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On March 8th we got a fair
bit of snow and not many people venturing out. In the second
picture the snow plough had only just moved through doing a first skim
on the road and you can just see it in that picture...
We've actually had more
snow this year that the past couple of years.
On 3rd April we had a
Scottish Week event in Toronto at the CN Tower which replaced our normal
Tartan Day dinner. At the event was Linda Fabiani MSP and the
Provost of Glasgow.
This event was paid for by the Scottish Executive and instead of paying
for tickets everyone was given free access but asked for a donation to
the Scottish Studies Foundation. We raised something in the region
of $45,000 which was exceptional.
My thanks to Doug and Pat Ross for the above pictures.
(l-r) Neil
Fraser (former Tartan Day Dinner Chairman), the Hon Donald S. Macdonald
(Scot of the Year 1996), the Hon. Alastair Gillespie (Scot of the Year
2003), Pipe Major John Wakefield.
A Video of the event is being produced and I'll bring you
a copy of it when it arrives.
During this time frame I've been working on getting the
outside of my house finished by doing a bit of planting...
As it happens as all this was going on
various neighbours decided to tidy up their front lawns so all in all
the neighbourhood is looking good :-)
And as you can from the above picture we've
been getting severe thunderstorms with significant hail thrown in.
I think this is the first time I've seen such hail in Chatham of this
size anyway. Quite a lot of damage done in the area.
I decided to get one of these green audits
done on my house so a chap called round with all his gear and proceeded
to check out the house...
And these last two pictures are the images
taken to show air leaks around the windows and doors.
I also took the opportunity to replace my
large carpet with a smaller one in my living room to show off more of
the wood floor...
Got myself a new mobile phone with a built
in 5Mb pixel camera. It's a Sony Ericsson Cybershot 5.0Megapixel
camera and Mobile phone combined...
So on one side you have the phone and on the
other the camera. The garden pictures above were taken with this camera.
Essentially I only have a mobile phone for
emergencies so it's rarely switched on but I do take it with me all the
time. I saw a review of this unit on a news program and I thought
to myself that for me this would make a great deal of sense. I
only take my big camera with me when I know I'm going to take pictures.
That means it's usually not with me when I just go around locally or to
an event where I don't intend to take pictures. I have found that
when I don't have the camera with me I do find the odd time when I
wished I had it with me as a great opportunity presents itself quite
unexpectedly. So now I have this phone I won't be caught out
without a decent camera.
During this time frame I also attended an
event at the British Consulates residence to promote the Highland and
Islands University and also an event organised by the University of
Guelph where we got speakers from Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, the
USA and Canada. It went very well indeed.
As to work... a lot has been achieved over
these past few months and it's been decided to move the business from
Kentucky to Mitchigan. With the move we hope to double our
bandwidth for just around a 20% increase in fees instead of doubling it.
We hope to make the move around August. We've also made a start at
adding a community site and so our forums are now up and we've added
some 300 Arcade games. The forums software also has picture
hosting, blogs, rss feeds, radio and TV and live chat. We've more to do
as there are other facilities we'd like to offer.
As tomorrow is Canada Day I also read with
much interest a substantial article comparing the USA to Canada from
MacLean's magazine and thought I'd share it with you. It's not that I'm
trying to compare America with Canada but more that the statistics are
interesting for both countries.
And so that's it for this period in time.
I'm really just continuing these diary events to remind myself of the
highlights :-) |
