Bottles of water...

Can you tell that I didn't get out of the house with the camera today? Close up of the case of water that Andy bought from Costco.

The Stump and the Slug...

It rained HARD today. Our area usually gets lots of rain between mid-January and mid-March, but this year, not so much. Today's rain was really the hardest, drenching rain we've had so far this year.

Anyway, there's a break in the rain, and so I decided to go around the block to look for today's picture before it gets too dark. I took about 25 shots, mostly stuff being wet, water flowing, places where water flows, etc. I got a couple of good shots of the cloud cover descending over the hill behind us (you can see the "almost ran" shots at my new flickr page here).

Then, as I was walking around the house on my way back in, I came across this stump. The homeowner's association hires gardeners who take are of our front yard, and they recently cut down a small tree that was dead. I saw the slug on the stump and found myself wondering "where is his shell" (we don't get a lot of slugs, mostly snails).

The cat that thinks she's a dog...

Meet Sophie. Sophie was abandoned by her mother shortly after her birth and raised for the first 4 months of her life with a pack of chihuahuas. As a result, she's pretty sure she might be a dog.

She plays with Clementine (our Papillon/Poodle mix), tussling and jostling for position as alpha bitch. She eats her cat food grudgingly, but never misses an opportunity to steal Clem's clearly dog-oriented food.

She's also dumb as a post. She has a cat tree. She'll stand at the top shelf of her cat tree, lean over the ledge and look down on us. Pretty soon, we'll hear her hacking, as the weight of her head is causing her to choke on the raised portion of the ledge.

But, we love the little stinker.

Except, of course, when she pees on any rug, blanket, or basically any fabric covered flat surface she sees.

Try, just try to guess what I do for a living...

Data infrastructure makes for a series of moments of controlled chaos. Bits go here, bits go there -- blue wires, black wires, yellow wires, orange fiber-optic cables.

Yet, in spite of all the confusion and spaghetti, it turns out that everthing goes where it is supposed to go -- all of the data that should be read is; all of the data that shouldn't be read isn't.