Blair's Blog

Steven, Mark and I took a little road trip this weekend down to Lethbridge to visit with my Aunt Marg and Uncle Jim. It was meant to be a family trip, but unfortunately Alyssa came down with some kind of stomach bug and wasn’t well enough to be going anywhere.

The impetus for the trip actually began about 6 months ago when we asked my uncle, who is quite an accomplished watercolour artist, if he would consider painting a picture of the Australian outback for us. We wanted a bit of artwork that could be a focal point of our basement and we’d sort of drifted to a red/brown colour scheme that reminded us of the palette of the Aussie bush. (We lived in Australia for 2 years in the 90’s and Steven was born in Sydney). Anyway, Uncle Jim agreed to take on the project and we provided him with some photos we had taken and a arm-wavy description of what we’d like to see and how big the picture should be.

Fast forward to 3 weeks ago and we got a call from my uncle saying that the painting was complete and we should set a time to come down for a visit and to pick up the painting. Once it was clear that Alyssa wasn’t up for the trip the boys and I headed off to Lethbridge, arriving Friday evening.

Saturday we had a lazy start to the day the went out for lunch with my uncle, 2 of my cousins and their boys. We spent the afternoon swimming at the pool at the Lethbridge Ramada and then had dinner with my cousin Drew, his wife Cathleen and their son Liberty. Had a real nice visit with them and the 3 boys had a great time playing computer games and Lego. We stayed at my aunt and uncle’s place over night and drove home this morning through the tail end of an overnight snowstorm that dumped a couple of inches of snow across the prairies from Vulcan all the way to Calgary. The driving wasn’t great, but it didn’t stop the boys and I from stopping for some photo opportunities.

Anyway, the new painting looks pretty good hanging in the basement above the fireplace – I know that we’ll be enjoying it for many years to come.

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Me and my dad have been spending the last few weeks doing some rock tumbling. Well we actually started about a year ago but the drive belt broke and it did not get fixed for a long time. It was very fun doing this project. It was especially fun to take out the rocks on their final stage, they looked so cool! Here are some pictures.

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Plain English:

Sorry for our absence over the past week, but internet ne’er-do-wells attacked our computers and I had to sort some stuff out before I could put the website back on-line.

The Geek-splanation:

Bad, bad script kiddies and spammers!! Bad! Go to your rooms – no supper for you!

The last 10 days have been exceedingly frustrating as the site has been down due to a rather nasty email based attack on our servers. The attack was actually against our mailserver, but it was difficult to sort out what was really going on, so the webserver has been down while I analyzed mail and system logs to try figure out what was happening.

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