Updated Blog again - this must be a record!

Yes, I know, we should be doing these more regularly anyway, but for all of the people who keep commenting on how we never seem to update our blog anymore have now just been able to replace their commenting time with reading time :). Anyway... It is finally warming up, but Big White still has over 200cm base of snow to ski on, which is great, but the warmer weather is making it a little less powdery and more icy, which is not so good. Today they had @ 5cm whilst we were there tubing with the Goelsts, so should be good boarding in the next couple of days :). Average temp here through the days for the past week have been +10 to +14 one day! The nights get down to the minuses, but we are sound alseep, and as long as the central heating does its job, we dont notice at all.

Well, thats the weather - seems odd, but really is quite a large part of our lives over here as it changes so much - onto the people stuff.

The boys and Samuel and Jacob Goelst have all been having lots of fun, with late bedtimes and early rises, they are making the most of their time here together. Watching the Suite Life of Zac and Cody, playing Nintendo DS and club Penguin are all favourites. Weekends are great, and we have taken them to go snowboarding for the final night session for this season, and they all did really well. Nyah and Isabelle have been having lots of fun also, with plenty of "widdiggles" (wiggles) and Hi-5 to keep them dancing.

Andrew and Jacqueline took a couple of days out earlier this week to head to Banff and absolutely loved it. We kept their boys here and they got the opportunity to find out what homeschooling was like. They seemed to like it enough, though I am not sure they will be trying to convince Jacqueline that they want her to take it on when they get back to Tassie ;). Darlene and Terry have headed to Palm Springs for a couple of weeks, and lent us their car whilst they have been away. It has been such a blessing, and we have had the pleasure of dog-sitting Ollie. He is a funny little dog, full of personality and loved by all. The first thing Nyah used to ask for when she woke up was mum or dad, now it is Ollie, or occasionally "mitmey" (Brittany, Darlene and Terry's daughter). I am not sure if she will have separation anxiety when he has to return home tomorrow, but thankfully she has plenty of other people here to help take her attention off the fact that her morning buddy has gone. I am sure Ollie will be thankful of the rest going back home, as living in a house with so many people with lots of different games and noises from all the kids must be driving him insane (sorry Terry and Darlene if he is scarred for life!).

We managed to get onto a tour of Club Penguin this week also (thanks again to Darlene), and the kids all LOVED it! They all got free puffles (including the little girls) which they were stoked about (and Nyah sleeps with hers - yes Bart, her other bedtime favourite now has a companion). They also got to give them ideas for what they wanted to see in the game, and to amaze the staff with their vast knowledge of everything related to Club Penguin. Elijah was the only one who could tell them the actual day they started up (October 24, 2005), though he said October 25th, which was incorrect here, but being from Australia, it actually was the 25th in Australia when it started (which they had not thought of, so E was quite pleased).

Diabra got her hair cut yesterday (first one in 8 months) - yay, but the hairdresser wouldnt listen to what she wanted - boo, but it ended up looking great anyway - and the peasants rejoiced :). She has been doing the usual cooking up a storm for everyone here as she does so well, and teaching the boys. They have done their first project on Canada naming the provinces and tracing a map, with some lines written about things in Canada. Calebs reading and spelling are coming along well finally, and Elijah is also doing well.

Work for me has been going really well. Anderson Morgan Kelowna has been officially running since December 16 2008. Fred Brown is the man who will be responsible for everything over here when I leave, and is excited to be a part of the Anderson Morgan family. Since we have started we have had the privilege of performing a lot of non-core Anderson Morgan work, such as the largest audit of a data server power usage performed to date in BC, and assisting in a large scale migration of Exchange to Domino Server for a large international company. I have been quite surprised to find that the general levels of service in the IT industry here are atrocious, which is fantastic for us, as this is an area we pride ourselves in doing well. They also appear to be behind in their methods of support, and whilst they have the marketing side of things down to a tea, their follow through with actually achieving results appears to be lacking. Once again, good for us. I am sure there are exceptions to this rule, but the industry in general feels to be at the stage we were at in Australia about 5 years ago, which is insane. Since starting up, word has spread, and I have recently been approached by another IT company in Chilliwack asking if they can become an Anderson Morgan site, which is nice, but we shall see what they have to offer, and vice versa. Office space is currently elduing us as there are a lot of vacant offices on the market due in part to a lot of companies downsizing in the current economic climate, but agents dont appear to be willing to put reasonable offers in for spaces we have been looking at. In general they seem to be trying to keep the image that business is strong, and there is lots of competition for the space, but I have been actively looking for the past 3 months, and the same spaces are all vacant, with more coming up as companies downsize, so I am happy to bide my time to find the right place at the right price. So we continue to work from home and communicate via Skype and IP phones, which is working OK for the moment, but is not a long term solution as we get larger.

Well, its about time I went and woke Andrew up to play an obligatory game of Age 3 before bed, so I will sign off for now, and update sometime again in the future.