More cowboy hats, fewer piercings and one naked lady in the parking lot

Light on photos

We are very light on photos for yesterday, so to compensate I've provided an extra long title for this post, all of it true of course.

In the afternoon, Alison gave a haircut to Amélie, our neighbor. For the record, this was her first haircut to a native Québecois. She had given a haircut to our neighbor Gaye from Lexington, but that didn't count. Frankly, I'm surprised that Alison had lasted three weeks without giving a haircut.

After work, we sat on the patio behind the apartment and shared wine, cheese, meats and stories with Amélie. She's got many such stories. As I've said before, there is so much to Amélie that I wouldn't even know where to begin.

After dinner, we headed to Scène Bell for our first full concert, start to finish. Sheryl Crow provided the opening act; Brad Paisley the main event. Compared to the previous evening (Alessia Cara and Selena Gomez), this audience definitely skewed older, with lots of cowboy hats and fewer piercings (they seem to be mutually exclusive).

We expected Sheryl Crow to give a solid concert and she did not disappoint. Having never been to a country music concert, I didn't know what to expect from Brad Paisley. In short, he was a consummate entertainer: strong singing voice and virtuosic on the guitar, with an easy, informal rapport with the audience. His performance was terrific and we stayed to the very end.

The Selfies

Lying in the grass at the concert...

Tidbit #1

The United States and Canada are very similar in many respects. For example:

Statistic	United States	Canada
Area	3.79 million square miles	3.85 million square miles
Literacy	99%	99%
Life expectancy	78 years	81 years
GDP per capita	USD$47,106	USD$47,567

But then, of course, there are guns and gun violence. Those statistics look like this:

Statistic	United States	Canada
Murders involving a gun	8,813	172
Murders per 100,000 people	5.0	1.8
Guns per capita	1.13	0.31
License required	No	Yes
Background check required	No	Yes
Personal references required	No	Yes
Mandatory waiting period	No	Yes
Safety course required	No	Yes

Triple the guns, triple the murders. The answer to the gun violence in the United States is simple:

Fewer guns in the hands of fewer, better vetted and trained people will reduce gun violence.

Tidbit #2

You might be wondering about that naked lady mentioned in the title of the post. Yesterday morning, Amélie knocked on our door and asked if we had heard anything unusual during the night. It turns out that during the night, a woman had somehow driven her car through the thick, steel chain that cordons off the parking lot behind the apartment, and was found early in the morning passed out in her damaged car. Alas, when pressed, Amélie admitted that the woman was in her underwear, but here in "boring" Québec, that counts for naked.