Father Stan presided over our marriage, and was a faithful, earnest priest who brought God’s word to his parish in Vermilion, Alberta with a reverent love for Christ. He was also a gentle person, a giant teddy bear of a man. His funeral will be on August 15th in Edmonton, at St. Joseph’s Basilica, and his ashes will be sent back to Poland following that for interment there.

Also, there are some pictures of us enjoying a chance snowfall in late May:

Update: And now there is also an album of photos from our tour through the new Mazankowski Heart Centre in Edmonton.

More on the way soon!

First up, there’s a bunch of photos that I took when Grace and I met our friends Sharon and Dave for a walk around the Alberta Provincial Legislature back in early January. The Leg’ always has a beautiful display of Christmas lights and ice sculptures up at that time of year.

Next up, I’ve started a kind of “omnibus” album of pictures of our friends from St. Joseph’s College — this will be a collection point for photos that I can’t otherwise categorize. There’s not much in there at the moment, but I expect it will grow in time.

Finally, there are some photos that Grace and I took whilst on a walk in the river valley in March.

I’m presently uploading the pictures from our trip to the West Coast (Vancouver, Vancouver Island…) in March of this year, but as there are a few hundred of those it will be another day or three before I’ve got anything to link to from the main page.

We’ve no less than six weddings to attend (well, five now — one was last weekend) between now and the middle of August, and Grace is a bridesmaid at one of them. On top of that, and on top of our normal working lives, we’ve got to get the apartment ready for our little one, which means boxing up some things and moving some furniture out into storage.

It doesn’t sound like much, but believe me — it’ll keep us busy!

Two legs, two arms, four chambers in a little heart…and a lot of attitude, apparently. Proof positive that this really is our kid.

Grace is now into the fifth month of her pregnancy, and we’d just like to let friends and family know that both she and the baby continue to do very well.

That’s right! Grace is pregnant, and we are excitedly looking forward to the birth (probaby in October) of our first child.

“On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of the new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in the semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn. ” - G. K. Chesterton

(stained glass image from Austin Avenue Methodist Church, Waco, TX)

(click the image for a slightly larger version)

“Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.” - G. K. Chesterton

(icon of the Blessed Mother and Christ Child by Ade Bethune)

There’s just one problem.

Something happened to the first disc, and as a result it wasn’t finalized. What finalization does, in DVD camcorder parlance, is “closes off” the disc and readies it for playback in a home DVD player or computer DVD-ROM drive. It’s a common step to omit when one is filming something like a wedding — you should theoretically just be able to swap a disc out after it fills up and finish recording the event, and then go back later and finalize all the discs you used and be done with it.

That’s not what happened with the wedding video, unfortunately — something went wrong, and the unfinalized disc, while quite obviously full of data, doesn’t recognize more than the first 10 minutes of footage as being present when played back in the DVD camcorder used for the recording.

That’s bad.

What’s worse, of course, is that the disc isn’t finalized — that makes it unreadable in most DVD-ROM drives, which means that even manually extracting the data isn’t feasible.

Or is it?

Enter ISO Buster.

This handy utility is saving my butt. Not only does it enable my work PC to read the contents of the DVD, but it has actually found and extracted most of the lost video segments. There’s about…well, I would guess there’s another 10 minutes of footage that I have to recover, some of which could theoretically be left if it had to be. Some of it absolutely needs to be pulled off the disc if at all possible…although at least I was able to recover the exchange of the rings (the vows will hopefully be recovered in the last two files I have to pull off the disc).

I’m not out of the woods just yet as far as getting this video back is concerned, but I just wanted to stop and mention, in brief, a handy utility for salvaging data off of corrupted and damaged DVDs. Not exactly the sort of thing everyone has a pressing need for…but hey, if it helps someone out of dire straits, it’s worth mentioning on that possibility alone.

Still, this is going to be a lesson for me. Next time I need to tape anything, I’ll go and buy one of these.