Family Update

We bought a house. We took possession of it May 14th and had most of our stuff moved in on the 15th. It is a beautiful little house. We both love it a lot. Slowly but surely over the last week, we have been getting our stuff sorted out. It is slow going, I don't remember having this much stuff in our old place but I guess it was all stored nicely. We still have a lot of miscellaneous stuff at the old place still. Mel's scrapbook room is still full and my computer room still has tons of random junk that seems to collect around computers, semi important stuff that is only important every 3-5 years but really great to have when you need it.

I spent 3 hours digging out the dandy lions on my new front lawn. I thought I had them all, but the next morning some new flowers had opened up letting me know that I had missed them the day before. Looking at the lawn, I wouldn't have expected it to take so long to dig them all up. I had figured an hour tops but boy was I way off.

I left gas in my lawn mower over the winter and that is super bad for small engines, so now I'm planning on taking out the carburetor and cleaning it out with dad's help although it seems like it might be a little beyond us both. I really don't want to buy a new lawn mower, but I might not have much choice. I wouldn't mind a lawn mower with a bag on the back of it, but still, I would rather have the money.

Work is going well, we'd love to have more grad formals than we do, but other than that it seems that people have ordered sooner this year than they did last year and on top of that we're getting the orders back to people faster than we did last year too. The pictures are looking better than ever, after a couple of grad seasons taking the photos goes more quickly and I felt a lot more confident in the studio. We have this information that we collect from the grads, basically to be able to connect them to their photos. One piece of information that we have is an email address. Unfortunately we told them that all we would use it for is to email them proofing information and then later to let them know that their order is ready. I really would like to use it for a third time to follow up with people that haven't ordered by the end of July. The boss really doesn't want to use the email addresses for a follow up because it isn't one of the things we said we would do. I remain tempted. The boss says that six or more years ago, they would phone all the people who hadn't ordered by the end of the summer to warn them that he was updating the price list at the end of August. I argued that a phone call is much more annoying than an email. Next year I'm changing the policy up front.

Last week, there were 7 streakers from one of the local high schools. The ran through the lobby of a hotel here in Medicine Hat and then through some portion of the mall. The local cops decided that it would be a matter best left to the school admins. I can't say that I disagree. In any case how it gets handled would vary wildly from school to school, on vice principal said at his school they would be out no questions asked. As it stands after a little community service and extra hours at the school the offenders still got to participate in their convocation ceremony. I didn't really understand the full impact of the situation until today I was photographing a kid from the same school and had to ask if he was one of the streakers. He said that no he wasn't and that everyone he meets asks him if he was one of the streakers. Every guy from the entire grad class must be getting bugged about that and I can only imagine how long it will continue.

Anyway, I guess that's my update for now.

-Gary Milner