Welcome to summer

Our little home looks always nice when the summer starts with the green around it. We bought this place in 1995 and have enjoyed it ever since. It suits us...

The beauty of your twenties....

A good friend of Mark is going a year to New Zealand. Jared played soccer with our son Mark for many years in Niagara and then they lived in the same house for the five years while they both studied engineering at University. Jared is spreading his wings and is going to try out the life down under in the land of the Kiwis. He is already on the ice-hockey team of Queenstown, a sport I am sure not too many folks in New Zealand play (the land of the mighty "All Blacks" rugby team)...

Tonight it was nice to have Jared over for dinner and wish him safe travels and good luck. It brought my thoughts back to when I was 25 and left Holland for a year trotting the world. And our daughter Hilary wants to go badly again after just having been in Australia for a year with months of travel on the way there and back in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines....

Office renovations

Our offices are a "no go" zone for the next four months while they break out and rebuild....

And during these few months we are one big happy family in a packed temporary space....

Visit to BCIT

Today I enjoyed a visit to BCIT, the British Columbia Institute of Technology. They have an excellent "catch phrase" nowadays: "Education for a complex world". My tour guide was their VP Academic, Tom Roemer with whom I have been done educational consultancy work in Mozambique (Tom speaks Portuguese from living and working in Portugall for two years early in his career). Tom took me to a variety of excellent applied technology training areas of the institution.

From a training home for energy efficiency to a training installation for high work stations such as for example oil rigs. And from a training hall for large building heating and cooling systems to a simulation laboratory for chemical production plants. Some pearls of our applied technology training in Canada and part of what is one of the strongest institutions in this field in Canada.

The simulation lab has specialized training modules all developed by BCIT staff in cooperation with industry experts. The simulation programs run on special servers and offer the students and trainees the opportunity to learn how to work with industrial control panels.

Jim (on the photo at the right) has worked at BCIt for more than 40 years and still loves his work as if he had started last week. Lucky students to have instructors like Jim!

Tsawassen and Burnaby

After the days in Tofino on Vancouver Island we took the ferry from Victoria to Tsawassen to visit our friends Val and Steve. They have a lovely home on the ocean and this was the view from their house towards the island group in front of Vancouver Island + also towards Vancouver with in the background the Rocky Mountains and Whistler.

After a nice weekend with Val, Steve and friends I moved to Burnaby to visit colleagues at BCIT, British Columbia Institute of Technology.

Few days in Tofino, BC

Mary joined me yesterday in Victoria, BC, at the end of the annual CICan conference (Colleges and Institutes Canada). Today we drove five hours north-west on Vancouver Island to the small town of Tofino on the Pacific Ocean. We are staying in a neat cabin place for two nights before visiting some of our friends who live in Vancouver during the weekend.