At the end of July, our remain cat Spike went missing. He was in bed with us one night, we all heard the coyotes up the hill, woke up and he was not here. We never saw him again. We talked to the neighbors, walked the streets and hills, put up flyers, went to the Animal Shelter and Animal Control twice a week for a month. Nothing.
I always thought Spike would go first and we would have Butch for more years. Instead Butch goes first, and Spike goes right after. Like an old married couple, Spike lost his edge after Butch died and the coyotes probably got him (after avoiding them for 14 years!). It seems just in a way considering how many animals he slaughtered in his time. But we really miss him.
Then our friend Nancy died suddenly. One day she was sitting on the terrace with us wondering where Spike could be (her theory - on the roof), a few days later she is in the hospital, a couple of days after that she died. She did not lead the healthiest life, but she was only 65 and it was a shock to all of us. A Mind's Eye in Italy.
If bad luck comes in threes, we thought we were done. But maybe the cats counted as one, not two.
Steve's computer hard disk crashed in the middle of a big work project. He ordered a new Dell, spent two days loading software, then it crashed. It took a week to get it fixed because Dell and New Mexico are not a good match. They use a repair guy based in Colorado, they ship parts to Farmington - and it takes 3 days to get a part ordered and the guy out here (he had to come twice).
I was working late one Friday night on Slow Travel, while eating popcorn, and I managed to delete the file that controls the site navigation. If you use FrontPage, as I do, this is HUGE. Slow Travel is a 2000+ page site (over 6000 pages if you count the database generated pages) and I use the FP navigation to control breadcrumbs and the navigation columns. I need to switch the site to DreamWeaver, because Chris who does all the database programming uses DW and we could coordinate our work better if we both used DW, and because FP screws up Moveable Type by putting its control files into the MT folders (and then I have to spend an hour removing them). But it is going to be a big project to switch to DW. I have been preparing for this for the last year and hope to do the switch this fall/winter.
Then I get the phone call I have been waiting for over the last several years. My mother was in the hospital. We were just leaving for Phoenix (for Steve's business) so we did that two day trip, then flew to Toronto for a few days. The trip went well, all things considering.
I posted this as a draft and then forgot about it. I am posting it now a couple of months later.
