I can't believe that I've got less than a month to go on vacation already! Time zips by so fast when I'm at home; course, we've gotten a lot done since I've been back: dr's appt for me for blood work (I'm fine), health card, trip to Ontario including stopover in Montreal for family and IKEA, stuff unpacked, storage unit cleaned out, new desk and home office set up for both of us and wedding planning underway. Today is a lazy saturday morning, J is sleeping in after working the night shift at the hospital and I'm trying unsuccessfully to get Dreamweaver to connect to my ftp server! We've finally decided to do something constructive with my website, the first page will be basic info about us with links to a photo gallery of our adventures and a wedding page with a map of the location (once we find one) and links to hotels and other services in the area. The wedding isn't until 2010, so there is plenty of time to plan...

Got an old lake freighter you don't know what to do with? Make it into a dock!



Believe it or not, there are more than a few of these 'old boat docks' around the Great Lakes. This one, at the Algoma Steel Plant in Sault Ste. Marie, ON, is one of the few that is largely untouched. There is a more famous one in Sarnia, ON, named the Sydney Smith dock, in which the boat in question, the Sydney Smith was rammed in a collision underneath the Blue Water bridge just upstream, and it drifted downstream and came to rest at the river bank. The damage was apparently too bad to refloat so they cut the superstructure off, filled it up with cement and paved it over. It's part of a public park/wharf now, you'd never know there was an old ship under it!

The first time i ever set foot on one of these ships, I told myself that I would be off the boats by the time I was 50. But what to do then? I've always been interested in web design, right at the moment, my bookshelf out here (how I am going to get these books home is beyond me) has 2 books on HTML/CSS, 1 on Javascript, 2 on Visual Basic, 2 on Photoshop, and 1 on Illustrator! And I'm pleased that I remembered that I am still registered as a student, cause I just scored the Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Master Collection which retails online at Adobe for $2499 (!!), for the amazing student price of $499!!!! There is more software in this package then I know what to do with, but it's a step in the right direction.

TFP always manages to come through for me in a pinch.

When I go out working, I take along my satellite receiver to watch tv through my laptop. It saves having to buy a small tv, and I can record onto my harddrive. The other night I got the first episode of True Blood on the Movie Networkm and wanted to burn it to DVD so I can watch it later with J. But when I went to burn it, I discovered that after my most recent Vista reload, I hadn't reloaded Nero! So, I figured that I would give the Windows version a try. Bad mistake. It was so slow, I went for supper and when I came back 30 minutes later, it was still only at 0.8% completed encoding! So I fired up the internet (which I get over my cellphone and usb cable), and went to the technology forum on TFP and straight to the open source thread. 1 minute later, i discovered Deepburner, had downloaded it, and 25 minutes later, I had a completed DVD! TFP always comes through in a pinch!

Since I never know what to do with this space (and I tend to internalize things rather than externalize them), I've decided (since I found some really great and free software), to shoot panoramas of some of the more interesting places that I go to in my Great Lakes travels. Here is a part of Chicago that most chicagoans probably have never seen, the Calumet River at the KCBX coal dock: