Almost-Summer Moonrise: Cat & Mouse

This morning heralded an the end, at least temporarily, of our area's "June Gloom". By 5:30, the eastern sky was beginning to glow a lovely yellowish orange. To the west, the waning gibbous moon (check out this explanation of moon phases) was on its way towards setting. (Click on these photos in order to better see the moon.) The direction of the approaching sunrise and setting moon reminded me that the Summer Solstice is just one week away!

As much as I love to stay up at night, I love the soft, quiet atmosphere that exists just before sunrise. Oh, that we didn't need to sleep!

So as I was getting the morning paper and taking pictures of the moon, I noticed that Bob was batting at something in the plants in the front yard. When I came back out to see if he wanted to come in for breakfast, he was at the side of the house by the new gate Kevin is building for us. This is what I saw:Since I'm a softy, even toward vermin and varmints that eat my koi and get into our garage, I brought Bob in for a breakfast of the Science Diet variety.
The little guy was gone the next time I looked.

June 11, 2:17AM - Tom Finishes His Master's Portfolio

(Don't forget you can enlarge pictures by clicking on them.)
After two years of Tuesday classes and many late nights of writing papers and fretting, Tom completed the last step toward his Masters degree. Naturally, our computer had been acting up for months and tried to die on him at least three times last week. I was able to resurrect it and copy his latest files onto a CD and Tom borrowed Jack's printer to print several needed pages. By the third "resurrection", however, we decided it was time to buy a new computer (yes!) and I spent most of Sunday afternoon and evening setting it up and updating programs and files. By 1 AM, I gave up and told Tom I was going to bed and he would have to finish printing his files by himself. He woke me up to say he was just about done and I told him he should take a picture of the portfolio before shipping it out in the morning.

I've used the camera's self-timer plenty of times, so if it had been me, I'd have taken my own picture. But Tom didn't think of that, so he woke me up at 2:17 to show me his finished product. Here's the picture I took of the happy man - the angle is weird because I didn't bother to get up out of bed ;-)