A Return to Blogging!

That's right, I'm back! It's only mid February and my second post of the year, what's the big deal?
The reason for my hiatus has been a mix of travel (to Calgary, Saskatoon, Smithers, and Regina), family related things, and a decomposing computer. Really, the excuse lies mostly with the latter reason.
My computer, fyi, was more or less the same one that my parents gave to me on my 18th birthday. It's had some parts replaced and upgraded, but for better or worse, the thing is just about 10 years old. For your horror, I'll tell you that the operating system (Windows XP) was running on a 10GB drive. As time went on I found myself deleting other programs just so it could run.
But yesterday Brad and I went out and purchased ourselves a nice shiny new one! By no means top of the line, but as I pointed out to Brad, at this point ANYTHING is a huge upgrade. And (surprise surprise) I was right! Where my old model sounded like I was operating an airnailer when it was thinking, this one is whisper quiet. The previous model would take a solid 5 minutes to start up, and this one is running in about 10 seconds. We didn't go for the 1 terabyte hard drive, but I think 500GB is far superior to 10, wouldn't you agree?
In all fairness, my computer did me well, it lasted through about a dozen moves, two years of College, and 9.5 years or blogging, gaming, photo editing, and general nonsense. A service will be held later this month.
So, the blog is back and I'll be posting photos from Smithers asap!