trouble with preceding:: and parsing xhtml

I have some xhtml documents that I want to process with XSL.  The patterns
that I'm interested in have a series of occurances of "div" element in pairs
as in:

<xhtml...>
<head/>
<body..>
<table...>
<tr..>
<td...>
<div tid="field"><a href="...">Foo</a></div>
<table...>
<tr...>
<td...>
<div class="category_data">Bla,Bla,Bla</div>
<...>

this pattern of the two pairs of div variations repeats an arbitrary number of times 
throughout the document and there could be other "div" elements interspersed,
but not with the same qualifying attributes.


Note that the "div" with "class='category_data'" is not a descendant of the first "div[@tid='field']"
I don't think these pairs of DIVs are siblings either (at the same level).

Basically, I'm trying to generate XML of name-value pairs where the name
comes from the content of the <a/> in the first "div[@tid='field']", and the value is the
content of the second "div[@class='category_data']".

So the output should be:
<Field name="Foo">Bla,Bla,Bla</Field>

Where the value of the "name" attribute is the content of the input doc's
div[@tid='field']/a, i.e. in this example, 'Foo'

...and the content of "Field" is the content of the input doc's
div[@class='category_data']



Since the the second div is not a descendant of the first, I can't capture 
the <a/> content in a variable and call <xsl:apply-templates select="div[@class='category_data']"/>
with a parameter.

The question is how else to pass data from one template to another template?

I tried "reaching back" from the second template by using preceding::div[@tid='field']
but this retrieved the value of the first node matching "div[@tid='field']" not
the immediately preceding node that matches, as I would have expected.  Then I tried
preceding::div[@tid='field' and last()] - same result; always the same value and
always the value of the very first node that matched.

I guess I have no idea how "preceding::" is supposed to work.


I would greatly appreciate any help.  

Thanks,

   -Chris

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:strip-space elements="div a"/>

<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:message>***** ROOT</xsl:message>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="//h:div"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="h:div[@tid='field']">
  <xsl:message>***** DIV1</xsl:message>
  <xsl:apply-templates select="h:div"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="h:div[@class='category_data']">
  <xsl:param name="fname"/>
  <xsl:message>***** DIV2</xsl:message>
  <xsl:message>^<xsl:value-of select="preceding::h:div[@tid='field']"/>^</xsl:message>
  <xsl:element name="Field">
    <xsl:attribute name="name">
      <xsl:value-of select="preceding::h:div[@tid='field']"/>
    </xsl:attribute>
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
  </xsl:element><xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
        <xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="text()">
  <xsl:message>***** TEXT</xsl:message>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>