Blair's Blog

… for riding!

This has been the second of two glorious fall weekends in southern Alberta.  I’ve managed 50% of this years mileage on my motorcycle over the past 9 days.  Last Saturday (20 Sept) I went for a double header with 2 different groups of riders out in Kananaskis around Bragg Creek and Turner Valley – 465 km in all.  This weekend I went out and rode the Highwood Pass loop on Saturday (27th) with some of the same guys and a couple of riders I’d not met before, that was about 360 km.

Today was my friend Sean’s birthday (Sean:  don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone that you are 40 now) so we took the afternoon and rode out to Bragg Creek and did a couple of passes up and down Highway 762 before stopping for chai in Bragg Creek.  Chai is the official beverage of motorcycle road trips and the little coffee shop in Bragg Creek makes quite good chai.  After a bit of a break we headed back to Sean’s place via Black Diamond and Okotoks (about 270 km), arriving just in time for Sean’s surprise birthday party!

There can’t be too many more days like this left before the snow flies, so it’s nice to be able to get out and enjoy them.

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The part of southern Alberta where we live is quite prone to “lively” summer weather – thunderstorms are common from June through September.  Many of the thunderstorms are accompanied by hail – I’d guess that we are hit with hail 4 or 5 times in an average year.   Most of the time the hail is small and relatively soft, causing little damage.  Sometimes it’s not; yesterday we got hit with a pretty good hailstorm, it lasted about 20 minutes with some hail the size of a grape (although most was in the pea-sized range).

This storm really messed up the gardens, adding injury to the insult of a poor growing season.  Most of our annuals had just barely established themselves – this has been one of the poorest growing seasons in a long while.

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The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. ... it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that August 8.

I don’t generally spend much time (certainly not as much as I should) paying attention to international affairs, but a colleague at work sent me a copy of the article that is quoted above on the Stratfor site. I thought it was pretty interesting and certainly conveys more depth than the TV news is able to provide.

Update (6 Sept 2008): Apparently the content on the Stratfor site becomes available only to subscribers after a few weeks. The link in the quote above now points to a PDF copy of the article.

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After nearly 6 years, we decided to replace our digital camera. Our old digital was a Sony DSC-P9, which was a very good camera when we bought it in 2002, just before Alyssa was born. However, much has changed in the world of digital photography in these few years and the old camera was having some light metering problems. Many outdoor shots were turning out badly overexposed. Continue Reading »

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