Ok fine, Claudine! Are you happy now? Here it is! My very first Quartiers d’hiver blog post. You want me to talk about myself, right? Tell people who I am and what I eat in winter (that’s a beautifully horrid translation of a quite charming french expression)? Well here goes nothing.

Those of you who were at the last FME edition in September might remember seeing some of these Lost Bike posters around old Noranda.

I made those. It was my kick-ass bike that was stolen on that early Sunday morning of quite possibly the best weekend of life. I didn’t let it bring me down. I couldn’t. I was having too much of a good time to let some jerk ruin my fun. I made silly posters, mostly to make myself smile, plastered my second favourite mining town, and kept on partying.

I don’t just make ridiculous Lost Bike posters for a living. I also pretend to DJ every once in a while under the alias DJs Masqués, spearhead We Live Up Here — a community arts collective called in my hometown of Sudbury (Rouyn-Noranda’s twin brother on the Ontario side), and do design & communications work at my creative agency Studio123. Oh, and than there’s Up Fest. After developing an uncontrollable jealousy for the city of Rouyn-Noranda brought on by many FME editions, we decided to stop slacking. We are in the process of creating a new urban art festival that embraces the Nickel City’s downtown core. We’re calling it Up Fest.

Participating in the genesis of any new cultural happening is inspiring and exciting. But that’s a topic for a whole other blog post. We’ll get to that next week.

And now for the happy ending. Phone rings in November. « Salut Christian, c’est Marc Talbot de la Sûreté du Québec à Rouyn-Noranda. J’ai de bonnes et de mauvaises nouvelles. » « Start with the good news », I answer. « On a trouvé ton vélo. » « Yes! And the bad news…? » « Finalement, y’en a pas de mauvaises nouvelles! » Christian is happy.

Rouyn-Noranda, you stole my bike and my heart. I got my bike back, but you can keep my heart.