I fed my official three inside. Emma preferred to eat outside, just outside the door. I also put down a dish for TomTom, who had sort of greeted me this afternoon.

And then I saw yet ANOTHER cat. This one also has lots of dark tortoise-y markings, except for white legs.

Did I miss some arrows in the woods labeled EATS and pointing to my house?

I'll be home again tomorrow, doing the never-ending yard work. I finished the latest collection this afternoon and have only the inventory list to do. For that I needed an accession number, which just came by e-mail. I'll type that stuff up tomorrow at home and e-mail it to the archivist. By Thursday she'll no doubt have another collection on my cart.

Big local news is, of course, the rising waters of the Mississippi, thanks to the floods up north. The Corps of Engineers is getting ready to (probably) open at least part of the Bonne Carre spillway to divert the high water into Lake Pontchartrain. They accomplish this by removing "needles" from the sort of dam blocking the shortcut into the lake.

These needles look like railroad ties (and they probably are very similar). There are 7000 of them. They don't utilize the Spillway all that often, but I can recall at least two times since we moved back here (in1976) that they have used it.

Farmers along the route, who routinely pasture cattle on the "floor" of the spillway, get plenty of warning.

This is not done lightly, but now when Katrina repairs to levees are probably not fully completed it's important not to stress the levees downstream.

I finally remembered to get new passport pictures this afternoon. They're not great, but then again they're not awful. The pictures taken for the visa for Kenya were truly dreadful. I'm surprised they let me in.

Now to get the passport itself renewed. If I recall, it expired last month.

Maybe I'll see Bob again tomorrow when I'm out there weeding.