On Monday I taught my daughters' pathfinder group how to use GPS devices. On Tuesday, I did a brief overview of GPS's with some of the Young Men and leaders at church. Last month, I purchased two GPS receivers for the 7th Ward for just this purpose. I got the encouragement to do this from attending the advanced training at Impeesa last summer. I used the lesson manual they gave me and set up a course for the girls. They were really excited about it and had a blast. I'm more excited now about the geocaching event we have planned for February with the Young Men and Young Women of the ward.

I've made a change at work recently. I'm in a new development group working on the replacement for our customer management and billing system. I started with maintenance on the source code repository (using Subversion) and then got involved in the reporting component of the IUM application. IUM is a product from HP called the Internet Usage Manager. The idea is to gather records from various devices we use (for telephone calls, Pay-Per-View, Internet logs, etc.) and use one application to process and store them for later use (like billing).

So this week, I'm at the HP office in downtown Calgary in the Petro Canada tower, learning how to use IUM.

We held a birthday party for my Dad this weekend.  All 10 of the children were there, as well as a few dozen of the grandchildren.  My primary objective was photographing the whole thing.  It's the first time in years that we've all been together for a family portrait.  The pictures are online here.

Brad and Jeanette's wedding was at the Cardston, Alberta Temple at 9:00 AM.  As is usual in LDS weddings, the sealing ceremony was simple and beautiful, with a small number of witnesses.

After the ceremony, I took some shots of the couple in front of the main entrance.  The weather was snowy with a light wind.  The temperature was around -18 degrees C.  We had missed warmer weather by a couple of days.  It got even colder the next few days, so this was still good.

The first outdoor shots were quick.  There were no flowers in these pictures because they wouldn't be able to withstand freezing.  Jeanette had a short-sleeved dress without much to keep her warm.  Brad was cold too, but at least he had a suit coat.  For cold weddings like this, I might want to invest in a warm white cape for the bride - probably fleece or something.

For a Halloween party, I made some sugar cookies that looked like severed fingers. Some of my friends couldn't eat them because they were too disgusting looking to pick up. The brave ones said they were tasty!

The recipe for the fingers can be found at http://www.britta.com/HW/HWr.html#fingers . I've reproduced it below with some of my observations.