If you are a regular visitor to this website, you may have noticed that the visitor counter, and visitor log, were down, off and on (mostly off) for about 3 days (from Friday, December 2nd to Sunday, December 4th).  Friday, I woke to an awful rattle erupting from the server closet.  I performed a graceful shutdown of the server.  In the evening, when I returned home from work, I investigated further and found the problem was due to old fans.  Today I replaced the fans in the server, and while I was at it, upgraded my home router, too.  Service is now restored.

Seattle had its first sticking snow last Thursday afternoon, December 1st; although, West Seattle may not have gotten any.  We had snow here in Bothell and it is almost all gone today.  We enjoyed seeing all the wildlife footprints at our watering dish.  We were surprised that not only our cats, but also squirrels, raccoons, neighborhood cats, and birds all drink from our dish.

I'm working on some site-wide updates but they aren't completed yet.  I haven't had a lot of time for personal projects lately, but the butternut squash soup recipe is new.  I've also replaced the verbiage from the home page with a "NO XMAS for SONY" image (and link to the sysinternals blog, where the rootkit kernel hacking was first exposed.  One of the CDs Sony booby-trapped was "The Essential Pete Seeger".  That's got to be major karma damage for Sony.

The boss's trip to Dutch Harbor has been rescheduled for next year.  So I'll have to wait till then to install the new firewall.

I've ordered the new server for our accounting database and it should arrive at work this week.

I STILL haven't gotten Majordomo working properly on my server for SeattleLinuxChix.  I phoned my ISP and they are supposedly sending my messages through, but it isn't working the way it should and I'll need to look deeper into it.

Yes, I am finally running a mile, on some of my run days.  The other days I still run 3/4 of a mile.

I've got a list of projects I'm supposed to get to at home that I haven't been able to do.  I have one more vacation day that I can have this year and I'm thinking of having an alone day during the week to tackle some of my "to dos".

Saturday, Tom and I took a day trip to Vashon/Maury Island and Quartermaster Harbor to see the winter birds.  We saw wigeons, a few red necked grebes (not in breeding plumage), earred and horned grebes, Barrow's and common goldeneyes (in pairs), buffleheads, surf and white-winged scoters, and non-seasonal cormorants and kingfishers.  We did not see loons nor mergansers this trip.

Anna's hummingbirds are visiting our shade garden feeder regularly.

We were surprised when we saw fall foliage still on the trees of West Seattle.  Here in Bothell the flowers have all disappeared and the deciduous trees are bare-branched.