The Hilton Chronicle

Seems like we just turned around last week and all of a sudden the leaves had turned to their autumn colours. I thought it was a bit early as I don't usually expect to see this until we are in to October. Perhaps the hot days in July and August made them turn a little sooner. Nevertheless, they are beautiful and until a windy day comes along they will be a pleasure to see as I drive around the city. Of course it means that fall is upon us and within a month or so snow will be on the ground. A dreadful thought. But, in the meantime, we will enjoy the nice weather, and we certainly have had some of that in recent weeks. Last week it got up into the 30's and was quite summery. Today it is raining and quite cold so perhaps our fair weather has departed.
I have only two more wedding videos from the summer season to edit and at the moment I am taking a bit of a break as I put the new edit suite together. I am writing this from the new "command central" as I transferred my old system and the complete network into the new facility over the weekend. I am just finishing off a few structural things on the desk, like wiring and power supply and will be continuing to set up equipment for the next few days. The new work station arrived last week and I did have a chance to fire it up briefly. It's a Dell T3400 work station and once we finish upgrading it will have a quad core processor, 4 Gb of RAM and over a terabyte of hard drive space. It will be running through two 21 inch Samsung Syncmaster monitors and a 32 inch Samsung LCD flat panel. The new desk looks pretty spiffy with all the new gear on it and I can't wait to start editing on it to see how well the system runs. The work station will be dedicated to only the Adobe Production suite software and all my internet and utility computing will be done on my older Pentium system. So it is pretty exciting to see it all come together.
We called Sandi last night who is currently in Vietnam until Wednesday and then heads back to Bangkok. From there she will be heading to Singapore. She is doing well and enjoying herself although she took a three day tour that did not seem to well organized and caused a lot of frustration. It seems they don't put a lot of care into the product they sell over there and once they have your money they are not really too concerned about how well you're treated.
Dianne and I are planning a little road trip around the Thanksgiving long weekend to get out to Vancouver Island to visit Mom & Dad. We haven't had a chance to get away together for so long so we thought this would be a good opportunity before winter socks us in.

Posted 7:36 AM by Jeff

Monday, September 01, 2008

The Long Hot Summer

Tomorrow is the first day back at school and I was thinking today of when I was in school and how the last days of holidays were always a bit depressing. The last Friday before the long weekend is the official last day of holidays as you would get the weekend off anyway. Then the holiday Labour Day Monday is kind of a "bonus" day. But tomorrow is Tuesday the 2nd of September and it's officially over. I still remember the feeling I used to get as the new school year drew near. For in those days of my youth, the summer days languished on forever. Day after day of hot sunny weather where we just lounged around or went for day long bike rides with no other cares in the world. And then life came to a halt as the Labour Day weekend grew near and the dreaded "first day back" loomed on the horizon. It sort of feels like that now with the approach of every Monday morning but not to the same extent. Nowadays, the next Friday is just a few days away and those Mondays just keep coming around and around. But there is nothing like the summer holidays of my youth. Life was good and there was plenty of it.
It's been a busy summer and now we look to the beginning of September and the coming of the fall. I have been busy all summer with the video projects which are progressing along nicely. Our final wedding shoot for the summer was yesterday after doing one on Friday afternoon. So both weddings are in the can waiting to be edited. I am just in the process of editing the one we shot in July and I am about half way done. The pressure is off slightly so I think I may concentrate a bit more on getting the new edit suite up and running. I have decided on what equipment to get and just need to order it. I'll report on that a little later as it starts to come together. Before that I have a bit more infrastructure work to do on the room.
As an update on the activities of our kids, I can report that Sandi is enjoying her travels around Asia, now that her contract in Japan is over. She has moved out of her house and sold her car and has gone off exploring. She went down to the island of Okinawa for a few days where she was able to do some scuba diving. She then flew to Bangkok Thailand and had a chance to ride an elephant as she did a little sightseeing around Thailand. Currently she is in Cambodia and will be leaving at the end of the week for Laos and Vietnam. After a couple of weeks there she plans to try and get to Singapore before heading back to Bangkok and the next leg of her journeys. She hopes to get to Malaysia and Brunei before ending up in Australia. She has no definite timeline for all of this so we are not sure when we shall see her at home again.
Nikki and Chris are about to make a major move. Chris has finished his tenure at the mission in Crestview Florida and the two are now in the midst of moving to Montgomery, Alabama. They will be renting a house there as they find some work. The church that has invited them up there will be training them for ministry positions for the future.
Lee and Angela just returned home from a rather monumental trip. They had flown down to Tampa Florida to pick up a motorcycle that Lee has bought. They then rode the bike all the way home to Edmonton, stopping in to see Nikki & Chris along the way as well as a few other relatives. They had a lot of fun and arrived home safe and sound but tired.
So it's back to work tomorrow after another long but busy weekend. The only consolation to that is thet it will be only four more days to the next weekend.

Posted 8:57 PM by Jeff

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