Charlie is one year old!

And here he is! He's so active that it was hard to get him to sit still for his birthday photo. He's 23 pounds now and is a delightful member of our family. Loves people too much to be a regular at the store but the day will come.

Recession? Well - we're down a bit but not so much that it's a worry (General Motors wishes they could say that). I think that in many ways the economic downturn has helped us - offsetting the fact that people truly are spending less money. For example, if you can't sell your house and can't afford to take a vacation to the Bahamas then maybe you'll stay home and fix the plumbing, paint the living room, build a fence, stain the deck, and so on. We benefit from other people's home projects.

And speaking of projects, our website host company - Expiry - recently did a change and "upgraded" simple webpages such as ours (www.dunsmuirhardware.com) to a "new and improved" version. Translated, that means our webpage was deleted and we had to do it all over again. The new one is much more complex and we've spent hours getting back on line and finally are there. We didn't need to be doing web design in July - our busiest month of the year. It truly is a nicer deal - we have pages for photos, specials, links and so on, but doing it has been an exercise in frustration. Help pages for amateurs like us are total giberish! Professional web designers probably zip right through it but I look at it and wonder, "They want me to do what?" Anyway, take a look at it and see what you think. It's a work in progress and your suggestions will help us make it work.