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musings of mark since 2001

   Nice to hear that everything in Calgary is going just fine for Father’s Day visits and phone calls after making what I thought was the last call from the kids, (the youngest hasn’t checked in yet). Dave and Kelly are pretty much acclimatized from the sounds of it, it’s about 25 ° and feeling like the dog days of summer to them while Dad is chuckling that they used to think 35 was just “warm” when they lived in the Okanogan.
   On this side of the Rockies out in the ocean it was a beauty of a day, not too hot and plenty of sunshine with the most amazing colour everywhere, the flowers and plants and the island are into full bloom and bucks with new velvet are everywhere. In this little corner the hummingbirds are prolific, the lane is well named.
   A most wonderful day for myself as well, the time flew by taking a long walk and having a nice long afternoon with a really nice intelligent woman as we walked and talked and explored the island. Good advice from my buddy over at the farm to pass along too: the “hang in there” principle of the island as part of the afternoon was looking at overpriced property for sale. Simply amazing homes here though, for me the most dramatic home was literally, attached to a sheer wall of rock.
   Gotta run. Just killed a mosquito and noticed the screen door isn’t quite shut, oops.

   The Around Bowen Island race started with a cannon shot precisely at 10:00am and it was an amazing spectacle watching 60-70 boats round Dorman point just meters apart and sail past our sundeck. After the race Doc Morgan’s put on a huge BBQ with a couple live bands that had everyone dancing. The prerequisite rain shower for these types of events happened late, well after dinner and everyone just moved under the big tent or back to their sailboats for the evening so a good time was had by all.

   Not getting around to updating the blog lately, just too much other fun stuff to do in the summer and the garden beckons every day. When it’s nice outside, the news of the world just seems to be the same old conflicts hashed out over and over again and don’t want to go there. Father’s Day coming up this weekend, we’ve got ton’s of Hallmark cards at the pharmacy but nothing seemed as suitable as just giving him a phone call Sunday. He’s up at the lake fishing finally I’m sure, but this Sunday is also his granddaughter Jessica’s very first birthday and so it’s a call to Calgary instead.
   My new neighbor turns out to have quite the green thumb, and I’m getting lots of tips about the garden. She spotted a plant that had some sort of creature burrowed into the top most leaves and laid larvae that I rescued and her own patch of dirt is looking great with borders of Marigold.

   Great new sites to work on coming up, the one for the municipality is quickly hitting the back burner with Bernice’s son coming over to the island sometime in the next week or two with a package of goodies for me to put together for his site. Should be a fun one to do, he’s a world renowned photographer so the graphics should be brilliant
   Not quite the same site, but one more interesting to developers is for the Sagebrush Group whose president is Kurt Conrad. He’s still heavily into SGML, XML, and the W3C so I get to expand my horizons a little. Definitely going to make this site as table-less as possible after uploading my own new and improved table free version of my own pages this morning. The home page was a little tricky to getting it to look right and older Mozilla browsers aren’t recognizing the width value of my navigation elements yet but I haven’t played with it much. Kurt’s using Opera, so that might be kind of interesting, we have one of the Opera developers on the evolt.org list so there’s help available if I run into any CSS or XHTML bugs, looking forward to it!

   Summer is no longer just around the corner, it’s here! Temps getting to the mid 20’s today and nothing but sunshine to the end of the week. New neighbor has moved in upstairs, we went to the nursery and picked up some vegetable starts for her own corner of the garden. Lots of weeding out there for me to do, nice way to keep busy when the eyeballs get fuzzy from looking at this computer monitor.