Matts' Birthday Party

Cooper's First Fishing Trip

Uncle Toad and Aunt Maaike took Cooper fishing to Lake Whitaker.

Ran my first marathon, only 5km but we made it, my running buddy decide to sprint to the finish line and left me behind. I finished 7th in my age group, not bad for my first attempt at running!

my special bird

a few weeks ago I had an Indigo Bunting come visit, it only stayed for a days and I haven't seen him again

Carly's trip home

Carly and I just before heading out to a wedding ceremony the afternoon of Age's party.

Age's birthday party

Carly and Samantha at Age's party. Samantha must have been real tired to sit on a lap that she wasn't familiar with!

More Jenna...

Canadian copyright laws bringing change

There is currently big change going on with Canadian copyright laws that the conservative government is trying to push through. This will change the legality of many normal things people do (and its not just about file downloading). Michael Geist has written a series of articles about how it will impact everyone in day to day life.

My view of this is how big music and movies make their money. Right now if you buy a CD you can rip the CD to play on an iPod. You cannot easily do that with a movie because movie's are encrypted. The content industries want you to buy one form of a song to play on the computer, one for the iPod, one for your CD player. You will put in your music and the device will 'phone home' to make sure you have permission to play this song on a Tuesday afternoon (maybe your song license only lets you play it once a week). A bigger problem with this is when they disconnect the server that the music phones home too because the format is old (this happened with Microsoft). The songs you bought try to call home, no longer can and so now refuse to play. Too bad, buy them again in the newer format. You can't hack them either, they're encrypted and to break the encryption by this law is illegal.

The other thing is tv broadcast flags. When VHS came out there was a big lawsuit because you were able to record a movie on TV. Big media lost, you are allowed to record and save the shows. The new copyright law will now change it. With digital tv (US has now shut down all analog tv and it's coming here) it's encrypted. There is a little content flag in the signal which says if you are allowed to record or not, how many times you could watch the recording, what equipment you are allowed to use and if the recording will delete itself after a month. These are all against your current protected fair use but now the new copyright will make it illegal to break the encryption. The content industry will hide your fair use behind encryption.

The music industry will claim to maintain fair use but it will be entirely at their discretion.

Michael Geist has a page about what you can do.

From 2368 Slo-Pitch Road - An Update - The Boys

Helping daddy with the deck.

This jeep can handle this hill.

In fine soccer form.

I just fed the fishies

Check behind before backing up!

Opa and Hudson.

Watching my big brother play soccer.

Mom ad Hudson at Cooper's first soccer game.

Port Dover on Friday the 13th

Jenna Rose

Hello, my name is Jenna Rose Huitema. You can see me with my very proud parents Jamie-Lynn, and Rick. I was born on June 11, 2008 at 10:08am. I weighed in at 7lbs, 5oz...and everyone says i'm a healthy happy baby. Can't wait to see all you real soon.

New foal at Age's farm

Age's mare had a foal on Friday evening during a thunderstorm.

Catching a Swarm

Here is the swarm in the branches of the tree above the hive. There must be hundreds of bees here who have made a new queen and subsequently left the hive with the old queen to start a new one. We hope to capture this swarm and put it into a new hive box to start a new hive. Swarming is a common occurrence but this is the first time we have experienced this.
Mike and Age watch us walk towards the tree where the swarming bees are located. Marie and Aukje were also there to watch and take pictures.
Johnny lifted Bert and I up in the tractor loader to reach the swarm of bees.

Shaking the swarm into the beehive and hope that we have the queen.

Johnny, Jack and Isabel's birthday party

These three were so excited about their birthdays that they couldn't look at the camera!
Jack and Matty
Lindsay and Dominic

Wyatt and Jericho
Stacey and Jakob

Lindsay and Samantha.

May flowers

I'm sure most of you have seen these flowers, but they (our wedding tulips) have finally achieved full bloom! It's just too bad the squirells at 90% of our plantings...

Shawn's birthday party

Kyle looks entertained by Mike and Richard.


Shawn and Monique's new deck was done just in time for the party!
It was a nice sunny day with a cool wind.

Shawn had a very unique birthday cake in the shape of breakfast!

Flooding

Because of the rain and melting snow the creek that runs through our farm overflowed its banks and the bottom half of two of the hives were under water with another hive tipped right over.



When the creek level went down we were able to go and have a look at the damage. Surprisingly there were still bees in all three hives although the hive that was tipped over didn't have many bees that survived and it will be surprising if any of the hives survive. Luckily we still have three other hives at our farm that weren't affected by the flooding.