Day 1446

It's hard for me to remember what day it is on holiday weekends. Since I did most of my regular weekend chores yesterday, there was little for me to do today. With Thanksgiving out of the way, it was time to go looking for the Christmas decorations at the storage warehouse. I'm always amazed at how neat and tidy the warehouse looks in comparison to our house. I wish my office looked as nice as my storage warehouse. Maybe it would if everything in the office remained untouched for months at a time.

It's an unfortunate fact of life that doing things almost inevitably creates a mess. Doing things with dogs creates an even bigger mess.  I don't help matters by being such a pack rat either. Almost everything in my tidy storage warehouse came out of my messy office. It's hard to believe that I have removed so much stuff from the office and it still looks full.

The weather was so warm today that I decided to wash the car. I like washing the car. It is a simple task with tangible results. Getting my large format printer working again is a much more difficult task. I've been using the supplies that UPS finally delivered with mixed results. I think I'll eventually be able to clear the clogged lines, but it is almost certain that I will use up all my ink in the process. I'm beginning to wonder if there's a point to this madness. I feel the same way about the watches I've collected. At some point in the distant past they all worked. Now, the batteries in the watches with quartz movements are all dead and many of the mechanical watches need cleaning. I took three of these watches to my watchmaker over two years ago for service. They still aren't done. These watches are still making better progress than the repairs on my Citroën Maserati. That car has been in the shop for over nine years.

My possessions are literally screaming at me to simplify my life. I won't live long enough to replace all the dead batteries,  re-solder all the loose wires, and clean all the gunk out of various dirty fuel lines. Mechanical things make me happy, but why do they always break? Oddly, things seem to deteriorate whether you use them of not. Batteries corrode and leak inside of old tape recorders. Gas goes bad and won't even ignite after several seasons of sitting in the fuel tank of an unused rototiller. Radiator hoses crack and break even if the car they're connected to is sitting on blocks inside a garage.

What's a boy to do? I don't need to be reminded that it's all ashes to ashes and dust to dust in the end. My own body has been telling me that for years. All is not lost though. There's actually a smile on my face right now. As I was writing this somewhat gloomy missive, I received a message on the printer display panel that the lines are clear. The printer lives!

Belle is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day