After 13 years, I decided a couple of weeks ago (clearly I’m a little slow) that I’ve been paying Smugmug too long. Smugmug is the site that stored all my pictures, I would upload a picture there, and either share it over email or create a blog posting on this site and point to smugmug to display the image. All told over that time I’ve probably given them over $2,000.

As I now have my own servers, I no longer need to pay them. I’ve been in this position for quite a while (around 5 years) so it’s taken a long time to make this change.

To move everything, I had to re-write my website from scratch! This took a couple of weeks, and I now have a site (this one) that’s very light weight, easy to maintain (for me) and it points to my servers for all the pictures.

I should admit that this was a ton of fun, I had to learn how to write my own wordpress theme and then carry out a ton of testing. My old site was a free theme that I slightly modified, this new site is a brand new theme that I created. I also made this version of the site, mobile aware, so you can view images on your phone (which amazingly didn’t work before).

In addition I created a few plugins that assist the site. The slideshow on the homepage, the gallery functionality, the popup windows on each blog image (if you click on them) and the view counter on the side bar are all new and written by me . Incidentally, the number of views on this site is legitimate. This is quite amazing to me and means that over the last 13 years over 1.6 million people (or bots, let’s be honest it was probably bots) have visited my site.

If anyone comes here and notes an issue with the site, please do let me know (either leave a comment on this blog posting or email me at Tony Seeley. While I tested it for over a week, any developer will tell you the worst person to test code is the one that wrote it! We tend to use the software as we intended and don’t find as many bugs.

Anyway, enjoy the site and look for more pictures of Colorado in 2026. I will try to post more than one or two postings next year.

We are so proud of Abi. We just got back from San Diego where we saw her graduate Magna Cum Laude from San Diego State University (SDSU) with a Batchelor’s Degree in Kinesiology.
For Abi, it’s a couple of months downtime before she heads to Fresno State University to get her doctorate in Physical Therapy.

Lisa, James and I had a wonderful weekend, lots of sun, sea, food and drink celebrating with Abi, her boyfriend Aidan and his family, and friends and family from Washington State and England (Thank you Nikki and Craig and Tania and Manesh for coming so far).

She’s now over halfway there, just 3 more years to go.

I took the camera and captured some pictures of her around the university and down on the beach. SDSU is a really pretty university with lots of white stucco buildings with Spanish tile roofs, makes a great backdrop for graduation pictures.

Here are a few shots (from the many I captured).

Again, congratulations Abi.

Every once in a while my friend Steve Downing and I go out on a motorcycle ride into the mountains. Steve is a bit of a local expert and I just follow him and enjoy the sights.

The other day we headed out into a new mountain pass and got to see the fall colors start to appear. Loads of cars had pulled off the road to capture a picture so we stopped too.

The picture I took is below and it doesn’t do the scene justice. It was BEAUTIFUL! It was also a wonderfully clear day with a blue sky and the yellow in the trees just popped.

We suspected that it would look even better over the next few days, but a storm came through and it probably took a lot of leaves with it.

Anyway, I loved the picture and thought I’d share.

Well I promised to post some pictures of the back yard (garden for all you British folks) when it was finished.

The work took just over 4 weeks through some incredibly hot weather. It was over 100°F on some days (38°C) so we kept an ice cooler full of drinks and snacks available for the guys.

The first week was spent prepping and marking out the garden, the second and third was putting down all the pavers adding the irrigation and lighting and the fourth was rock, plants, grass and mulch.

It’s funny, when you see the plans and then look out onto the mud pit (that it once was), you couldn’t really imagine that everything would fit, but I have to say the designer did an amazing job and the contractors who built it followed the plans perfectly.

To say we are delighted and love the garden would be a huge understatement.

We’ve had a couple of BBQ’s already, and there’s still a couple of warm months left so plenty of time for more.

Anyway, here are some pics from the entrance to the garden through to the other side.

We didn’t know it when we first came to Erie, but this is a popular location for flying balloons. They have a number of events over the summer months and this morning there was a big launch a mile from our house.

So Lisa and I got up at 6am (yes really) and biked over to the local field where all the balloons were located.

There were hundreds of people present, all locals I suspect, there with their families and cameras to enjoy the event. In all we saw 8 balloons get inflated, two apparently decided it was too windy and decided not to fly but we saw the others take off.

I have been in a hot air balloon before (a birthday gift from Lisa 20 years ago) and it’s a wonderful experience, so we were quite jealous of the lucky few to took off today.

It was also a perfect morning for the flight, very sunny and around 65°F (18°C), as I write this now at 9:30 in the morning it’s already up to 85°F (29°C), so I’m sure those in the air and enjoying the experience.

As usual, I took a few pictures to share the event: