I cleared out a few month’s worth of pictures in anticipation of our upcoming Disney World vacation. Here are the best…

Summer 2010

Various pictures taken over the Summer of 2010. Disney World vacation NOT included - that will be later!

36 Photos

As expected, the auto-update to WordPress 3.0 from 2.9.2 was flawless, and took all of 30 seconds.

I continue to love WordPress as a blogging and simple CMS platform!

More volunteer work, but I like the results: I offered to help my local Little League out with their site, and did it all in WordPress. I used the usual suspects for plugins:

• All in One SEO Pack – very well done plugin for moving your site up in search engine responses.
• AWS Easy Page Link – I’m surprised this isn’t core functionality yet. I use this for easy linking between posts and pages.
• Contact Form 7 – along with gmail filtering, this is a great way of directing “contact me!” requests appropriately.
• NextGEN Gallery – good gallery, but in my humble opinion, still missing a lot of useful functions, like the ability to specify whether images in galleries should have descriptions below them.
• Page Links To - must-have if you want to have some menu items point to “nothing”, and other menu items point externally, or to some content.
• reCAPTCHA Form – well done anti-spam mechanism for Contact Me forms and comments.
• WP-Table Reloaded – very nice little Table creation utility.
• WP Google Analytics – you know… for gathering metrics on your site from Google…

All the graphics on the site are custom. I used “Function” as the base theme.

I’ve still got some “to-do” list stuff left-over, but the hard work is done.

Well – at least I’ m posting every month or so. But I have been busy. Here’s some of the reason why:

I was lucky enough to get into ‘Wood Badge’, which is the highest level of advanced Scout Leader training available. It entails two three-day weekends, and focuses more on leadership skills than outdoor ones. I’ve been to management training at work, so not a lot of this was new to me, but it was really interesting to see it all in the context of Scouting. I also learned a LOT about other aspects of the program that I hadn’t paid attention to, like Venturing. The most valuable outcome of the training was the contacts I made, frankly – my Patrol and the other attendees were fantastic to talk with about their experiences in Scouting, good and bad.

Still on Scouts, I decided to accept my pack’s leaders’ suggestion that I take on the Cubmaster position for the 2010/2011 year. I’m a bit trepidatious, only because things are really running incredibly well in the pack right now, and I don’t want to mess anything up. I’m sure I have nothing to worry about, because the leaders are all top-notch, and highly motivated and enthusiastic. We’ll see! I’ve got a bunch of ideas and projects (aka ‘tickets’) from Wood Badge I’m going to be working on in the coming months, and I’m sure I’ll be posting on the subject over the next few years (at least until Jacob crosses over into Boy Scouts).

Yours in Scouting!

P.S. For any Scout Leaders out there who are considering attending Wood Badge: do it. It’s a great experience – and feel free to get in touch with me if you’d like to talk further.

Jacob got a nice rocket kit for Christmas, and we spent some time over the last couple of weeks putting it together and applying a custom paint-job. We needed to buy a launch pad too, and so I got one that had a smaller rocket for the girls and me to put together. Today (the day after Mary Lou and I got back from our ‘grown-up’ vacation), we decided to launch them.

I got a great shot of Rebecca setting hers off. Jacob’s shot didn’t come out as well, but I still think his rocket looks really good. We lost the smaller rocket in the wind – it went VERY high! After we adjusted the launch location to accommodate for the wind, Jacob’s rocket came down in a retrievable location.

This was a fun little craft and science experiment for us, and we’ve already ordered a couple more rockets, and more rocket engines, for use this summer.