campus for the past little while. I find I’ve been rebitten by the game production bug. I’ll definitely be looking for a game to produce as soon as I get back from…

- Rome. On Sunday I’m leaving for a short solo romp in the Italian capital. Will eat gelato and prosciutto, visit Roman stuff, draw, do yoga and take a side trip to Pompeii.

Silly (and now sixty) lightspeedmom on our trip to NYC last year. Bonne fête Mom!

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Since leaving A2M last year, I’ve been searching for the same level of joy I found in my first years as a game producer (especially on Happy Feet). Unfortunately, by the end of the Iron Man project, that joy had been replaced by throwing up into office garbage cans and on one memorable occasion, losing vision from the stress. Although in hindsight it seems that leaving was the sensible thing to do, it was an excrutiating decision to make at the time without feeling like a failure. I know that the more driven parts of me will always feel like it was.

Anyway, at the time I tried my hand at freelancing and was successful at it, but I missed seeing the same people every day and being part of a team. Slowly I dropped each client in favor of my favorite one, Ubisoft, where I worked in the training department. At Christmas Ubi presented me with a full-time job, saying I’d get paid holiday vacation if I signed right away. I did it for the vacation, unsure of what the job would be.

A couple of weeks ago I landed ass-backwards into Ubisoft’s campus, where 100 soon-to-be graduates are working together to make a game over one semester, and I’m acting producer on this project. The campus gig ends in May, and I finally - happily - have an idea of what I want to do next. And I’m excited about it. I’ll be able to talk about it by the end of this month.

I absolutely adore this birthday card I received from a colleague yesterday. In case you’re wondering about the pegleg, Comet’s leg got hurt last week (but she’s ok). Merci JF!

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When I was a kid, my grandmother Laurette and my grandfather Yvon lived in the apartment above ours. Every day I came home from school and went right upstairs to play cards with him as she made me a grilled cheese sandwich. Although the whole family is made up of rather direct, no-nonsense people, my grandmother was by far the most direct person I’ve ever met.

She wasn’t a sentimental woman either. When I got hurt she didn’t take me in her arms; she would swiftly disinfect the wound and put a band-aid on it, later admonishing my father for moving into a place with stairs. At Bingo, when she got close to winning but lost, she’d never fail to colorfully rip into the person who had won, even if the winner was our priest. Still, because she wanted to be polite, she’d say “Allez donc pisser, vous”. When my cousin, aged only 4, loudly complained on a bus that the lady sitting next to her didn’t smell good, and my aunt tried unsuccessfully to keep her quiet, Laurette said “Ben c’est vrai qu’à pue!”

Yet for all her down-to-earth realism, every Christmas she built a virtual Disneyland in her living room for me and my cousin, filling us with wonder like a pragmatic fairy. When I last saw her in the hospital over the holidays, she didn’t recognize me but kept talking about Andy’s daughter’s recent achievements. She told me about my new job. My new house.

Laurette would have been 93 on Sunday, but she passed away last weekend, after a few months of illness.

Since then, I’ve received a lot of messages from surprising places, and I’ve learned that Laurette was neighborhood grandmother to many who weren’t related to her. Although I never heard her spontaneously tell anyone that she loved them, this week I’m happy to know that many hearts were touched by her uncompromising tough love.

Bye Mémé, tu vas me manquer.

On October 1st, I started

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an experiment in which I would be a vegetarian for 100 days. I wanted to do it long enough that it would be a challenge and also long enough to see the effects. With the 100 days now over, I’m ready to share some mostly anecdotal, completely unreplicated personal findings.

- Physiological: I lost 7 pounds (about 5% of my weight) and feel generally awesome, but I don’t credit vegetarianism for this. The veggie diet coincided with a training program which I think is responsible for these positive changes. However, the experiment did show that one can easily engage in rigorous strength-training whilst avoiding meat, a concern that had previous kept me from adopting vegetarianism. Energy levels remained high, and got my 65g daily protein by including lots of legumes.

- Gastronomical : Armed with a few recipe books and some online research I found it easy to make vegetarian meals that both Jonathan and I enjoyed, and I made many new discoveries along the way. I’m now a bulgur master. At no time did I feel any general meat cravings, but did feel one specific craving early on when a crispy slice of bacon was staring up at me. Otherwise even when wonderful dishes were served (Blork’s turkey at thanksgiving, Mom’s tourtière at Xmas), I found honest satisfaction in the vegetarian side dishes. I was also able to take in a bit more of the yummy, healthy fats (from nuts and olive oil) because I was ingesting no unhealthy fats from meat. Oh, and Indian vegetarian takeout rawks.

- Financial: This was surprisingly the area of biggest impact. Every week I went to the checkout counter thinking, “okay, this one’s going to be costly” having bought so much, and every week I was stunned by the bill. Weekly groceries for two people, including Jonathan’s meat (exclusively smoked or canned fish), ran us 45-50$ for the duration. The previous typical bill was about 125-150$.

- Social: This is definitely the area where I felt the sacrifice most dearly. Being a vegetarian is most inconvenient when dining out or at other people’s houses. Even when you bring a veggie dish to someone’s dinner party, it feels like an imposition. Additionally, the special diet creates one more constraint when choosing restaurants, or the necessity to negociate with chefs who aren’t always pleased to alter the delicate balance of their dishes. That having been said, there is less social pressure to bend the rules when you’re a strict vegetarian than with anything that seems negociable such as being on a diet or being a loose vegetarian. People don’t question you on it. Except your dad, of course.

Conclusion

Overall, one of the most surprising things is how little difference being a vegetarian makes in one’s life. It was generally an extremely easy and positive transition for me to make. As a result, I have decided to remain vegetarian, but only at home. The only difficulty arose when dining out or at people’s houses, so when I’m out I’ll eat what’s there. Since about 80% of what I ingest is food I make, with this easy guideline I should remain mostly vegetarian.