Today I had to go renew my car insurance. It's never a fun thing to do, but it has to be done. Now I'm all set up until next January.

I got email from my lovely J.S. in Ontario today which makes me very happy! Everyone in Ontario is freezing their butts off right now because it's about -24°C. I feel bad for them. Winter is almost always harsh there. Right now I'm trying to imagine what it must have been like for the first European settlers in eastern Canada. They were fur traders. When they experienced their first winter in Ontario (Hudson's Bay) they must have seriously considered packing their bags and catching the next boat back to France.

It's a lot warmer here in the west. Out cold snap seems to have traded places with the East (Ergo my symapthy for the Ontarioites). It's raining though, and I wanted to get out and do some photography. Instead I went to a restaurant for breakfast and then I came home and worked som more on my web page. It's almost ready for presentation. I'll keep you posted.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, I'm going to drive out to White Rock and shoot some film. I'm going to bring my photojournalist friend J. along and possibly his friend D. (another freelance photojournalist.)

-Ciao!

It's warmed up a little here now, and the snow is being replaced with rain. I've slipped on the ice about 10 times now.

This Sunday I have plans to go on a photography treck with my friend J. and some of his friends. I hope the weather will be nice. Yesterday they were forecasting sun on Sunday, but now the forecast has changed to rainy. I hope the meteorologists are wrong this time.

Tonight I've been working on my new web page for my photography business. It's been a long time in the making, because I keep making changes. I've very picky about how it will finally look. The part I've been working on lately is the image portfolio section. I've included several of my favorite images and I spent most of this evening reformatting the image files and adding my copyright information to each.

When it's almost ready to publish, I'll post a sneak preview link here. One problem I'm having though is deciding how I'm going to host the web page. At this point I have it stored in my Shaw account web space. I own a domain name which I purchased through Network Solutions and I want to use my domain name as my website address. I don't want the "Shaw.ca" address on my business cards or website address. Network Solutions offers several types of web page hosting, but I'd rather not use their templates or pay them $40.00+/- per month for hosting. So that's something I'll have to work out soon.

Hi!

I haven't been posting here very frequently. I guess was getting really caught up in the whole holiday season. I hope that everyone who reads this has a great new year! I really appreciate it when you take time to stop by and check out my journal. I'll try to keep it up to date more, now that I'm not as busy.

I had a really nice Christmas. I spent Christmas Eve. With my parents in Langley (about 45 minutes from my home) and then I spent Christmas day with my best friend L. It was really nice because we just watched T.V. and movies all day while we cooked hours'dourves.



We also made some really funny looking gingerbread men. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a pastry chef of any kind and neither is L. We bough the cookie dough at Safeway and we used cookie cutters.

L. had various candies and things that we could decorate our gingerbread people with.



I used candies and nuts:

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About two weeks ago, we had a little skiff of snow and it started to get pretty cold:



But this last week it's been really cold. We had a snow storm yesterday and we got about 15 to 20 cm of snow in the first few hours. I was at work shovelling it like crazy. We couldn't keep up. I brought my little Canon G2 along and got these pictures of the nasty road conditions:



















The good thing is I got off work early that day, so I wouldn't be caught in the deluge of bad drivers on the icy roads.

I spent my New Years eve. At my friend A.'s place. It was kind of a quiet new years this time around. Here he is with one of the two kids that was there:



A. likes photography too and he snapped a few photos of me with my camera while I was there.





Here's a picture I took of his fish "N.":



Well, I'd better get off this computer now and do some Yoga. I'm trying to do it every day. It's hard.

Bye for now!

My friend "J." (the photojournalist, not my lovely J.S. from Ontario) is originally from Winnipeg (pronounced 'Winter Pig') where it is always winter, even in the summer.

Canadians that are native of Winnipeg are acclimatized to withstand temperatures around -70°C. Today Jack was wearing shorts again, but understandably so; it was a balmy -8°C.