I can't explain my finding lolcats so charmingly amusing. Here's a super recent one:

and actually I really like this early one too.

Back yesterday from a week in England, where it is surprisingly more sunny than it is here in San Francisco. Matt and Mary are in town this weekend; nice to have them back in California. Matt brought back from China an electric beckoning cat for us: in fact the exact model linked. Due to some inscrutable malfunction it doesn't work but it does helpfully explain on the box:

One NO.5 battery for praviding the power, enabling to automatically beckon the hand for months, setting it at any position, never be offected by the lights.

When it is in the initiative operation, please insert the fitted NO.5#1.5Vbattery into the bottom of the treasure-beckoning cat according to the inscribed polarities. Then it can work immediately. The hand beckoning will automatically enter the stable position for several minutes

Inside attaching poly luck-beckoning lyrics, sticking them for immediate realizations.

Inside attaching several self-filled out creative and catchy phrases' lable paper

If finding that the hand-beckoning stops swinging, please change the same battery with type number

Day 6, December 29, was our last full day in Puerto Rico. It started off with an early morning wake-up in The Great Escape, appropriately to make our Great Escape from the place. The method: light aircraft.

Very light aircraft, in fact: so light that they arranged the seating according to the passengers' weight, to balance the plane.

After landing back in San Juan we took a cab into Old San Juan to see what it's all about. Very nice, is what! Narrow cobbled streets and lots of colors; very colonial and very cool. We saw San Francisco, too.

Photos from the day are available online.

On day 5 in Puerto Rico we woke up at the Inn on the Blue Horizon and after breakfast walked along the beach to Esperanza.

After a while there, we wandered back to the Inn and hung out for the rest of the day before heading to our next stop, which unexpectedly turned out to be the Great Escape Inn up the road. That was a pretty extraordinary place.

Photos from day 5 in Puerto Rico are available online.

We woke up early on December 27 so we could wave goodbye to the evil resort and get a cab to Fajardo, where we'd catch a ferry to Vieques.

After a long wait, another long wait, wifely seasickness and then a crazy cab ride we ended up at the Inn On the Blue Horizon in southern Vieques, where I took this gem:

The rest of the photos are also available online.

Waking up on December 26 we figured that we'd plan an escape from the resort: where would we get to if we just walked and walked and walked up the beach? Turns out you that find no people, no buildings, no nothing apart from sand, sea, and big sticks. Here's me with a particularly attractive bit of bamboo:

More photos from Boxing Day in Puerto Rico are now online.

This is what Christmas night looks like on a beach in Puerto Rico:

We woke up on Christmas day in San Juan and went out for a walk on the beach. Beautiful! Warm! Sunny! Sandy! Not things one typically associates with Christmas if one's from England but Puerto Rico has a way of being different.

At lunchtime we hopped in a cab to Rio Grande, where we'd booked into the "Rio Mar Resort and Spa by Wyndham" on priceline.com (ie. we'd named our price and it had put us there). The room was super but I'm not sure a resort was really what we were looking for; lesson learned.

Photos from Christmas Day 2007 available online; boxing day to follow.

It was about 11pm on Christmas Eve when we finally arrived at our first hotel in Puerto Rico, and everything was shut. No dinner, no drinks, no celebration, but we did have a nice midnight walk along the beach to celebrate the advent. Here's Wendy looking all business-like while enjoying the sight and sound of the Caribbean sea:

We stayed the first night at the curiously named "At Wind Chimes Inn" (yes, the opening preposition is part of the name). The room was small but comfortable; the noise terrific but after our long journey not enough to disturb our sleep too much. And hey, we were a block from a lovely beach in Condado, San Juan, Puerto Rico.