The Yahoo board is one short.

Edward Kozel, a former Cisco CTO and now a VC and a Yahoo board member since October of 2000, tendered his resignation Thursday saying he meant to leave in February but stayed on because of Microsoft’s unsolicited acquisition proposal. Now he’s going to do what he intended and spend more time with his family, including relocating them to Europe this summer.

How odd. He’s at the center of a situation pregnant with possibilities affecting an industry and all he can think of is spending more time with his family? Hmmm.

Yahoo told the SEC that with him gone it’s reducing the size of its board from 10 to nine.

The company then nominated the rest of its incumbent board for re-election, pitting it against activist stockholder Carl Icahn’s shadow slate of replacements willing to sell the company to Microsoft, if Microsoft can be persuaded to buy it.

The move sets the scene for continuing, longer-playing drama since Yahoo has also moved back its scheduled July 3 stockholders meeting to some unspecified time toward the end of the month.

And according to a Yahoo filing with the SEC, other Yahoo stockholders want to run their own candidates for the board.