After two long years I finally took the time to put together a new picture collage for the home page. (I think it was Deanna who told me the one from 2007 was getting kind of old.) I used to construct them by hand using Adobe Photoshop Elements which was really a pain since I had to find the pictures and then manually cut and paste them all together, and get them in the right spot so it’s fits together. It used to take me a couple of hours to get it all done which is why I had been putting it off.

But a while back I started using Google’s Picasa as my photo catalog and they have a cool collage feature so all I have to do is select the pictures and hit the make collage button. It does all the hard work of puting the pictures together and making them fit together just right. Took me less then half the time to put this one gether then the other ones.

This year they had an after school chess program at school that Alex participated in. On the last day of class the parents were invited to come and watch and then be there for the end of year awards ceremony.

I took a couple of pictures of Alex playing and getting a trophy which I posted to the web site. He received a medal for trying to teach Andrew how to play and then a trophy for his tournament play. The teacher really liked Andrew and gave him a medal as well since he was able to name a bunch of chess pieces. Since that day he’s been picking up the chess set and tells us that he ways to play but I keep trying to direct him to Candy Land or something that he has at least a chance of playing without direction.

Andrew turned 4 a couple of weeks ago and we had the traditional family party at the house and a week or so later we had a party with his school friends at Boomerangs, the bounce house mania. He had lots of fun and I updated the website with the pictures.