I was just sent a link to a Yahoo! news story about 10 foot Afghan marijuana plants and I figured I would let people see some more from Afghanistan. Siobhan’s childhood friend Dwayne is over there now and his family setup a small site with some pics, including some large marijuana plants.
Go here to view!
Enjoy!
Rene
Thought I’d put a couple more videos online.
Here’s Nicholas enjoying Dancing!
I finally have some updated pictures on my blog. We had a bunch of weddings this past summer and with the little guy around it has been hard to get some pictures online. Last night I took an hour or so and uploaded a bunch.
The first wedding was Donald and Natasha. We couldn’t stay around too long as we only had a babysitter for a few hours. I only got a few pictures at this wedding.
The second wedding we went to was Quentin and Judy’s. These pics were uploaded a while ago but I forgot to post about them. Congratulations guys. I wish I had more pics, but I left the camera home for the wedding ceremony, which was outdoors and really nice.
The third wedding we went to was Tim and Chrissy’s. They got married down South and came home to celebrate. They had a reception at the Vancor on Thursday night and a party at the Kelly Ranch the next night. It was a good time.
The Saturday night following Tim and Chrissy’s party we were also invited to another wedding reception. Kevin and Dena also got married down South and then came home to party. Unfortunately we never got to make it to this reception as we were pooped from the last two nights and we had to leave town early the next morning. I dropped over and chatted with Kevin for an hour or so before the reception started. They had the Legion decorated with palm trees and everything. I think we missed a good time, but those are the sacrifices you have to make sometimes. Kevin and Dena came by our house the following week after we had got back home and visited for a while.
In August we had another wedding. Craig and Andrea came home from Alberta and got married. We hauled our camper to St. Alban’s and set up in the Legion parking lot for this one. It was pretty convenient having a bed and a fridge in the parking lot of the reception. Thanks to the people living next to the legion for letting us use their electricity!
Our last wedding of the year was Danny’s and Angel’s. This was a big one for us as it was held in Grand Falls-Windsor and I was standing for Danny. Siobhan was also asked to stand but had to turn it down as we figured it would be difficult for us both to be standing while having a five month old with us. It was a nice wedding. The pictures came out nice with the fall colors in the background. Unfortunately we all almost froze while getting them taken. It was cold and a little windy. The reception was perfect for us as our room was about a 30 second walk from the reception and it made it really easy to look after Nicholas and to take turns between watching our boy and being at the dance.
Congratulations everybody! And just a little advance notice to anybody who might be reading… Siobhan and I have a date set for our wedding as well. August 2nd, 2008. There will be more details on this in the near future as we figure out how we are doing it and where!
Rene
I think I finally have all the toys I want. Next it’s time to start buying them for our little man!
A few weeks ago I decided to buy my Nephews dirtbike for Siobhan. It’s a Suzuki DR-Z125L. It should be more then enough for her to beat around on. It needs a little work, a couple bearings are shot, the rear axle is bent a little and the carb was full of crap. My brother cleaned the carb out for me and got the bike running. I have bearings on the way and the axle might be still usable. I don’t have any pictures of the bike yet (*GASP*) but you can be sure to find them here soon enough!
Last Sunday we took a trip to Stephenville to bring Siobhan’s parents out there and to check out a sport bike that someone was selling. I have been looking all year for the right bike for me. I wanted something yellow, green or orange, 600 ccs, at the right price point and I wasn’t buying a new bike. I had found a few bikes, but they were either more then what I wanted to spend, or they were sold before I got a chance.
I finally found a yellow 1999 Honda CBR600 F4 in Stephenville that met all my wants. We got to Stephenville and I drove the bike back to Siobhan’s uncle’s house that evening with lots of smiles on my face! The next day I drove the bike from Stephenville to Grand Falls without a problem.
Pictures of the CBR600 can be found in the Gallery!
Next year I am guessing we’ll start seeing mini-sized “toys” in the yard for the little man in the house!
Rene
We had our first trip to the cabin at Peter Stride’s Lake since Nicholas was born.
It was a beautiful week and we had lots of fun. The weather was great and Nicholas had his first ride on a quad and he finally got his feet dirty. We also found out that he loves to watch the Canadian flag flying in the breeze.
While there we all had a Christmas in July party for Ivan and K, who were in Alberta working this past winter and missed Christmas at home. There were gifts for the kids, and lots of food and drinks for everyone.
Pictures of our trip can be found in the Gallery.
Later!
Rene
Conne River Powwow 2006 has come and gone. We had a beautiful weekend with sun and hot breezy days. No flies around to bother the people and the breeze kept everyone from melting away to nothing.
As usual the food was great and there were many different people who came by to check out the sights and sounds. We spent Thursday evening, Friday afternoon, Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon at the Powwow grounds and we enjoyed it all.
Pictures of this years Powwow can be found in my www.conneriver.com gallery.
Enjoy!
Rene
I have a bunch of pictures put in the gallery again… check them out as follows:
New Camper – 2007 Conquest 275FBS
Nicholas up to June 30th, 2006
Nicholas’ First Camping Trip
Enjoy!
Rene
Today is my first day at work with a summer student. I’d like to welcome John Nick to my office and I hope you can learn something from me.
Rene
We bought our Honda CR-V back in September of 2000 just before the 2001’s hit the lot. We worked out a deal with the dealership and had our CR-V delivered to us a little while later.
Before our CR-V’s factory warranty was up we purchased a 6 year, 160,000km warranty from Honda for around $1200. It turns out to be money well spent.
On March 17th, 2006 we had a bunch of stuff replaced under the warranty. Front passenger upper control arm (ball joint was gone), front links and bushings, rear links and bushings and both rear trailing arms. Total cost to me would have been around $1500 but with the extended warranty I only had to pay the deductibles which ended up being around $150. We also replaced both rear struts with a set of aftermarket ‘Gabriel’ struts from CarQuest as these weren’t covered under the warranty.
Last Wednesday night, March 29th 2006 on our way to St. Alban’s we started hearing a new knocking noise. Only very occasionally at first, but within 10 minutes the CR-V started knocking with every little bump. I figured a rock must be stuck bouncing around the driveshaft. A couple days later when it stopped raining I got the CR-V up on jack stands and crawled underneath. No rock to be found but I did noticed oil leaking from the power steering rack. We then checked the fluid level and it was down a little, but far from being dried out. After pulling off both front tires and not finding anything loose or bouncing around I called Honda and setup an appointment for another visit.
Today Siobhan took the two hour drive to the dealership and had the CR-V looked at. It ends up that the driver side ball joint now needs to be replaced and the power steering rack has to be replaced. On top of all this one of the two NEW rear struts has already leaked out. The rack can’t be air shipped for some reason or another so we have to wait until at least next week for it to come in so that means another trip to Gander (approximately 240 kms each way) to get the work done. Keep in mind that during all of this Siobhan is just about ready to give birth to our child (due in 11 days). Our CR-V has about 147,000 kms on it and therefore only about 13,000kms of extended warranty left. The upper control arm and power steering rack are both covered under the warranty but I will have a little battle with the struts for sure. I hope that anything else that may go wrong does soon so we get everything replaced before the warranty is up.
Honda is being very good about all of this and the dealership is quite accomodating. Hopefully all will be good in a week or so.
Rene
I finally got the time to install Linux on my home PC last night. I choose Ubuntu Linux (Linux for Human Beings) 5.10. The install was relatively painless. I had to do the disk partitioning on my own to setup a dual boot system so that was a little more advanced but if someone wanted to set it up on a empty hard drive they shouldn’t have any issues.
This morning I got up and decided to have a little play with Ubuntu to see how easy it was to use. The first thing I notice is that Firefox (web browser) was an older version. I wanted to update it. When using Windows, I simply went to www.mozilla.com, clicked on the download link, ran it and the update was a simple matter of clicking next a few times.
Not so with Linux. The download was easy enough. I saved the file to my desktop. Now what?
First of all, what’s a .tar.gz file and what do I do with this “Archive Manager” program now that’s I’ve double clicked on the Firefox file? The file had a .tar.gz extension that I recognized as a compressed archive, much like .zip files in Windows. I have used Linux many times before, and I have a SmoothWall Linux based firewall at work that I configured and have made many modifications to, so I realized that this update of FireFox might require some console action. Here’s where the problems would start for almost everybody who is a Windows user.
I then visited the www.ubuntu.com site, found the forums, and did a search for “update firefox”. When I found the information I was looking for my jaw almost hit the floor.
Here are the links I found:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FirefoxNewVersion
This one is flawed from the beginning. Picture a Linux Newbie reading this page. The first thing they are told to do is “sudo apt-get install libstdc++5”. OK, what the heck does that mean? Do I type is somewhere? This page then goes on with many things you are supposed to ype, but makes no mention anywhere that you are supposed to type this stuff in. Even if someone realized they were supposed to type it, where do they type it?
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=137243
This one is a lot better. It actually explains what to do, which program to run in Linux and it explains what each command does. It is still quite scary looking to Linux newbies, and unfortunately for me, I didn’t find it until after I went through the step by step method in the first link above. Fortunately I didn’t need to worry about all the steps as I didn’t have any settings that I needed moved over to the new Firefox. Unfortunately, many newbies probably wouldn’t realize this by looking at the instructions.
There is also another method that I discovered that might be easy for newbies, I haven’t had time to try it out yet, but it sounds promising. Automatix can be found at http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=138405. The instructions for installing Automatix are on this page as well and it seems to be very easy.
So to all those that preach the Linux gospel, please realize that this OS needs to be more user friendly! It shouldn’t be this hard to install applications.
Later,
Rene
edit: I tried to install Automatix following the instructions. Right away I got a permission denied error message. I had to add a sudo before the first command so that it now read: “sudo wget http://beerorkid.com/automatix/automatix_5.7-3_i386.deb”
edit 2: Automatix is the answer! With two lines entered in the terminal I had a program installed that gave me a simple way to install new software (that was supported by Automatix). The two lines were:
sudo wget http://beerorkid.com/automatix/automatix_5.7-3_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i automatix_5.7-3_i386.deb
Be sure to check out the thread on Automatix linked above!
edit3: I think this comment that was left sums up what my title states pretty good:
“That’s all I got out of your last post”
Posted by Danny at April 4, 2006 02:13 PM