All,

Another week has gone by. We are having the most gorgeous weather imaginable. Crisp clear nights and warm crystal days. It tends to be foggy in low areas in the early mornings but that's OK. We live above that level.

Not much has happened lately. Sue did her audit in West Van this past week and now she has another 'home' audit this coming week. She is doing Whistler. Don't anyone tell because it will is a secret until they walk in to the unsuspecting branch on Monday morning.

Just bought 3 more blueberry bushes (Ha Ha). Just not sure where I will plant them. Too bad it takes a couple of years for them to start producing. There are Fall crocuses out here. We have them in the back yard, they are about 3 times bigger than the ones in Ontario. And local strawberries are into their second fruiting of the summer. They have a double season. Cool.

Poor old Tracy is just about stone deaf now. I can walk up behind her and yell 'cookies' or 'car ride' and she does not react at all. She has to take her cues from Yogi as to when to bark and where to look. I think that's one of the reasons she wines at night, she doesn't know where we are. Her eyes and ears seem OK and she still wants to be the boss so that's good.

Ev and Ed have been in Vancouver for the last few days. They have been on tours etc and seem to be having a great time. They are here again for the weekend and then are heading to Vancouver Island for the week. The dogs miss them when they are gone, they seem to view them as some sort of 'grandparent' material. Tracy has no problem ordering them around and Yogi has Ed trained to let him out for a dump whenever he needs one.

The CPU chip and mother board on Ryan's computer fried so he has had to rebuild the system. He is now running an AMD 1700 chip with 256 mg DDR SDram on a mother board running at 266mz that can boot from the CD as well as the Hd and floppy. I have every right to be jealous and I had to foot the bill for the parts. He also popped in a CD burner so now he owes me big time. The jerk!!

I've been working on a job site that is going to be a rich person's estate. I'll be there until winter. The first building you see when you drive in the laneway is the spa. I thought it was a mansion. Then you see the actual mansion. It would make Bill Gates envious. You could land an airplane in the living room. All this on unstable swamp land. There is no place left in Whistler to build estate properties. They can blast 'normal' building sites for size houses out of the sides of rock cliffs but to get several acres you only have swamp left to work with. The carpenters can't keep anything straight as the whole structure keeps shifting. That is normal there. It's simply taken for granted. If you have multi millions to spend on out doing the other estates, you don't care about long term durability. Hard to get used to.

Have a good week.

the doug