Home Mike Cathy Photos Places Games Soccer

Intro Journal Work Play Cars Music SK

Intro 1998 1999 2000 2001

Another entry. I really should try to put up entries more often.

Anyway, what's new about our side of the world? Starting with myself, things have been fairly active. The biggest news is that over the past 2 weeks I have successfully taken and passed a soccer refereeing class, so I am now a fully qualified grade 8 referee! See, here's my badge to prove it :

This now means I can officially referee games in the US and even get paid for it. I'm not giving up my day job, though, as we're only talking about $20 per game or so. Nothing to get too excited about.

At work my present clients have extended me for another 2 weeks, so I won't start at Oracle until the middle of March. This is not too big a deal, as I'd like to get these Salem guys straight before I leave them. There's still plenty to do there, not just on the Financials implementation, but there are so meany old mainframe applications that are just begging to be rationalized and integrated in the Oracle software. Job for life, pretty much, and the new director there has made a few attempts to try to persuade me to join them on a permanent basis. Nae chance, pal!

Colin's soccer is going just the way we feared. They're really out of their depth here, but they still seem to be enjoying it. I just wish we had a couple of more players, as 2 dropped out. They played against the classic 'B' team last week, and were tied 1-1 at half-time. In the second half they just ran out of puff and lost several goals. We'll have to see if we can be allowed to add more players.

Cathy has been at the dentist getting measured for a couple of crowns. They get fitted this week, so that will sort her out. They're costing over $600, and that's just our share, the insurance covers most of it. Yikes!

The kids have been just getting on with school.Colin seems to have settled and is doing his homework. He's got HOT tickets for the past 2 weeks (Homework On Time), which is a definite improvement. Graham's reading and math are coming on quite well, better than he makes out.Catriona is still going to the Brownies, and seems to be enjoying it.

Cathy and are thinking about changing at least one of the cars. We're toying with either an SUV or mini-van. Given that we like to change fairly frequently, we're looking at leasing. We'll not be changing in the immediate future, but perhaps 4 months down the road. This might give us some extra money in our pockets for buying a house. We'll see when the time comes nearer.

This past weekend had the President's day holiday, so we had a 3-day weekend. Just more mucking about with computers and stuff.

Speaking of stuff, I'm trying out a new piece of software, Macromedia's Dreamweaver web authoring software. Previously I've just used a text editor to create this web-site, which is fine for a simple page like this. However, for a complex page (like the Acquire game page) it's an absolute nightmare trying to keep everything straight.Using Dreamweaver makes that page a snip to maintain. The software is not cheap, about $300, but I may just invest in it. One other reason is that I've got a board meeting for ake Oswego Soccer Club on Thursday, and one of the items on the agenda is the web-site. They may need someone to set this up, and may be willing to make some sort of financial remuneration. Could work to both our benefits.

Anyway, that's enough for this week