How we almost killed our cat

Yesterday our neighbor was having a BBQ. As we walked back and forth between our houses with various food and drink, our cat Bellini was watching us curiously and seemed to want to participate in the action. She's an outdoor cat who's very adventurous, so we decided to encourage her to follow us to our neighbor's backyard. We didn't plan to let her in the yard, but thought she could hang outside and watch us through the fence until she got bored and went home.

As I entered the yard, our neighbor's rambunctious dog came tearing out of the house and pushed past me out the gate before I even comprehended what happened. The dog raced after Bellini as she took off running. According to bystanders, the two went flying around to the front of the house and Bellini barely made it up a tree before becoming dog food! The dog was called off and taken back to the house, but Bellini stayed up in the tree a good 30 minutes before we could coax her down. Since then Bellini has been uncharacteristically subdued and didn't even sleep with us last night. I think she quite literally had the bejesus scared out of her and it will be a couple of days before she's back to normal!

Below is a picture of Bellini in her normal, pre-dog attack mode. This is a picture of her up on our roof. I told you she was adventurous!

Garden Fever

We're very excited by our garden! After nearly nine months of doing absolutely nothing with our yard, we finally put in some plants. The previous residents had already laid a pretty good foundation, but we had some ugly plants to remove and new ones to put in.

We have a new vegetable patch with lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, and onions. We plan to add tomatoes and maybe beans. We also have a random aloe plant in there, which we didn't want to transplant!

We also now have Herb Row with sage, marjoram, lemon thyme, oregano, chives, basil, and lavender.

We can't take any credit for the below plants. They were all already there. It's a bit chaotic with plants growing over top of each other, but we both really like it!

And I couldn't resist a photo of Bellini and Cosmo playing in the yard. They really love their mini jungle!

Relaxing weekend on the coast

After a busy July at work, including organizing the "East African Workshop on Cyberspace Security," we took a well-deserved long weekend in Watamu on the Kenyan coast.

We didn't spend much time on the actual beach. The brown stuff in the foreground of the below picture is seaweed! The entire beach was covered with it, right up to the barrier wall of our resort.

So we spent most of our time in the resort, including massages at the spa, lazing by the pool, and enjoying drinks at the bar. The drink we are holding below is a dawa, a potent vodka drink mixed with honey and lime.

The resort organized a day trip to nearby Malindi, which has a significant Italian expat community. We couldn't pass up the opportunity to eat at a place called "I Love Pizza!"

We also satisfied our shopping itch, picking up the below items for a total of $60. If you receive a present from us in the near future, you might be getting a preview of it here!

After Malindi, we visited the Gede ruins. Gede was a thriving city back in the day, but was mysteriously abandoned, and now only the outlines of their buildings remain.