Upcoming busy week.  I'm headed off to Sherri Edwards tonight for a 90-person networking picnic.  Tomorrow I'll be attending the Community Leadership Summit and then OSCON in Portland. 

Since my last entry, my Mom's companion, Myron, died; just shy of his 90th birthday.  Over the decade that he and my Mom had been galavanting around the world together, spending much of their time in Florida, Manhattan, and Rockaway, I came to appreciate him.  He saved my Mom's life when she had a heart attack.  He had an arrogant sense of humor that made strangers edge away from him and it was a while later that I realized he didn't take himself as seriously as he came across.  He gave my Mom many adventures and pushed her to learn new things (golf, appreciation for music).  I am so sad that he is gone; and so relieved he is no longer driving on the road. 

I find that I am using this space more to explain why I haven't worked more on my site than what I've done.  I still intend to do a major overhaul of my links pages, but life has been busy. 

I discovered my stylesheet error that had been invalidating my link colors for July's blog.  I opened my background image url with a single quote and closed it with a double quote and that made some (but not all) tags and properties further down on the page not function.  I should have caught that earlier.  Fixed now.

I attempted to install VMPlayer on my dev machine only to find that my hardware doesn't support it.  It might be time for me to add another machine or two onto my home network.  I'll have to wait till I have some more money. 

Tom just had his second in a series of surgeries - this one might be the last, and appears to be healing well.

I've been spending lots of energy looking for work and having a lot of disappointments.  There was one company in particular that seemed a perfect fit for me - at least it did from my perspective;  they are scientific, involved in green energy, I like the people, they are using my favorite technologies at the right complexity and intensity level; but they selected someone else.  I was hoping all last month. 

Will (tugster) published photos of the Coot on his blog, tugster.wordpress.com.  He and Elizabeth spent a little time with Tom and me - left us wishing to see them again.  I am reminded of how many surprises - new and unexpected things always seem to happen when Tom and I are on the water.  On this trip we anchored near St.  Edward park to have dinner and watched rapid jumping of many tiny little fish out of the water, then we continued through the ship canal to the South end of Lake Union and ran into a crowd costumed bicyclists drinking beer and singing.  Will always interacts with people, so talking with them became easy, even for Tom.  What a fun night, followed by another perfect sunset! 

We had our last cat shaved again so she would be comfortable and not matted this summer.  We are setting up our watering system so the crops won't die in the heat and so Tom doesn't have to spend all his personal time watering them while I'm out of town. 

I'm taking Claritin again for my grass allergies.  Taking 2 teaspoons daily of bee pollen from March through June fixed my cottonwood allergy, but apparently bees do not pollinate grass so I need to find a different solution for that. 

My ankles are better today than they were prior to my surgery last November and as I'm getting more mobile I'm also shedding pounds.  Good for me. 

Tom and I have been watching lots of sunsets on the water in the Coot.  We also saw Dall's porpoises when we took a trip out the locks and across to Kingston.  We saw them both on the way there and on the way back.  I think that because the motor on the Coot is so (relatively) quiet and we are such a slow vessel (built for pleasure, not for speed) we get to see a lot more - wildlife and wildlife behavior that we might have missed even on our little run-about. 

The boat-building shed is still up, but Tom has torn down the sides (and discovered wasps nests) with the intention of tearing it down soon so that our tomatoes can get more direct sunlight in the evening.  The cherries were all eaten by crows this year, but we still have trees full of apples and plums.  The tomato plants are large and promising; the cucumber might not happen this year.  All the feeder birds are getting bolder they seem to be lingering around us more, as they have identified us as their providers. 

A Swainson's thrush was in the shade garden and came right up to my window.  This was my first "in-person" view of one.