The past few weeks have been eventful, if a little foggy. My sister and nephew were out for a visit at the end of May. We visited a number of spots around the area including the tide pools I like outside Pescadero, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the new California Academy of Sciences. My nephew seemed to enjoy himself greatly… especially at the touch pools at both Monterey and the California Academy of Sciences. I have to say though that the Academy’s new building is just amazing and is a must visit. They have a three level rain forest in the building that is really very nicely done with lots of birds and butterflies flying all over the place and some fish in the “river” that were astoundingly huge.

While I was out and about with my sister and nephew, though, I caught a lovely cold and was out of it for about two weeks. Just this last weekend, though, my parents were out for a convention, and we visited a little and went to Filoli, which is a place I had never been before, although I have been past it many times. Filoli was nice enough, I suppose, if you like that sort of thing. Certainly, the gardens were very beautiful, but they are formal English gardens. I never really learned to love formal gardens and have always preferred things to be a bit more wild than that. Still, an interesting visit.

I uploaded two photo streams to Flickr for this trip:

	Pictures of my father’s koi pond.
	Pictures from the trip to Spring Mill.

To try to have a little fun this week, I took a little extra vacation time over the weekend and went up to Seattle to visit with my friend, André (aka Ozymandias). We bummed around a rather chilly and damp town, strolled around the Fremont neighborhood during the tail-end of their Solstice festival (and got an eye-full of some unfortunate fashions… hint: kilts are in for the men folk, but total nudity will do in a pinch… or not).

On the way back down to Oregon for my meetings this week, I was going to swing by Mount Saint Helens (I have been coming to the area for years and have never made it there), but the weather was less than cooperative. Combine the lack of visibility with some camera problems (hint: if you have digital SLR, don’t try to clean the sensor yourself), and I’m afraid you’ll have to do without pictures of me trotting around the north-west. Sorry… maybe next time.

Oh, incidentally, I just discovered that my e-mail address here at tailrecursive was forwarding to the wrong mailbox… so if you sent me anything recently and I didn’t respond, that is probably why. Sorry for any inconvenience.

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Akismet, by the way, is the WordPress plug-in I use to catch and throw out the spam comments I get on this blog. That’s right, if I didn’t have Akismet, I would have had to delete more than 13,000 comments by hand. Yikes!

[Edit: Removed image link after I lost the image file on the site... oops!]

	The wild lilac in full bloom, with a happy customer gathering some tasty pollen. Mmmmmm… pollen!
	Action shot! A bee coming in for a landing. I was pretty pleased to capture this one, those suckers are fast!

I had some other pictures on my camera… one of a Christmas gift my sister sent me, and several of the new roof. Since some of you have shown interest in this waaaaaaay to expensive repair to chez PJ, I thought I would include a couple of shots to show you what the new roof looks like. For those that haven’t heard, the new roof is one of these fancy new membrane systems (the old one was tar-and-gravel, which I have decided is the spawn of Satan). It’s a rubbery membrane set on top of fire-resistant fiberglass layers and is “welded” roll-to-roll. So, basically, my entire roof is one solid sheet of this stuff from one side to the other. Winter rains, I laugh at thee (but not too hard, because there is a creek nearby)!

	Yes, these are bunny slippers… or rather killer rabbit slippers as in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Sadly, my feet are too big to wear these without ripping out the stitching, but they’re pretty funny… they bite as you walk, by the way. Oh, and apparently, Sasquatch is modeling them for your benefit. I forgot he was here when I took this picture.
	Here’s a shot of the north-west corner of the house. This is the area that had the problem leak… basically right over Shawn’s room. Pay no attention to the stucco work that needs to be done to the furnace chimney… that’s just an illusion.
	A shot in the opposite direction (over the kitchen). The colors are a little off, since it was getting late in the day, but you can see the new vents the roofers installed, and the blocks used to support the electrical conduit.

Ok. If you made it through the roofing pictures, you must be a true friend, or a housing geek. Either way, you deserve a cookie.

Seriously, I’m starting to wonder if the main purpose of a state legislature is to look asinine. I think one of the problems here is that people seem to think that Pluto’s being reclassified somehow makes it a less interesting object… like this reclassification is somehow an insult to Pluto and Clyde Tombaugh. Really, it’s a very strange reaction to have; and it’s an even stranger thing to feel the need to legislate. Don’t these people have real problems to be dealing with?