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I said I wasn't going to do it, but I did it anyway.  I said I wasn't going to let this blog rot after working hard to create it, yet here I am at the end of August with no posts since June.  But to be fair, it was a busy summer.

July started off a bit hectic, starting off with Cruise #2 (for me) aboard the Queen Mary 2.  It was both better and worse than my first time out on the QM2, but it was still a good time (who can have a bad time aboard a cruise ship?).  I took mom this time, and I think she had a blast.  Here we are in Halifax.

The food on board was decent, and I managed to catch high tea pretty much every day.  Mom got to see the Planetarium show, and she did a bit of senseless gambling.  And I got my ice cream ;)

After the cruise, I was back for a week, a week in which my work PC was completely uncooperative, so the work I had planned to get done didn't, putting me behind.

The following week began our annual three-week holiday to Temagami.  This time we had two weeks with my mother-in-law, and one week with friends from Frederick, MD.  I finally got to climb the Temagami Fire Tower.  The view was amazing.

This was our first year having a permanent solar power system, and it worked flawlessly.  Even though we only have a 40-watt panel (which will be upgraded to 75-watt by next summer), it was able to handle all of our water pumping needs, as well as charging laptops, phones, and my battery drill.  My goal is to have a collection of 18v power tools and only have to run extension cords from the generator when I have to do some really heavy-duty work.

By the time I got back to work at the beginning of August, I had a ton of work to do.  To be honest, it took me a couple of weeks to get my coding head back on, but fortunately I had a fun project to get me back into the swing of things - a web tool that I had to reverse engineer using only the database, a results page on a remote server, and nothing else.  It actually went really well, and I think the new version of the tool is a lot nicer than the one it replaced.

That's one huge project out of five that's behind me.  The rest might not be so much fun, but I plan to get the rest of my webteam involved.  Afer all, what fun is it if you can't spread the misery, right?