OK, here's a picture of Fife to tide over his fans, who have grown angry and restless over the lack of recent postings of pictures of our dogs. Now, heel!

I'm just back from an enjoyable but exhausting weekend in Atlanta - enjoyable because I actually got to see my lovely bride, who has been home for a total of two days in the past month. Exhausting because we spent three days solid looking for places to live again.

Fortunately, this is an unusually long stretch of travel for Leslie. She had two weeks of training in Salt Lake City right after we went to NYC, then she was home for a weekend, which was cut short because of the regularly scheduled flight delays that seem to - scratch that, really do - always prevent her from getting back to Greensboro less than a day late. Then this past weekend we were in Atlanta the whole weekend, and she won't be back until Thursday night, which means sometime Friday. Her regular schedule, which she should hopefully be getting to sometime soon, will only have her traveling from Tuesday through Thursdays, which should be somewhat more tolerable. On the bright side, she is enjoying her new job quite a bit, and making her usual fans along the way with the sales reps she supports and her bosses. Plus, now she calls me from luxury hotel suites on the nice end of the beach rather than crack dens on the wrong side of the tracks, which was where she usually had to stay when she worked for the state! She's worried that because she's been gone for so long that the dogs won't remember her, but I think this photo of Kaylee in heaven indicates she really needn't worry. (There - two!)

We think, after three more days of hunting, that we found the right place. We checked out several areas but decided that we wanted to live in East Atlanta Village, which is a pretty cool neighborhood not far from downtown. It's not quite the intense hippie vibe of Asheville that we would have had in Little Five Points, but then again, you may have noticed that we aren't really terribly intense hippies - we just like hanging around them. But that's just five minutes from East Atlanta Village, and I'm thinking EAV will have a bit bigger gay population, which along with a generally positive vibe also usually means good restaurants and rising property values.

We looked at several houses but what was in our price range all looked to be flips, and we've watched enough of those "Flip that House" shows on TV to be terrified of what those incompetent morons might have done to the house. So we looked at newer lofts and townhouses, and we were tempted by a loft that had been converted from an old shoe factory and was located quite literally in a huge retail development. It would have been extremely urban, tons of shopping steps away, but I can see having a view of the shopping center getting old rather quickly. It was probably only kind of tempting because this particular unit is probably literally the only true loft we could ever live in, since by happenstance it had a small outdoor garden for the dogs. But for the amount of money they wanted for it, I would have insisted on a view of at least something classy like a Pier 1, not just a Target.

So we think instead we'll put in offer on a loft-like townhouse nearby. It's not as authentic, but on the other hand it's bigger, has a small fenced-in yard and the developer was practically begging us to make an offer, since the market is in such a dumper right now. Of course, that's what we thought the last time we thought we were going to get a place, and we were wrong. But with any luck, the housing crisis is really heating up now!

Which reminds me, anybody want to buy a house in Greensboro?

Oh yeah, one of Fergus... This is from last year's AIDS walk. Fergus is firmly opposed to AIDS, but he also enjoys the bling.