back home

This is a picture of my brother David and his wife Laura (left) outside their house in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. David has a Ph.D. in Entomology and recently took a job there at a research station, after living in Fort Valley Georgia (home of the Fort Valley State University Wildcats). Laura is an accountant, which is a good situation because David is like me and doesn't have any sense when it comes to money.  Notice that in the picture above Laura is carrying my niece Lilian under there. Lily is over a year old now and very spoiled, but she has relieved some pressure on me to provide grandkids for my parents...
The picture on the right is David collecting semen from a couple of bumble bees for a selective breeding program using artificial insemination (just kidding, he just grabbed these males out of the air one day at Laura's grandmother's garden).

I owe David and Laura for quite a few things, including giving my cat a home when I moved to Hawaii.

My cat endeared herself to me one night in California when she invited herself in off the street and devoured most of one of my housemate's birthday cake. She reminds me a lot of myself, she's small and skinny, and I assume she got picked on a lot by other stray cats growing up, so now she doesn't play well with other kitties. I tried naming her "Satan's little helper" and then "Gayfer", but nobody cared for those names so she usually just goes by "Miss Cat".

For purveyors of cat trivia: notice that Miss cat has one pink toe that does not match her nose.

Even though Laura qualifies automatically as a cracker for growing up in Anderson, South Carolina and for serving time keeping books at a tractor dealership in Georgia, I feel like I lent some legitimacy to their residency in Georgia by shaming them into keeping our Grandmother's 1985 Subaru on blocks after David conducted some lubricity studies on it and burned out the engine. It's a long story, but after more than two years of mixing original parts and parts pulled from a junkyard in Sacramento, California (thanks for the memories, "Pick-and-Pull!"), we got the Subaru running (briefly), before remanding it to a final resting place in a junkyard in South Carolina. In this picture, dated ca. March 2002, David and I are switching out the entire front wiring harness, ignition, computer, etc, (for the second time).