Four years have passed since we all were here.  It seems that Moab changed a bit more than we did.
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The most prominent feature in Edinburgh is the castle, which sits atop a volcanic core.  The core is all that remains after glaciers stripped away the rest of the mountain.  It’s a naturally fortified position, which made it that much more difficult for the Scots to retake after the English took it over. (Read on …)

We landed in Scotland on Sunday.  Leslie managed to sleep a bit on the plane while I caught up on all the movies I had missed from the last six months.  Having not slept, or not much anyway, we decided to hit the town immediately. (Read on …)

Leslie was up in Toronto, I had just arrived home that evening from San Francisco.  I had trouble sleeping with the jet lag and an empty house.  But I did manage to nod off around 2am only to be roused by the shaking and the noise at 4:37.

This was not my first rumbler.  In 1993 I was similarly jolted out of bed by a more violent quake.  This one was only a dozen miles away did more bouncing than shaking.  The ‘93 quake condemned the main building of my high school and extended my spring break by a few days.  I was too shocked to take in the entire experience of this event.

The Illinois quake had extensive aftershocks, one in particular stands out because I was in the office.  My office is on the fifth floor of and old masonry building.  It started at 10:14 and lasted what seemed like minutes.

During these quakes I was careful to pay attention to everything I could, the noise, the movement of the ground beneath my feet and of the rattling of the buildings.

Another dive, another sea turtle. He’s probably thinking something similar about me. I spotted this one near the Playancar Deep reef off the shore of Cozumel, Mexico.

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This is a Gerbera Daisy and it was suffering from mold on the leaves. I did some research online to figure out if there was a spray or something I could put on it. Sure enough there was, but what I also found intriguing was the suggestion of figuring out why the leaves are getting moldy in the first place.

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A day or so after Thanksgiving I noticed that Mary decided to make an appearance in the dried water droplets on the faucet of our Chicago rental. You may speculate as to why she chose this location, but I’m certain it was to ensure that my whites were as pearly as the gates.

So there’s this guy that hangs out around Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. He sits there holding up these branches in front of him and when some unsuspecting person walks by and doesn’t notice the oddity that is a shrub on the wharf, he scares them! Boo! That stunt won my dollar. I dropped it in his bucket and asked Chris to take our picture. Touche bush guy, touche.