I have a funny story that I thought I’d share as it proves that sometimes you can try too hard to do what you think is the right thing, and it comes back and bites you. It’s still funny though so enjoy…

In March of 2024 we moved into our new house, it was a new build and everything was great, but the back garden (yard for my American friends) was just mud. This was a horrible pain as every time Harley (our French Bulldog) went outside, she’d bring back into the house a ton of dirt. So clearly a priority was to get the back garden finished.

We hired a really good designer and gave her a brief, that basically said, low maintenance, lots of plants that were indigenous to Colorado (so they’d survive the winters) and consider water conservation, let’s not use all the water in Erie in summer to keep plants alive.

Our designer came back with a really lovely design (it’s a post on this site if you want to check it out) and we started work in June, finishing late July in time for an August birthday barbeque to celebrate the finished work.

One decision we made was to put in a special type of Bermuda grass that was very hardy, and required little mowing and little water – perfect right? The Bluegrass everyone else had was much cheaper but needed to be mowed every week and required gallons of water in summer, so we figured while this was more expensive to put in the Bermuda grass, in the long run it would be worth it.

The new grass went in and it was lovely, in fact if you look at the posting on the finished garden, that’s the Bermuda grass.

In spring of 2025 Lisa noted that Harley was spending a LOT of time licking her feet, something she hadn’t done when we lived in Washington. So, she had her tested. Guess what? Yup, she’s allergic to Bermuda grass!!!!

Firstly, how come it took us half a year to notice Harley was having problems – that’s pretty bad ☹️. In the end we made the call that there was only one option. We had to have the Bermuda grass pulled up and bluegrass put down! We obviously checked that Harley would be ok with that and of course she was fine.

It appears that not only is Bermuda grass expensive, but once it’s down it’s a terror to pull up (it really takes root), so the cost to pull up the almost brand new Bermuda grass and put down Kentucky Bluegrass was over $5,000.

So, this summer, I mowed every week and watered like there is not tomorrow (and paid the price for all that water), while I watched Harley continue to lick her feet.

Life sometimes sucks!

Told you it was funny.

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.