The big news is the weather.  We've been having a lot of it.  First there was the record rainfall in November, followed by a road-crippling snowstorm at the end of November.  More recently, we had a rain and wind storm that knocked out power to more than half of Seattle.  Our outage lasted a mere 3 days.  We have neighbors within a mile who still don't have their power back.

I've been bicycle-commuting rarely, and running even more rarely, but just enough to keep my weight stable.  I'm hopeful for more exercise in January.

My ISP is giving its customers a difficult time, first by "enhancing" their spam filters in such a way that they catch too much good email; and now by making it so I can't get my contact email.  I'm going to have to spend yet another hour on the phone with them to straighten this out.  This will make something like 5 phone calls in the last 2 months.

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 has created a large shelter in the backyard in which he 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.

Mike and Deb (our friends who moved to Tucson) are supposed to arrive here Saturday afternoon and spend a couple of days with us.  We are looking forward to it.

Our container tomato is dead and we have finished the last of our home grown tomatoes.  I'm thinking of making starts early since we bought an indoor lighted sprouting tray.

During the snowstorm I saw hummingbirds at our hummingbird feeder.  They couldn't get to the food due to snow and ice.  I rushed inside, made up a fresh container of sugar-water, and brought two feeders out.  The hummingbirds, who were watching from nearby tree-tops, came back to the feeders within 15 minutes.  Hungry little hummingbirds.

The backyard is seeing our winter birds again, including one elusive varied thrush (aka "Alaska robin"), many spotted towhees, plenty of juncos (who never left), our hairy woodpeckers and the occasional wren.

I watched a flock of bushtits feeding off the undersides of leaves.

The entire Puget Sound region is lousy with fallen trees:  entire trunks of large trees uprooted.  Some of them fell on houses and cars; luckily for us, not ours.