It's been way too long since I updated this blog!  Again!  So many things have changed!!!!  Again!  The big news is that I started new work in September, right on target.  I'm now working at the Genome Center in the UW; another solo Sys Admin job.

The seasons have come and gone and the garden produced like crazy including tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, fava beans, snap peas, strawberries.  Now even the toad lillies are gone.

With the exception of the last two record-breaking rainy weeks, I've been bicycle-commuting to work; 3 days per week; 9.5 miles each way.  I enjoy the bicycle ride, when it isn't icy, or raining too hard, and when I don't have a flat....  The days I don't commute I take the (uhg) bus which is always full and never pleasant and my stomach doesn't appreciate it.  I wrote a poem about a worse ride I had to take daily to Swedish Hospital when I worked in Anesthesia billing there (an awful job).

The University of Washington has an indoor track which would not be better if I had designed it myself, so even on the weeks when I don't bicycle commute I can get a good workout.

The Genome Center in the UW has the largest collection of great people including the largest collection of women scientists I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

This page is new, as well as my homepage.  Maybe you noticed?  They are now coded with divs instead of tables.  Tables are easy.  Divs are hard, although I'm starting to understand them a little better.  I've read the documentation several times and found it less than helpful, which is probably why the W3C people added all those other links to their site; and why there are so many of them.

With my high IQ brain and an inclination towards web coding, I fully expect that within a year I will be a CSS2 master, but for the moment, it is just frustrating the hell out of me.  Considering how many pages I have to convert, this will either kill me or cure me.

Last April my "to do list" looked like this:

1. Get Mailman working for Seattle LinuxChix
2. Refactor my home page so that the layout is controlled with CSS instead of tables
3. Set up all my links pages so they pull the links up from flatfiles or a database, to reduce work when I CRUD (create, read, update, delete) links.
4. Set up a DNS server

I can cross number 2 off the list.  the other items stand.

Tom is in the process of finishing the back porch roof, although he hasn't made the back porch yet.  There is a small deck out there now which will be expanded some time in the future.  It will be great to walk out the back door and not get rained on.

Tom is doing this to appease me.  He found a project he's much more excited about and now all the remaining house construction projects are going to take a back seat to his boat-building project.

Tom will be building a small cabin cruiser in a tug-boat style with a little bit of fishing-boat detail thrown in.

Tom's other big new project, Zoomatron, has been taking up much of his time.

I've observed so much in the past few months I don't know where to begin.  Seattle broke all known historical records for amount of rainfall in November.

The birds have been very hungry at our feeders and I've needed to replace seed every week and a half.

Our yellow jacket nests are still active, but I may be getting rid of them anyway over the Thanksgiving weekend.

We still have some home grown tomatoes from our garden, and we took in our one "container tomato" plant.  So far, no new growth, but the existing tomatoes have been ripening.