Update!

Regular readers of this blog have probably been worried that there hasn't been a post for awhile. Is she dead? In a coma? In prison? Rehab? Does she hate us? No, the reason is much simpler, first a lot of travel, then laziness.
Unfortunately, I do have some sad news. Sandy passed away at the ripe old age of 16, only a couple of weeks after her birthday. We miss her but we like to think that she had a full life and didn't really have any medical problems until close to the end.
As for the travel, the first trip was to Orlando for a W3C meeting. Besides lots of exciting work on World Wide Web standards, we also enjoyed a trip to the Kennedy Space Center, where we had a tour and heard a talk by an astronaut. Here I am with some of my colleagues and the astronaut, who is in the middle.
Then it was on to Sarasota, to see Rich's mom and dad, and Aunt Sue and Uncle Mike, where we had, as usual, a nice visit, including a lot of wonderful meals. Rich stayed in Sarasota for a few more days while I went out to San Diego for a conference. Here we are enjoying a meal in Sarasota.

Gray Kitty Those of you with whom we've been in communication by the quaint medium of "telephone" will know that we have a new animal-related project, befriending "Gray Kitty", a (possibly) stray cat that has taken to hanging around our deck mooching for a handout. Gray Kitty likes to sit right outside our kitchen door, meowing loudly for a meal. After s/he gets a dish of cat food, s/he then meows loudly for us to go away so that s/he can eat in peace, because Gray Kitty is afraid of us and doesn't like to eat when we're nearby. Gray Kitty is getting to be  quite at home in our yard, having been observed chasing away another (possibly) stray cat(Dark Gray Kitty with White-Tipped Tail). I should point out that while I call our project "befriending Gray Kitty", Rich calls it "stealing the neighbor's cat".
Bad Tree! Another bad tree has fallen into our yard. Well, half of a tree. The other half is still standing in the neighbor's yard, at least for now. This one is very far from the road, which is good in that it doesn't look as horrible as the first one, but bad in that there's less of an incentive to get rid of it. You can hardly even see it from the house. When I told the tree service our address they said "Oh, yeah, the big sycamore tree". (See the December 19 post)