So, briefly: I am in Florida at the moment, anticipating going off to England to start my Ph.D. in a month. I spent a week in New York recently, visiting relatives and friends, and had a wonderful time. I'm off to Canada for a visit next week, and need to get ready for that - catching up on e-mail, nailing down details, etc. In the mean time, I've been spending time with my family, going to the gym obsessively, hanging out with my cat and dogs, and doing leisure reading. And, as always, wasting huge amounts of time.
To that end, I thought I should include a picture of two of the dogs, for those of you who don't know them. We used to have two dogs and two cats, but then the senior cat went to chase mousies in the sky, and Dad found a stray dog. Anyway, here are Hops and Buddha. Hops is a boxer/black lab mix with a bit of pointer thrown in - you can't see it in this picture, but he's got speckled paws. Buddha came to us with the name, having resembled a classical Chinese Buddha statue in his puppyhood. He is now quite conceivably the yappiest dog in existence, and incredibly hyper and spoiled. But we love him.
Zeke, the rescue-league Doberman, clearly needs a photographic presence on this blog. So too does Violet, the love of my life. She's a Siamese mix - white coat, orange tips. She is the best cat in the universe. But she hates being photographed. There should also be one of Freckles, her dear departed brother, who was a great fluffy orange thing. (They weren't biologically related.) I should work on that...