Calvin's Weblog

Halloween Party

Ah-kay - it's 9:52 (hooray for the time change!) - so it's almost like I got up and started doing stuff at a reasonable hour this morning, despite the hella-wicked halloween party last night... I think it was 3:30 when we got home? Or maybe that's just what the clocks said. We left pretty early too - as the party was still in full swing when we split. Anyway, on with the pictures!
Carole and I went goth for the night:

though if anybody asked, she'd insist that while I was "dressed up", this is how she always looks...

We took a few band photos before the drinkin' got really outta hand,

But before the witching hour hit, the night pretty much tuned into this:

and this:

and eventually ended up like this:

Special thanks must go out to Ron's Chili - it was an awesome treat at 2AM, and kept us going after all the metal madness... Wayne really should have tried some!

Ron's cover band, Beard Inc. was great:

and the peanut gallery seemed to have a rockin' time too... nice dress, Leon!

Wow! This is powerful - I hope it works!

5 days until the U.S. presidential election, and the campaigns have been relentless - but it's the least expected voices that are most poingient sometimes...
Take, for instance, Eminem. Today he released his new video for "Mosh" on the internet for all to download. This is a deep, powerful, and moving statement - very well done - and the message?
FUCK BUSH! Vote.

You gotta check this out - it's amazing. I love it. I got goose bumps.
Watch the video using RealPlayer
Watch the video using Windows Media Player

Ack! Dang! Easy come, easy go...

Story of my life... rediculous amount of hard work followed by a brief period of moderate payoff, and then blammo, it's all up in smoke.
Bands that write and record an entire album just to break up, a years worth of blog entries and thousands of scanned photographs stored on an unbackedup harddrive that fries, pets that die, jobs that don't pan out, girlfriends that dump ya, you name it, it has happened to me.
Fortunately though, I've never repeated the same mistake twice... well, until now.

Relax, Carole still loves me (I hope!) - but I DID manage to blow away the database file of the nearly 600 movies that I own. This ain't just a database of movie titles either... it was loads of information about every movie - image of the DVD cover, list of all the actors, description, you name it - all sortable, searchable, and 'borrowable'. Yes, that's right - my friends regularily checkout what new movies I have, then click the borrow button, and I lend 'em out. Um, well, until now. That was so much work!!!!

I'm kinda pissed right now. I blame it on my cold. I've had a cold for a couple days now, but it got pretty bad today, and I had to come home from work a little early - I was just coughing and sneezing all over the place - not healthy for everyone else... so anyway, my head's all plugged up and my sinuses are full, and I've got that aweful ears-popped, "help, I'm trapped in my own head" feeling - but since I was home I thought I'd be a good boy and backup all my websites. When that was completed, I cleaned up (read: deleted) a couple of 'testing' websites that weren't in use... unfortunately, when I deleted one of the sites, it automatically removed it's database as well... BUT, that database was a SHARED database that several sites were using... one of those sites was my "Calvin's Movies" site - sooo, while all the html content is still there, the database is completely gone. It took me about 6 hours a day for a whole long weekend to enter all that information...

...what do you think, should I bother doing it all again? Or should I get a life...

The end of the road

Another week goes by, and I finally find myself, between bottling beer and laeving for rehearsal, with a few extra minutes in front of the computer... oh joy! I can finally finish the blog entry about my roadtrip.
Ironically, the only reason I even bought the digital camera was so that I could get picture online and into the blog with a click of a button ... no scanning, no developing - and yet, it seems it's actually MORE work now, cropping, colour correcting, sharpening... ah well, we pay the price for technology don't we...

So this is how the last half of the trip panned out:
It was already about 5PM when we left the dam and headed back toward Hudson Hope. We knew that if we headed to Tumbler Ridge, it would probably be about dusk when we rolled in, but what the hey.... Tumbler Ridge is the town that was for sale a few years back ... when the mine shut down, the whole town closed up - how hard could it be to find a place to spend the night in a ghost town, anyway??? LOL, I'll get to that...
But first we passed through Chetwynd:

From there, it was straight to Tumbler Ridge, but my camera batteries died, so there are no pictures. It was a beautiful drive, and we actually even checked out a campsite by a lake, just before getting to the town, but figured we'd see what ammenities the town had first before hunkering down for the night. Wow. so much for the ghost town! Apparently, since the oil and gas industry has been doing so 'well' (forgive the pun) lately, the region has absolutely exploded with exploration - and as a result, every motel room, hotel room, and every place to stay was booked up by oil workers - a bustling community indeed! It's very modern, has great amenities, it's no wonder that the whole thing was bought up so quickly ...
So now that it was starting to get dark, we figured we'd plow straight through to Dawson Creek again, since it's less than two hours straight up a road we hadn't taken yet - by the way, that completes the big cirlce we had planned for the day...
Now, we had started to see a lot of deer on the road as soon as it got to twighlight, and I was actually SAYING to Tim "I've got to really pay attention to the road - as soon as it gets dark there are going to be animals ALL over the place" when we both yelled "Moose!!!!" as one jumped into the road about 50 feet ahead of me. Hitting the breaks as hard as I could, left about 10 feet between the hood of my car, and the mooses' kneecaps. Them suckah's are BIG! I then said, as we looked to the left and watched the moose dissapear, "You know, I'll bet more accidents happen when people just miss an animal and then they're still looking at where it's going, when more animals jump into the road from the other side..." Although, I don't recall if I finished my sentance, because Tim was yelling "Deer! Deer! Watch out!" - I hadn't even got back up to 50km/h yet, and I was stupidly looking left at the moose and talking, when 3 deer hopped up on to the right side of the road. More brakes, and another near miss.
"Okay, oaky! I'm paying attention now!" - that was one hell of a DARK and nerve racking ride. In 100 killometers, we counted over 100 dear at the sides of the road - fortunately there weren't any more close calls. Well, okay, there was one.
About a half an hour after the first moose incident, I saw that the taillights that I had been seeing off and on for about 15 minutes way off in the distance (maybe 4 or 5 km... they are long, straight roads...) turned to brake lights, seemed to shudder sharply, then stop. Headlights came into view, heading my direction, and they seemed to swerve and stop right where the tail lights were stopped. Then it looked like the taillights backed up a little, stayed still for a while, then left again. The headlight also headed toward me once again. About three minutes later he passed me, and flashed his hi-beams at me. "Do you think there are cops there?" asked tim "Or did he think you have your highbeams on?"
"No," I said... "I'll bet ya anything there are a bunch of animals on the road" - we'll just watch out for them. As we got near the spot where we say them stop, it was apparent what the hullabaloo was about ... a freshly struck moose lay prone in the very middle of the road. Head to butt, it must've been 8 or 9 feet long... I could barely get around it! Anhd this wasn't even a big one - t had no antlers...
Man, the damage that must be on that vehicle that was in front of me! We wondered... but as it turns out, when I finally caught up and passed him, it was a semi truck with a big cattle guard on the front. Other than some fur in the grill, no damage at all.
So maybe another 45 minutes after that, we were back in Dawson Creek and looking for a motel. Surprise, surprise. same deal as Tumbler Ridge - no vacancies! Luckily, the clerk at one of the motels phoned around until she found us a room- so we headed straight to the place she told us about, and checked in. Joy of all joys, it was kareoke night in the bar downstairs... and rather than sit in the room drinking beer and watching TV, we decided to go down and check it out. It was really rather fun to watch actually! Who'd have thought that there are only three types on music up north... Country, AC/DC, and Whitesnake. I must admit, that wasn't what I was expecting. Some people were really good, some were really bad, but in the end it was a pretty nice way to relax after a fourteen hour drive.

The next day, I filled up with gas (again) - and by the way, I totalled my gas bill for the trip, and it was $465. Yowza. At the gas station I also bought batteries for the camera. Of course, it wasn't until an hour later when I actually tried to take a picture that I found out that all the batteries I bought were completely dead. Dang. I did manage to squeeze a couple off though, by combining old half-dead batteries with one new half-dead battery.
We headed back through Chetwynd, then down toward Mackenzie.
Here are some mountains during that drive - it's kinda nice to be back in the mountains again!

And here's the Mackenzie claim to fame... Yes, you read it right, the world's largest tree crusher...

Well, there actually were a couple of other "interesting" things about Mackenzie, not the least of which is that they've got an IRLP node - that's the Internet Radio Linking Project - and while that might be self explanitory to people like my borther, to the rest of us, that means you can use a HAM radio to dial up the internet, then you can punch in the code for any other HAM IRLP site in the world, and blammo - you're instantly talking into your handheld radio in Canada and yet you're being heard over the airwaves in Australia, or South Africa, or wherever you chose toy call. Nothing so glamorous for Tim though, he just wanted to call a friend in Penticton... and he actually got through!!! pretty damn cool - from the highway, he's talking to a repeater 30 km away in Mackenzie, which is turning his conversation into digital packets, routing them through the internet to a repeater in Penticton, (or was it in Vernon? I forget...) but anyway, his friemd in Penticton actually hears him and picks up, and starts chatting, clear as day. A cool story indeed, but not the most noteable thing about Mackenize...

Okay, so how to begin... Tim had been driving for about four hours, and we finally pulled over at a rest stop, a mere 20 km before Mackenzie to stretch our legs and switch seats. I was trying to get a picture of a huge bear holding up a sign that said "Mackenzie, 20 minutes ahead" - but I couldn't get the camera to work (though it DID work half hour later for the tree crusher photo... go figure) so anyway, I had just buckled up, and pulled out of the rest area. I was going about 100km (yes, in a 90 zone, but hell... this REALLY IS the middle of nowhere.... we probably passed 10 cars in the last hour) and I had been driving all of about three minutes, when a car came over the crest of the hill in the distance. I wasn't sure if it was a cop, but I thought it might be, so I checked my speed, figured there was no way I'd get a ticket for going 98 in a 90 zone in the middle of bumfuk nowhere, so I ensured that my seed was steady as the (sure enough) cop came closer, then passed me. I look in my rearview mirror, and, you guessed it, he stops, turns around, and comes after me. By this time, I'm over the crest of the hill and he can't see me, so I make sure to slow right to 90 as he comes up behind me. for maybe another minute he just tails me and I'm thinking "okay, he's running my plates - he'll see that I haven't has a ticket in over 13 years, and he'll go away." - but instead, he hits the lights, and I pull over right away.
"Licence and registration"... blah, blah, blah. "You're from Coquitlam. What are you doing out here?"
"We're just taking this weekend to see some of the parts of this fine province of our that we've never been to before."
"And what's to see in Mackenizie?"
"Well, for one, we really just want to drive every road in BC, and we've never been here before - but also, I've never seen the largest lake in BC before, and I think everyone should do that at least once."
"Uh-huh." He walks off to his car, and comes back in about 4 or 5 minutes.
"Step out of the car please sir." I get out. "May I please talk to you back here, sir". He takes me back behind the car. First of all, I'm giving you a ticket for speeding. You were going 98 in a 90 zone." I flash him my best 'get the fuk outta here...' look. "Have you ever had one of these before?"
"Yeah, I haven't had any tickets in well over a decade though."
"Well, payment and dispute information is on the back. But would you mine sticking around a few minutes to answer some questions for me?"
"Sure, no problem - I'm not in any hurry..."
"Uh huh...", he says, looking at me skeptically... "If you don't mind me asking, what do you do that you drive a car like this?"
"I work for the phone company."
NO SHIT - his gaze turns to a glare, he grips the handle of his billy club and says "You freely admit that? You're not afraid that we're going to beat you senseless in the middle of nowhere for your lousy service"
"Um, " I stumble, "Should I be?" as visions of "squeal like a piggy, boy!" and "you's gotta purdy mouth..." popped into my head...
"What do you do for the phone company?"
"I'm a computer and network security specialist. I work with law enforcement - I go after bad guys trying to break into, defraud, or damage our networks or our customers"
"So you go after hackers? You're in IT"
"Well, I used to be in IT, that's where I started out, but now it's just security. The information security people go after hackers, I deal more with the telephone lines - you know, toll fraud, 911 calls, tracing bomb threats, protecting our assets, and the phone service in communities just like yours."
Convinced that I'm probably not trying to bullshit him, he losens the grip on his club and says "the reason I ask is that we get a lot of rich lower-mainland drug dealer types up here in their fancy cars, bringing drugs into our small communities. You... wouldn't... have... anything like that in your car, would you?"
"Geez, absolutely not - people come all the way up here just to sell drugs? Are you serious? What a waste! No, we definately don't have any drugs!"
"Okay then. You can go - just watch your speed, or you'll be getting a lot more of those before you get home." Yeah, whatever, I'm thinkin... back home I can pass a cop going 98 in a 60 zone and not worry about getting pulled over...

So anyway, when I got home and wrote my cheque to Victoria for the $108 fine, I printed neatly in the memo field "fine for driving a nice car through a shitty town". I really wanted to laugh at the cop and say "$108? Ha! I'll make that much before my first coffee break Monday morning!" - but somehow I figured that really wasn't going to help the situation, so I refrained...

Back on the road, and the foul taste of hillbillydom now a distant memory, we B-Line it for Prince George - um, with the cruise control set on 91km/h the whole way (there's still a little rebel left in me)

Tim bought another pack of batteries in P.G. when I filled up with gas again, so I was able to take more pictures!
First one, more mountains - somewhere between Prince George and Tete Jeune Cache.

Then sometime thereafter I slowed down to shoot some more deer (with my camera, silly!)

From there, we had a choice of a short jaunt to Jasper (No! Been there ,done that... full circle!) or a long jaunt through to Kamloops, then back to my parents for the night. We chose the Kamloops route, though it wouldn't get us in until about 11pm - yikes, another 14 hour day, and I drove all the way since Mackenzie...
I took probably another 15 pictures of mountains, but won't bore you with them... other that this one, late at night, somewhere around Blue River (where we live for a year when I was in grade one) - this is some sorta fire on the mountainside - the picture doesn't really show that, but it's still a cool picture - big fire!

Later that night, we started tuning in AM radio stations from all over the place - it was a clear night, and because of the phenomenon of AM, skipping off the atmosphere and bouncing around, we were getting stations from crazy places - we were making a game of it - trying to get station identification from the farthest away places... we got Oregon, Oklahoma, Salt Lake City, Montana, Seattle, but the coolest - though not the farthest, was actually getting NEWS 1130, the Vancouver station that I listen to every morning on my way to work for the traffic and weather report... their signal is so weak that I can barely get it in Coquitlam, and yet, here, a thousand miles away, we were getting it crystal clear - and we got it for HOURS too! Really neat.

But anyway, I'm tired of typing, and we're finally almost there - the rest is just a drive in the dark, south through Cache Creek, Lone Butte, Kamloops, then back through Chase to Sorrento where I had a GOOD nights sleep.

The next morning, a measely 400 (or so) km and I was back home.... ahhhhhhhh....

Slight (actually it was MAJOR) change to the blog

Today, some dickweek spammer dumped over 600 comment entries into my blog, advertizing a casino ... so I've spent all day upgrading and modifying the blog so that you now have to sign up and be trusted in order to post comments.
Oh.. well, that was after I banned the 175 IP addressed he was using to spam me, and after manually deleting the 600+ comments... what a loser!!!!!!

Anyway, what's going to happen now, is that you'll have to sign up for a TypeKey account - all this is, is a trusted middle-man (in this case, the company that makes my blogging software) and then after you're authenticated once, I get an email to aprove your account, and from then on, you can post all you want, just like the olden-dayz ... except this time, it only takes a username and password... you don't have to type in an email address and URL any more - so it'll actually save everybody time in the long run... well, you have to setup your profile once in TypeKey, THEN you save time.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but NOT having this system just cost me a days work, so if this prevents losers like today's Mo-Fo, then I'll be happy.
See what a chore it is keeping up this blog??? And y'all thought it was just typing off the top of my head and scanning pictures, didn't ya...

Oh - PS : Please, everybody - just post a comment on this entry right now, so that you get signed up, and I can aprove everyone once. Just say "Hi." - then we can put all this behind us. THANKS!!!

Northern Roadtrip part 2

Okay - so where'd I leave off? Soemwhere around Fort St. John, right?
Well, I had mentioned that we wanted to do a big figure eight, but on wrong turn in our first 2 kilometers set us into an entirely different path - oh, we still saw all the places we wanted to see, but the path was more of a big "G" than an "8". From Dawson Creek, we ended up on the Alaska Highway which took us straight to Ft. St. John. That where I got my picture with the big metal bear.
As it turns out, Ft. St. John is the most north I've ever been. It beats Hyder Alaska by about a half hour of driving straight north.

From Ft. St. John we headed out to the south west, next stop Hudson Hope, however, this particular stretch of road through the Peace River Valley was (other than the Rockies trench, of course) the most scenic and amazing landscape of the whole trip - unfortunately, the photos just don't do it justice...
Picture this though... you're sriving through the flat prairies forever, with nothing ahead of you but more flatness. As far as you can see to the Horizon, it's flat. And this is looking WEST mind you. Then, all of a sudden, you come to a Valley - a MASSIVE valley - far below you. You never saw it on the horizon because it's below the grond level, but it's MASSIVE beyond scale - almost like a prairie grand canyon. And down below, as you look down from the plateau, are all the mountains. You slowly wind your way down, down, down, out of the prairies - and find yourself back in what we southerners know as "British Columbia". And as you look around at all of the mountains that now surround you, you recall that at the top of the verry tallest one, is the prairies. Until that day, I never realized how high the prairies were.
There's no way, really to show what I'm talking about in pictures, but I'll try...
Here's the first point where we came to the end, and got the first glimpse of the valley:

This picture is blurry because my digital camera is on maximum zoom... and you STILL can't even grasp how big this valley is...
After driving another 10 minutes down into the valley I stopped to take this next picture, to show that I'm still not even half way, but again, the scale really can't be seen...

Oh well, NEXT time I'm there, I'll bring a really good camera with a telephoto lens.

After winding down into the Peace River Valley, we finally came out at Hudson Hope. Photo Op! There's nothing like a really big tire to make ya wanna have your picture taken...

So now, we're only 33 kilometers from the W.A.C Bennett Dam. How cool is that? I get to see (and drive over) one of the largest dams in the world, which happens to be at the mouth of the largest lake (Wiliston Lake) in British Columbia, and the largest 'man made' lake in Canada.
Here's my brother walking down to get a better view of the dam:

And here's a look fr om the other side of it:

Now this time, I was a little smarter at trying to represent the scale in a picture... to appreciate how huge this damn is, check out the picture below:

Ther eare two things to notice in this picture - the first is the blue-gray stuff in the far background, very middle of the top third of the picture - that's one of the the largest hydro stations in the world. The second thing to look for is the tiny black dot that's JUST to the right of the very middle of the picture. That's a huge tunnell that we saw construction trucks driving into. Ther eare also buildings down there at the mouth of the greet water, and about 30 vehicles parked in the parking lot. Want proof? Check this out... first the blue grey field- see the control tower? It has three levels of offices at the top of it:

And then the tunnel -

See the buildings? They're like airplane hangar size, as you can probably deduce from the comparative size of the dumptruck that's just heading onto the bridge at the right of the photo. Now go back to the first picture and checkout the size of that 'dot' tunnel again... pretty big frikken damn, eh???

Okay - so we're done with the dam and off to Chetwynd, then Tumbler Ridge. But that'll have to be tomorrow...

Road trip updated

Hi,
I worked on more pictures today and added them to the entry about my northern roadtrip (below), but that entry's getty pretty long, so I've decided to start a new one for the second half of the trip.

But not right now.
Soon.
I promise.

Idea Logs of Hate ???

Okay, I kept quiet when Bush said "People are talkin' out on them internets", and I didn't make a peep about "Anybody want some wood?". Admittedly, I DID crack a joke when he said "The Ter'rists are constantly looking for new ways to hurt Americans, and so am I." but I keep respectfully silent (okay, I cringe a little) everytime he says 'nucular' and 'Korean Peninshla' - but last night, when he said he'd hunt down anyone with an "idea log of hate", and the cutaway of Senator Kerry looked like he was fighting to keep from breaking into histerical laughter, I couldn't help but to picture what must have been going through his mind...

Idea Logs of Hate?

3,643 KM later...

I'm back!
Did ya even miss me?
Saturday morning I set out on a journey to traverse the roads less travelled by.
At noon, I was already in Salmon Arm, where I picked up my brother. From there, we set off for Revelstoke. Of course, we had both travelled those particular roads before, but we were on our way!
First stop was Three Valley Gap. Not by choice, there was road construction and we had to wait a few minutes - so it was a great opportunity to take this picture:

From there, we continued on to the Rockies - they came into view shortly after Revelstoke.

Finally, at Lake Louise, we were in the heart of the Rockies. Only a short distance to the south was Banff, but we had been there...

so we headed north to Jasper, straight through 'The Trench' - a perfectly flat passage, straight north, through the middle of the Rockies, to Jasper. I've been to Banff, I've been to Jasper, but I've never driven the Trench before ... and it was amazing! There are glaciers, ice fields, magnificent mountain ranges,

and an unbelievable amount of wildlife. We saw mountain goats, mountain sheep, Caribou, deer, bear, moose, elk, you name it... even got a few pictures!

I had planned on spending our first night in one of the National Park campsites (since the park employees are on strike, the park pass and camping site are free!) but irony of all ironies, the only time we saw snow on our entire trip was right at the campsite I had marked... it was in the shadow of a glacier, and it was cold...like, daylight, and below zero. We decided the drive the extra hour and a half to Jasper and get a hotel. It figures, not a kilometer past the campsite, there was once again no sign of snow, and it was about 8 degrees out.

At Jasper, we checked in to the Astoria Hotel. If anyone's familliar with the vancouver establishment sharing that namesake, fret not... this Astoria was much nicer. The pub in the loby was smokier than any bar I've been in, in the last 5 years, but hey... we're in Alberta now - things is diff'rent...

There was a bit of confusion with the alarm clock. We set it for 8:30AM, but didn't realize until we were already checked out and finished breakfast that the person staying in the room before us must've been from Saskatchewan or Manitoba, as it was an hour ahead. Yes, I know that by my BC set watch, all of the clocks in Jasper should have been an hour ahead, but THIS particular clock was an ADDITIONAL hour ahead... so when we finally got into the car and started off toward Hinton that morning, it was quite a surprise to see that the clock in the car said "8:14AM" (yes, it was still in BC time). Tim says "uh, didn't we get out of the room at about quarter after nine? "
"Yeah..." I reply...
"But that's right now by this clock... we packed up, went for breakfast, drove around, walked around, took some pictures.... that must've taken about an hour..."
"Um, yeah.... you're right... so that means we actually got up at 6:30 BC time? No wonder when we got back from the bar last night and the clock in the room said that it was past one AM we said "Where'd the time Go!!!" - it was really only eleven! That's hillarious!"
So anyway, that means we got a really good, early start on the day. No harm, no foul. I even had time to get my picture taken with a bear:

It wasn't too far 'till Hinton, where we only stopped to fill up with gas (77.4 - getting cheaper! Ironically though, that was the price on the pumps here in Vancouver yesterday). From Hinton we then turned north and headed up through Grande Cache, and finally hitting Grande Prairie shortly after noon. The weather was beautiful the whole time. In Grane Prairie it was about 18 degrees, but perfectly blue skies. I was really impressed with the city - it was much bigger than I had expected, and unlike some northern BC cities (like Prince George) it was very modern. New buildings, nice restaurants, it actually struck me as a really nice place to live ... of course, I didn't get to see the 8 month winter, so my impression was probably as good as it could get.

I took a picture of the Grande Prairie Regional College, which was designed by the famous architect Douglas Cardinal. I saw a whole doccumentary show about his amazing works, and how he entirely designed the National Museum of the american Indian in Washington DC, but didn't even get credit for it after a whole bunch of really lame American political crap - Canadians never get a break!!! Anyway, in that same show they talked about this amazing design and engineering feat that he pulled off in Grande Prairie in the 70's, and I was really psyched to see it in person. This ain't a good picture... lookup Douglas Cardinal for cool examples of his work...

So we ended up having lunch in Grande Prairie, and quickly set off to the west, back toward BC, but still trekking northward... First town after the BC border was Pouce Coupe.

From there, it was less than an hour 'till Dawson Creek.

Dawson Creek was a nice town, but I must admit, I was expecting more from it. It's really bustling right now because of all the oil and gas exploration in the area, but unlike Grande Prairie, it didn't strike me as a really "thriving" community.
Here's a picture of the Dawson Creek 'roundabout', which is also MILE-ZERO of the Alaska Highway:

We decided to try a figure eight roadtrip from there, since we still had lots of daylight hours ahead of us this second day... First, north to Fort Saint John (where I got my picture taken with another Bear),

then southwest through the Peace River Valley to Chetwynd, then south to Tumbler Ridge, and finally back up north-east to Dawson Creek again, where we'd spend the night. Of course, a few twists and turns and side trips few a couple of kinks into that plan...

...this entry is not done - I'm working on it slowly...

Also, I'll be adding photos in later - after I'm done all the typing...