Summer is winding down and the kids are getting ready to return to school next week. On Friday, we attended the open house at the school and met Ben and Delaney’s new teachers. We also dropped off their supplies. One of the cool things they offered last year was a program whereby you can pre-order your supplies from Staples and they deliver them directly to the classroom. They offered this for Delaney’s class, so we did it. It was awesome, as all of her supplies were sitting neatly on her desk when we arrived. Delaney is very excited about getting back to school…..Ben, not so much!
I spent most of last week in San Diego for my monthly program reveiws with the contractor. While I was away, Karen and the kids all got sick with a nasty head cold. I think they may have gotten exposed to some germs while we were all at the hospital in Charlottesville with Karen’s father. Eeveryone is still hacking and coughing and wheezing….except me. Karen has been miserable and can’t breathe through her nose. We are hoping it passes soon! Hopefully I can avoid it, but I am surrounded. Karen’s father is back home after spending a few days in the hospital. He appears to be recovering well from some surgery that he had.
I continue my work on my new blogs, although most of my time has been devoted to the hockey blog I am developing, http://nhlpens.com. It is starting to look pretty professional and I am starting to get some traffic visiting it. Stop by and take a look. I have spent a fair amount of time setting up the Rosters page, with pictures of the players. I have also added a cool video server application that you can watch pre-selected videos on (see the Video page). I am hoping more people will come and start making entries in the forum. I am trying to make it look as good as possible, so if you see something goofy, let me know!!
This website continues to get a fair share of hits, including some attempted spammers. Fortunately, I have been able to keep the spam off of this website using various automated tools and security checks. Since inception, one of my spam blocking tools has blocked over 5,000 attempted spam posts to this site. Another one has blocked almost 18,000 attempted spam posts to the Live Shoutbox on this page. This site generates about 40-60 unique visitors per week. Many of them come in through internet web searches for various people listed in the Tobin Genealogy pages, or also looking for the Tobin Coat of Arms. I also have a lot of hits for people searching for my brother Eric’s work, which is another reason I think he needs to have a web presence (and I would be more than happy to set it up and maintain it for him). In fact, I was contacted last night by a very good friend of the family that I hadn’t spoken to in years who found my site by searching for Eric’s paintings in google. I also get a lot of search hits to my hockey related articles (especially ones that include Sidney Crosby). That is one of the reasons why I started http://nhlpens.com, because I think I can probably generate a lot of traffic and possibly a little revenue. It also combines two of my hobbies (web page creation/maintenance and hockey).
With everyone being sick, we haven’t really made any plans for the extended labor day weekend. I have enjoyed just working on my new blogs and getting some rest after a week on the road. We did go out to dinner at a local restaurant that we tried a few weeks ago named O’Meara’s. It is a decent place and the food is very good an reasonably priced. The place is split between a Irish bar which takes up 3/4 of the place and a non-smoking dining room which occupies the other 1/4. The best part of the restaurant is that it is never crowded, so we can get right in and it is fairly quiet so you can hear each other talk. We may go see a movie, however, I don’t even know what is playing!