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The end of June marked the beginning of a short vacation. It started with a trip to Portland, Maine where I cat-sat for 4 days for my friend Sandie while she was in Iceland. I went solo, and was able to catch up with a few friends (see photos) and spend Saturday out kayaking around Cousins Island with Carey, (see Carey’s blog) which was a fun adventure. I caught up with Melissa and her son Ryan, which we hadn’t done in a long time. I also ran into an old college friend while out to dinner with Kate – kind of a small world occurrence! Not to bring up the grim side of the weekend, but I was able to find a final resting place for my cat Cecilia. Our hay-day was when we lived on the Eastern Promenade for 8 years.

On July 4, Ray and I hopped a plane to Seattle and checked out Washington, the northern Oregon coast and Portland, OR (best told through photos) brefore I attended the Web Design World conference in Seattle, learned some great stuff, and was side-blogged by Molly of Molly.com (Thanks, Molly!).

Ray and I took the last week to ramble through Washington and Oregon with stops in Seattle, Astoria, Cannon Beach, and Portland. Right now, I’m eating up web design techniques at Web Design World, with great info on XML and AJAX. One thing I’ve realized – I can learn these two technologies to make great, dynamic designs without having to get into the real (excuse me) dry stuff.

So learning the DOM, getting closer with Javascript, munching on AJAX - all will be good in the long run. I was able to talk with Molly Holzschlag about my recent venture in developing a new CSS-positioned template for Dartmouth, and that I am going down the right path. Hence I slept quite well last night. Right now I’m sitting in a series of sessions with Joe Marini on XML and AJAX