A Composer and a Super Male Model at the Salon

Dom and Steve went to get their hair styled together a couple of weeks ago. Their styalist Guy works right by our house so I snuck over and took some shots of their hair date.

Last Trip Out West

Jenn and Dom working for their room and board in the Grove and the Roomies posing with some other super models...

Jenn's Old!

We celebrated Jenn's 25th Birthday on April 11. Yes I know I am so far behind.
Actually, we had the celebration on the 9th because she was in the middle of exams on the 11th. Dom was out of town but his parents subbed in for him and joined us for dinner.

Song of the Great Khan

Steve's piece, Song of the Great Khan, premiered on April 3, 2008. The piece was written for the McGill Percussion Ensemble and incorporated over 40 different percussion instruments!

He's been working on this song since October last year and it was super cool to actually hear it after watching him toil over the score for 6 months. The piece was amazing and as our friend Jo aptly said "it was the best piece there and would have been my favorite even with my eyes closed so that I didn't know it was his"!

Steve spent months muttered that it was super weird and no one was going to like it so he just about fell over when I told him that I had mass emailed everyone that we knew within a 500 km radius and invited them to the show. Fortunately/ unfortunately (?) he's actually not as weird as he thinks he is and everyone in "Steve's section" loved it. He was the only composer that got hoots and hollers from the audience when the song ended! Dom even yelled out "that's my roommate!". I think Steve sort of wanted to die a little at that point. (He was also the only student composer and the rest were all faculty or composers from Europe and the US)

There was a problem with the recording and it has to be re-recorded. Once that happens I will try to figure out how to put the song on the blog. Here are a couple of pictures that I managed to catch before the show started and I was forced to put the camera away.

PS. Steve's looking a lot less haggard as of late in case anyone is worried.

More Ottawa

We took our new camera to Ottawa and had so much fun taking pictures of Parliament. And by "we" I mean Steve because he doesn't let me anywhere near "his" new Christmas present. That being said, the day was perfect for taking pictures and while his finger actually snapped the shots, you had better believe that I was chirping in his ear about what shots to take.

Week of the Moms

It sounds like the title to a horror movie but alas, it was great fun having my mom and Lois in town. They came out to see Steve's performance but we managed to pack in tons of wandering around Montreal, dinners and and dinners out, shopping and a quick trip to Ottawa to hang with Jenny.

More Massif

Here are some more pictures from our weekend at Le Massif that Jean-Luc took. Seriously, have you ever seen a ski lodge party so hard?

Team Ski vs. Team Study

Dom and I left Dr. Funk and Ms. Spazz-Attack in Montreal this weekend to work on their schooling while we partied it up in Quebec. Team Ski definitely had more fun~

On Friday night we had dinner with Dom's parents, Carole and Cajetan at their home in Mont Ste. Anne. Dom's mom is an amazing chef and she made shrimp cocktail, Chinese fondue with MOOSE, cheese, asparagus and mushrooms, followed by strawberry salad and chocolate fondue!!! Super yum!

On Saturday Dom's dad dropped us on the side of the road to be picked up by the ski bus filled with Dom's friends!!! The boys competed in the Le Massif Open, until the race was cancelled due to too many injuries, and then we partied in the lodge until the bus took us home later that night. The Quebecois really know how to do things right. The Apres Ski event saw the lodge turn into a bar with a live band!!

After we left the hill the ski van dropped us off at the poutine shop in Mont Ste. Anne and we ordered poutine and roast beef sandwiches in an effort to neutralize some of the beers in our belly. (You will note that the sandwich is mixed in with the fries and also covered in gravy) After dinner Dom's dad came and picked us up and after a quick chat with his parents we were in bed at 10 pm!

Carole and Cajetan treated us to lattes and a wonderful breakfast and then it was back to Montreal to hang with Team Study. I don't think they realized that we were gone...

Carole, more pictures of the Massif to follow, I promise! Thanks for the wonderful hospitality!

Easter

Jenn was in Edmonton for Easter weekend, Dom at Nationals and Steve in a horrible nasty funk (fitting out about his piece of music that is being performed later this week)..so to keep myself busy and feeling closer to home I spent the weekend cooking and preparing an Easter dinner for some friends that joined us on Sunday night. Did the full meal deal right down to the cabbage rolls and biscuits but I have to admit that my Grannie's cabbage rolls and Steve's Grandma's biscuits are way better. But, I did outdo myself with my easter cookies and table decorations, if I do say so myself.

Dom's Night Out

Dom and his boys went to see the Foo Fighters a couple of weeks ago. It was priceless. Dom was so excited he downloaded the words, e-mailed them to his friends and then spent the day practicing so that he could rock out, hard. Unfortunately, he missed his cue during the actual song. Maybe next time...

The Cleaning Staff

My mom tries to keep her cleaning staff a secret...however, last time I was home I managed to get a couple of photos. Notice the concentration? I hear they only get paid if they get all the crumbs off the floor.

Surviving the Storm

We'll call this GUEST BLOG NO.2 or STEVE'S WEEK OF "FREEDOM" PART DEUX (take note that the last so-called week of freedom was approximately one year ago ... I'm not drawing any conclusions from this but you can feel free to do so...). While the last time I posted a blog-entry my tongue was firmly planted in my cheek this time my intetion is to be dead-serious.

For those of you who may not know much of Eastern Canada got, (let's say) pistol-whipped (for the benefit of some of our more sensitive readership) by a nasty winter storm over the past weekend. Earlier in the week, the younger sister, our resident champion athlete, due to her physical superiority (for discussions of inferiority see a future blog entitled THE LIFE AND TIMES OF STEPHEN R ... I mean, seriously, I'd challenge any of you to live with a gold-medallist and a frickin' male model and not encounter feelings of crippling inferiority) felt no fear in proclaiming not once, not twice but three times "I think winter is over." Hubris of this sort seldom goes unpunished ...

So, the snow started on Friday night, really soggy bigs flakes (at least here in Montreal). By Saturday morning the wind had picked up and was basically blowing the snow sideways, replete with little icy pelletes (grappelle) that blow into your eyes like grains of sand and slap you across the face like thousands of tiny scorned maidens. Check out the views of Ste. Curmudgeon Avenue, first looking west toward the Market and then east towards Robin Hood (Prince of Neiges?).




In a normal city this type of storm might hinder the everyday lives of the citizens but in Montreal things continued almost as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. Check out our neighbour with his pets (its easy to keep the canine motif running through my blogposts with people like this around), I think their names are (from left to right) Monsiuer Pouf, Herr Gammers, Sloppy Joe, Mademoiselle Paris, Throw Pillow and Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo Dog.



Anyway, I was headed up to the school/the North Pole to meet my friend Rob for beer (you see when guys get together without their wives they don't bother with food ... as John Lennon sang, "all you need is beer"). After nearly being knocked to the ground by a gust of wind which pushed me into a knee-deep snowdrift and then subsequently avoiding the horrible scenario of wiping out on ice more polished than the hairless skin on a male-model's chest, I managed to make my way to the metro. As I approached I began to become confused, like Zoolander in a way ... "who am I", I thought, Stephen Rogers, Drrr. or Roald Amundsen, explorer of the earth's polar regions and first man to reach both the North and South Poles. The fur-lined coat and beard may have had something to do with my identity crisis. [see photo]


Once in the metro, the reprieve helped me sort out the issue, until I arrived at the school and saw this scene where a group of students had gathered after a concert at the music building.


Imagine my surprise when one of them that I knew, lets call him Pete for the sake of anonymity, stopped me to ask what I thought about the ramifications of the aggregate harmonic columns in the Fifth Movement of Pulcininini's Opera No.1, Opus 34. I quickly chirped something back to him and went inside. I met Rob in the lobby and even though he was just visiting from the states where they hardly ever get snow, he was better prepared for the storm than even I was. As they say: "you can rob the Canada from under a man's feet but never from his heart" ... or something like that.



We went out and had a great night indoors. And, just to prove that I didn't make this all up, here's a photo of the day after from the doors that lead out to our balcony. The snow bank was literally taller than me and my (tall) tale.



Guest-blogger, out!!!

NYC

Steve and I took a bite out of the Big Apple this past weekend and wow, was it UNBELIEVABE!! NYC is a place that you just have to see to be able to believe it: the lights, the people, the energy, the noise...

You'll note that I went a little blog crazy here but that's only because we went totally NYC photo crazy when we were there putting our new camera to work! I think the most unbelievable part of this city is just that you cannot comprehend what it is like until you are there. There are huge buildings everywhere.

We drove into NYC Wednesday afternoon thinking that we were prepared for the driving thanks to all of the crazy Montreal drivers - ha! After a quick pit stops in the Bronx - for a cash machine to pay the bridge tolls (I turtled in the car while Steve made a very very quick stop into a very very sketchy corner mart) - we managed to navigate our way to Erin's place after which we immediately parked the car vowing not to drive again until we had to navigate our way out of the City on Sunday! We spent the first couple hours wandering Astoria which is where Erin lives and then caught up with her for the evening.

We got our first real glimpse of Manhatten Thursday morning when we followed Erin to her office which is located about two steps from Time Sqaure. After pointing us in the right direction, she went to work and we spent the first couple of hours just wandering around trying to get our bearings. We managed to hit a number of must see sights on Day One: Grand Central Station, Time Square, Central Park, the UN, Rockerfeller Centre, and the Empire State Building, to name a few.

While we woke up to the first major snowfall that Manhatten had this winter on Day Two it didn't slow us down and we spent the dayexploring lower Manhatten: specifically the World Trade Centre Site, the Stock Exchange, the Federal Hall, the Court House, City Hall and many more. We hit the Moma right before dinner thinking that we would be the only tourists taking advantage of its free admission and instead enjoyed the museum with us and our closest 10,000 other NYC tourists. That night we hit Tribeca with Erin for drinks and dinner.

On Day Three we took the Staten Island Ferry for a ride, hit a 7 story designer clothing store (well Erin and I did, Steve sat on the stairs taking pictures of the chaos and crying) and then wandered Soho for a couple of hours before wrapping up the night with a new music concernt and a Susan Sarandon sighting.

Sunday was a bit of a quite day as we spent the morning hanging in Astoria with Erin until we had worked up the courage to brave the traffic and head out of town. I never thought I would say this but driving home through the Montreal traffic seemed almost like driving in Spruce Grove!

As our sampling of pictures show, it was a great trip and so fun to catch up with Erin. Thanks for being such a host E-Ro, we love you.