Author Archives: Ian

Breakfast With Mom

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Restored portrait of Judy Spiers at age 17

Judy Spiers Photo Restoration

I enjoyed a nice, long visit with my mom, Judy Spiers, yesterday. We do talk regularly on the phone, but it’s always so much better to visit with her in person. We haven’t really been able to catch up like this for a few months now.

During our visit, I made a point of bringing up several ideas I’ve had that relate to this web site. She has some modest experience with her own blog at this point, so, if she’s willing to make an ongoing commitment to this site, she’d make a good contributing author.

It looks like I’m now officially taking a step towards a new family reunion: I’m asking if anyone is interested.

This web site may look pretty sophisticated, but it’s really not. Nothing has been planned as far as an official family reunion. If this is going to be done right, there are many questions to be asked and answered, and there’s a considerable amount of work to do.

Mom and I are still mulling over yesterday’s conversation. We’re writing up our ideas and comparing notes, and we’re discussing ways to bringing more family members into this conversation.

We’ll see.

Since You Stopped By

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John, Helen and Hugh MacWhirter (Restoration)

This 1919 photo of the MacWhirter family is a sample from a family photo restoration project I’ve been working on. If you click on the image you’ll link to an associated Flickr page.

The 2007 Cutting Family Reunion was held on the weekend of July 20–22, at Ocean Shores in Washington State. It rained all weekend long, but it was great fun!

It’s now been five long years since the last post to this site. I thought there should at least be a little something for anyone that stopped by.

-i.

Cutting Reunion BBS Launched

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For better of for worse, today I’m officially opening the Cutting Reunion BBS to the public at http://www.cuttingreunion.com/bbs. It seems that this may be the best way for us to have and maintain an open dialogue regarding our family reunion plans.

This bulletin board system (BBS) is hosted by an application called PHP BBS, which should be familiar to a few of you. PHP BBS is a fairly straight-forward and easy to use application, and I hope that you’ll find it useful. Unfortunately, I don’t have time right now to add graphics and links that would tie our BBS into the rest of the Cutting Reunion web site, so I’ll ask that you be patient with the system if you get confused. We’re making this up as we go along.

One problem that I’m aware of that I think is worth mentioning is that you’ll have to create another account in order to participate this BBS, which means that you’ll have another login and password to keep track of in addition to the account you created to comment on our home page. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but there’s nothing I can do about that at the moment. This redundancy is due to the fact that our web site uses two separate web applications—one for blog posts (WordPress) and one for this new bulletin board system (PHP BBS). I lack the programming experience (and time) required to consolidate user accounts. (If anyone out there has programming experience and knows how to do this, send me an email!)

That said, I hope that you’ll take the time to poke around the BBS and that you’ll get involved with the discussion. Regardless of how slick any of this technology looks it’s all for nothing if you don’t participate.

Enjoy!

-i.

Web Site Launched!

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Hello and Welcome to the Cutting Family Reunion Blog and Web Site!

There have been some inspired discussions about having a Cutting Family Reunion during the summer of 2007. With so much going on in our lives today it’s no real surprise that we have such a hard time getting on the same page. This site has been launched in an effort to facilitate our ongoing discussion.

There really aren’t many details I can provide at the moment. Judy Spiers has taken the lead to coordinate this event. The plan is to rendezvous at Ocean Shores, Washington, over the third weekend of July (20th–22nd). Some of us also thought it would be a good idea to launch this web site and to send out some emails to let other family members know that it exists.

The home page for this web site has been set up as a blog, which means it will be fairly easy to post updates relating to our plans as they develop. It also means that visitors to this site have the ability to post comments to the posts for others to see and comment on, which I hope will improve our discussion. (You do have to register with this site in order to comment— a minor inconvenience that better protects us all from spam.)

This site will be updated as time permits, so keep it bookmarked and check for updates.

Warm regards,

-Ian Spiers (Judy’s Son)