I'm still looking for full time employment.  It has been a very discouraging year for employment. 

Camping on the boat has been lots of fun.  "The Moms" (my Mom and Tom's Mom) were just here for the weekend and we opened champagne on the boat.  I'm so glad the boat is usable.  It isn't completed down to the last detail, but definitely enough so that we can (and have) go for several days of boat-camping on it.  We got a lot of attention both at the Home Built Boats Weekend at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle and at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival. 

I redid all my "links" pages (pages that are primarily bookmarks to other sites) to be formatted in divs (not tables).  I wanted to do that before I started updating all the links so that I could normalize the coding at the same time.  It just seemed to make more sense to do the coding part first.  I've started updating the links;  which mostly means removing the obsolete links and rewriting the redirected ones. 

I did some fancy work on my index page, that I decided to do 3 years ago;  I made my home page Disability Accessible by removing brackets, creating a link that removes the backgrounds, and coding the fonts so that they will all uniformly enlarge with a browser zoom.  I separated out the style sheet that holds the shape of the page from the style sheet that applies the seasonal colors.  I now update the colors automatically at the start of a new month (javascript) and remove them when a user clicks the "remove backgrounds" link.

I did some work on Susie's acupuncture website and Michael Oxman's arborist website. 

Mostly I've been working on NARGS and my own website.  The work I've been doing on the NARGS website has been great.  The NARGS officers can pull up reports without my help.  I'm putting data entry into my dev machine and then pushing it to my production machine with replication.  The production machine is set read-only.  I'm finding this system works really well plus it is secure.  I'm refactoring the code.  I would love to make this an open source project.

Salem, the neighbor's cat, sneaks into our house at every opportunity.  Somehow he figured out how to get into our house through our magnetized cat door, even when I set it to block entry.  I put a large rock in front of it as a barricade.  Now he sneaks in every time I have any outside door open. 

The fleas are fierce this year.  I did all my usual treatments:  feeding Program to the cat (programming the cat - the interface is a little tricky) and Salem (I informed the neighbors), washing all the bedding, towels, my clothes on the hot setting, and they still persist.  I've just tried a sulfur bomb and if that doesn't work, borax, diatomaceous earth, and possibly professional extermination are my next steps. 

My teeth and my knees are worrying me.  Right now I have no sides left to chew on and 4 dentists ready to get rich on me.  My stomach is unhappy cause I can't chew.  My mouth hurts.  I want it all to be fixed already.  It seems like it is taking forever. 

Meantime I'm doing home remedies on the knees which don't hurt except when I need to take stairs.  I feel a pain in my medial meniscus when I walk either up or down.  Sometimes the right knee is worse and sometimes the left.  I've also been doing my best to lose weight, hoping that will help.

The Douglas Squirrels have taken over my yard, and possibly my immediate neighborhood.  Apparently my attempt at creating a Northwest habitat using native flora has been a great success.  Now what do I do about the Douglas Squirrel eating all my strawberries and Italian prunes?  I've seen the Douglas squirrel eating prunes, strawberries, Asian pears, and I suspect banana, but I'll have to confirm that last one. 

The tomatoes are finally ripening and the Sunsugar orange cherry tomatoes are the most delicious dessert tomatoes I've ever eaten.  The pumpkins I planted produced one yellow squash (not a pumpkin) and the cucumbers have been cucless. 

I'm pretty sure it was the crows that got the cherries.  I think those gigantic flocks of crows are actually a harvesting crew that go from neighborhood to neighborhood as fruit ripens.  Then, at twilight, they gather together in an even larger flock and report harvest details to all the other crows, so they can decide where to raid next. 

The apple harvest has been fantastic this year.  The Spartan just came ready last week and compared to Liberty and Freedom, (which started ripening apples earlier), the Spartan seems to ripen all at once.  I picked the 5 remaining Spartans and I'm putting all those I haven't already eaten in the refrigerator as they are the superior eating apple.  I think I'm going to juice the Liberty and Freedom apples.  I'm also thinking about replacing one of them with an Akane and replacing the other with another Italian prune. 

Tom and I have seen lots of water fowl and rapters this year on our boat-camping trips;  an osprey on the Duwamish, rhinoceros auklets and lots of eagles on Puget Sound.  We've also had more varied backyard birds than ever before;  Swainson's thrush, wrens, cedar waxwings, plus some strange sounding birds I haven't yet identified.