Okay, all of you who keep e-mailing, stopping by, and calling: Paze and Jeff are the proud parents of a baby girl called Devon Julia Preston LeBlanc! She was born on Tuesday night (sneaky, aren’t they?), mother and baby (and father too!) are doing just fine; they�re staying in hospital for a couple of days just to be sure everything�s okay, since Paze’s last few months were so closely monitored. They’re planning an official meet-Devon day instead of having dribs and drabs of people streaming through their place, which I think is a marvellous idea.

Congratulations to all three!

Well, that was interesting. I detest walking into a situation where I’m not prepared, and since this whole thing was non-disclosure protected (lots of espionage in the computer game world, I understand) no details could be released to me about this project to help me prepare. So I walked into the recording room cold. It was fun; no denying that. My partner was an absolute scream who made me cry with laughter. The main problem with the five female roles, though, was that they were female stereotypes as opposed to the ten male international characters. Granted, they were stereotypes too, but at least my partner could play with accents. I had to play up the stereotypes, which gave me much less room to improvise and basically left me pretty unengaged. They had fun fooling around with my voice, making me sound about a hundred pounds heavier than I am for one character, and I must admit I had a good laugh when they played back a couple of other characters that I had nailed dead on. All the same, though, as much fun as the exercise was, I wish I’d been given more than three catch-phrases for each role to record as a test, and I really wish I’d seen visuals for all of them.

In other news, we anxiously await the official good news of the birth of the new daughter of our upstairs neighbours and very dear friends Jeff and Paze! They’re at the hospital today, and they’ve sworn to tell no one the name of this child until she’s born, which has left the rest of us with no choice but to call her The Peanut. Poor kid; it’s going to stick. It will, however, be nice to be told the name that will be on her birth certificate! Watch this space for news as soon as there’s news to be released…

Woo-hoo! For all of you out there sitting on the edge of your seats, it was announced in Ottawa this afternoon that the winner of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads! project is In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje! Steven Page, lead singer of Barenaked Ladies, nominated this novel as the book that all Canadians should read together over the summer.

Well. That was my excitement for the day.

Tonight I’m off to a top-secret voice test for the spoken dialogue of a computer video game being developed here in Montreal. Oooh… the suspense…

Your Canada Reads! update:

Last week, they voted out A Stone Angel on Wednesday, A Fine Balance on Thursday, and The Handmaid’s Tale on Friday. I missed today’s debate, which must have been thrilling! I have never read >b>Whylah Falls, but I’ve read Ondaatjie before, and he’s really good. We’ll find out tomorrow which one was voted off, and which one is left to be Canada’s first book in the coast-to-coast book club!

I’m pretty lame, aren’t I?

Well, it could be worse. I could be saying, “Hey, it’s only whatever days till Star Wars: Episode Two comes out!” (Isn’t that sad? I don’t even know how many days it is. I’m usually up on these things. It’s around Victoria Day. I’m not overly concerned about it because I’m not going in the first week anyway.)