The 4 x 4 Meme

I have been tagged with a meme sort of thing by Dazzlin' Dino of The Blogging Party of Canada. It appears to go like this:

list four places you've lived
1. Sherbrooke, Quebec (my birthplace), where Conrad Black first got into the media ownership thing.
...the rest are all communities on the island of Montreal:
2. Beaconsfield - suburb without that stripmall look.
3. Notre-Dame de Grace - great place for a Concordia student.
4. Mile End - part of the Plateau, which is where Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen grew up. Some of their haunts haven't changed in half a century, and Big Fast Food is nowhere to be found in Mile End, so you know it's a real treasure.


list four vehicles you've owned
(only one motorized, none the least bit hip)
1. My sister's hand-me-down, banana-seated purple one-speed bicycle. But I had no kilt.
2. Canadian Tire ten-speed bike. Not the lightest of bicycles, nor the flashiest.
3. When #2 got stolen, my dad's hand-me-down Canadian Tire ten-speed bike, which also was eventually stolen.
4. A "Pre-owned" 2003 Ford Focus SE station wagon.

list four jobs you've had
1. Montreal Gazette paperboy (3 years and two ice-storms, 1983-85)
2. Beaconsfield Golf Club golf caddy (lasted one day, but inspired the song Back Nine).
3. McDonald's crew, Crew Trainer, Crew Chief, Swing Manager, and Assistant Manager. (It lasted way too long, and never paid better than subsistence wages. That inspired more than a few songs, to be sure.)
4. Production Manager, Swensen's ice cream in downtown Montreal. It was pretty cool making ice cream one summer, until I realized it was wrecking my back - for little better than minimum wage. You had a lot of heavy tubs of ice cream to rotate every day. Like 150 vanilla, 75 chocolate, 23 strawberry, and between 4 and 16 of some 30 others.

list four vacations you've had
1. Tootled around New Brunswick (very pretty) and the Gaspe one summer. La Belle Province is at its most belle in the mountains between Rimouski and NB, IMHO.
2. I was once good friends with an ex-Canadian Navy Newfoundlander. I still haven't visited the Rock, but he and I went to Halifax visiting a career Navy buddy of his. Gorgeous city, Halifax. I'd live there.
3. An old girlfriend and I rented a car and drove around New England for a week one summer. We hit Boston, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut. The ship-building museum/town of Mystic Seaport blew me away.
4. When I was a kid, our family would go to the Birch Knoll Cabins for two weeks every summer in Ogunquit, Maine. (Looks like they've put in a pool and finished some of the interiors - it's probably ruined for me now). That's where I learned how to body-surf, which is perhaps the funnest sporting activity that requires absolutely no equipment. We used to coordinate our vacation with a few Connecticut families we met there. It provided some of my most vivid childhood memories, and inspiration for the song below.

Tags to:
JohnnyC at (Not So) Idle Thoughts.
Montreal Simon
Cheryl at The Galloping Beaver
Rossk at The Gazetteer
Ivan of Ivan Prokopchuk - Creative Writing (because I suspect he secretly loves these meme things)

Apologies if you have already been so tagged.

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