Blair's Blog

Yes.  It’s like Zeno’s paradox – the number of plates left to find keeps going down, but the end remains stubbornly remote.  The CNPS game continues at a slower pace than ever before – this year a miserly 35 plates were added to the total.   That’s half of the long term average since starting in 2003. After 13 years the total is now at 900 (previous years are recounted in posts linked by the CNPS tag).  The overall rate has been drastically affected by not just the transit-based commuting, but also the significant reduction in driving generally after moving into the city.  Last but not least, six months of unemployment is really not helping (and it’s not just the CNPS that is really hurting…).The alignment with St Patrick’s day may not be just a coincidence – the lack of progress is like being pinched and it could drive one to drink!

Speaking of St Patrick’s day – there is not much green about today.  We got up to a nice fresh dump of snow – last week I was marveling at the tulips sprouting in the garden and today I shoveled the sidewalk.  Brenda has had the better day – she is off to the west coast today to attend Fibres West with our friend Karie who runs Big Blue Moma, a retailer of amazing jewelry made from glass beads, woven baskets and fabrics – all sourced from Ghana. While Calgary was overcast with cold wind, Brenda and Karie were driving through the spectacular Rockies. Fibres West runs Friday and Saturday in Surrey, BC – if you are in that area be sure to look them up and buy a basket – or two.

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One of the problems with Christmas is that there are far too many delicious goodies around the house – and this while the days are short and the weather cold. The antidote is, of course, to get out and get moving – something that we are finding a little easier to do now living in Calgary. We can actually walk though really nice parks that are just a few blocks from the house. Or, as we discovered over the holidays, just by stopping and walking while out running errands.

Over the past week, Brenda and I walked up Nose Hill on a bright clear day, took Chloe to the dog park in her new coat and did a long walk through Sandy Beach while the kids were swimming at the local pool.

The plan is definitely to keep up the walking – at least until the Christmas calories are dealt with!

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Christmas day has come and gone; the new year is just around the corner. It seems that this year has just flown by! The week leading up to Christmas Day was full of family activity; we hosted Brenda’s two brothers and their families on the 23rd and had twenty-one cousins, aunts and uncles over for dinner to celebrate Barry’s birthday and it wasn’t even a major milestone (unless you are counting in hexadecimal, then it’s 40). Barry and Breana and their 6 kids headed home on Christmas eve (after an all-cousins laser tag outing), then on Christmas Day we gathered with my side of the family at my Mom and Dad’s on Christmas Day.
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Sounds bleak, doesn’t it? November can often be blustery and grey – flurries of ice pellets rattling the windows as Old Man Winter stretches and yawns after a long summer’s slumber. This November has seen some of that, but we have also had some fine clear days with blue skies in abundance. Certainly the landscape’s palette has had the yellows, reds and fading greens removed in favour of browns and muted gold, but in the thin, bright sunshine there is still plenty to admire.

Brenda and I spent three days this past week working in the country around Gull Lake, Lacombe and Ponoka. We were doing antenna upgrades for the rural customers of a wireless internet service provider. I wouldn’t say that it was glamorous work, but since my contract in the energy industry wasn’t renewed at the end of September, it helps to cover the mortgage. Brenda had started in on this project a week or so earlier and had upgraded the transmit/receive equipment at a dozen towers throughout central Alberta. This past week, we were upgrading the customer’s antennas and inside equipment. We visited 32 properties over the three days.

We were fortunate with the weather, apart from a morning long snow squall on the second day that turned the roads and roofs icy slowing our progress considerably. By afternoon though, we were back to sunshine and temperatures just above freezing. At one point between customer sites, we stopped at the top of a hill on Range Road 11 north of Township Road 432 in Ponoka County. While Brenda took advantage of half-decent cell coverage (2 bars!) to call in the previous upgrade, I took a few (nine, actually) pictures and created a panorama of the view:

I used the Microsoft Research Image Composite Editor to build the panorama (5300 pixels wide) from the still shots – quite a cool program, easy to use with some interesting features. Features like the ability to extrapolate to fill in the black areas:

There are a few funky artifacts like half fence posts and the trucks shadow disappears suddenly, but it is pretty interesting to see how well it completes the image.

In any event, on this day at least, it was anything but bleak.

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