Seems I've been out of the loop so to speak for an entire month as the last post was in May. So, with the beginning of a new month upon us, here is a bit of a recap of the last month or so.

At the end of May, as you recall, Dianne, Angela and Sandi went down to visit Nicole & Chris in Crestview and had a fairly nice time. They were a bit delayed getting back as bad weather in Houston grounded all planes there and no incoming flights. So they were delayed leaving Pensacola and by the time they did get to Houston their connecting flight had already left. So, consequently, they were stranded in Houston and had to spend the night there at their own expense before they could get out on a flight the next morning. From then on everything went smoothly until they got home, albeit 24 hours late.

Work is going pretty good for me. I have been doing some work that is not as taxing physically as I have been installing connectors, cover plates, and distribution panels in homes that are nearing completion. I have also been involved in a couple special projects installing home theaters and multi room sound systems in some pretty swanky homes.

I took the plunge and installed the Vista upgrade on my laptop a couple of weeks ago. It lasted all of four days before I got totally frustrated and did a clean install back to XP. It was so annoying as every time I booted the computer it kept giving me warnings of incompatibilities with certain programs and the operating system, even when the program was uninstalled! And then the overblown security system started driving me nuts as it wanted confirmation from me that I was actually the one that had started the program and that I actually wanted it to run. Then it had to phone home every five minutes to check to make sure I was not running a bootlegged copy of Windows. I got so fed up that I scrapped the whole exercise and went back to XP. "You are beginning to realize the shortcomings of the new operating system. Confirm or Deny?"

I had to put the wedding video that we shot in May on hold for a bit as I needed to get back to the Fort Edmonton project. They wanted a revised draft of the production with a few changes made to the original. I finished that up last week and sent it off and hopefully in about a week's time we will know whether the project's a go and the DVDs can go on sale or whether we have to do a bit more revising. I am anxious to get that project out of the way and finish the wedding video as we have a couple more weddings lined up for the end of the summer. I also have two or three smaller projects waiting to be started. I still haven't got to my desk building project and am still holed up in Nikki's old bedroom.

Sandi is now less than a month away from leaving us for her trip to the Orient. She has received her placement and has been communicating with her predecessor there getting a low down on the living conditions and the lay of the land. He is selling her his bicycle and his microwave oven and has been giving her advice on all sorts of things. So now that things are more concrete in the planning, Sandi is getting really excited. She has to go down to Calgary on July 27 for a full day orientation and then flies out of there the next day, so we are planning to drive her down there to see her off.

Our family cell phone contract expires this month so we decided to upgrade our hardware as we renewed the contract. So, Dianne and I are now the proud owners of a pair of matching Blackberry Pearls. Dianne was in sore need of a PDA since her Palm Pilot died some time ago and without spending a lot of money you cannot buy a basic unit anymore. So, we decided to give the Blackberries a try as they incorporate a cell phone, internet browser, PDA functions and a digital camera all in one tiny unit. We've spent a lot of time playing with them over the last couple of days as the learning curve is a tad treacherous. I got so wrapped up it with yesterday, sitting outside in the sun, that I totally lost track of time and ended up with a nice burn all over my front. It's not hard to see why these amazing little devices are nicknamed "Crackberries" as they can be quite addicting.

Yesterday was, off course, Canada day, and we spent the evening at Angela and Lee's house on the river bank waiting for the firework display. We had quite a spectacular view and I tried my hand at photographing the show along with several other people who were there. The pictures turned out not to bad as you can see from this sample. I realized right away that I am going to have to invest in a remote shutter release cable as the time exposures are a little shaky from me holding down the shutter release button.

So we are now into the official summer month of July and we are really hoping the weather decides to be what it is supposed to be for this time of year. The last couple of weeks have not been too bad, but it still gets very cool in the evenings. We've been trying to get out for our bike rides but have not had a lot of success in being consistent yet this year. We went for a ride tonight and it was very nice. It just seems that either something comes up to make us busy or it's just too miserable outside. Hopefully we can remedy that in the next few weeks.

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