A sad postscript to our beach weekend: when we returned home, we discovered that our four-year old cat Popeye, who we’ve had since he was 2 days old, had been flirting with traffic, as was his wont, and came out on the worse end of it. We were sorry to lose our longest-term pet to date. We did, however, add three guinea pigs to the menagerie around the same time, which have been a lot of fun for the junior set.