Day 1571

Friday's are a bit different now. First Dash goes to the cancer center. Next Dot eats breakfast and gets a walk by herself. After that, I go out for breakfast and get groceries. When I come home, I take a shower, and then I usually get a phone call saying that Dash is finished with his treatment and ready to come home again. You pay by the week at the cancer center, and every Friday they hand you a bill when you arrive. Time passes quickly. We have already finished nine radiation treatments.

I didn't feel like my usual poached eggs and pulled pork this morning, so I went to a different restaurant. This place has had some management changes and although the menu hadn't changed, everything featured on the menu is cooked differently now. I ordered a familiar omelet dish and what I received looked very unfamiliar. Maybe the reason I like my favorite restaurant so much is that the chefs are actually the owners and nothing ever changes.

Considering that the today's beautiful Spring weather was tailor made for gardening and mowing the lawn, I actually got quite a bit of writing done. I managed to complete three articles today and still had time to update at least one website. My website woes are far from over. I'm discovering that as web hosts continue to move and upgrade their servers, many of my favorite scripts no longer work anymore. One of my sites lost all its online forms recently when the hosting company changed how customers are able to access the CGI/BIN directory. I suppose the hosting company still supports CGI, but I will have to re-write some code to get the forms to work again. If they eliminated the directory entirely, I'm going to be really mad. I've always been a firm adherent to the time honored "if it's not broke, don't fix it" idiom. Apparently very few people approach life this way. I am continually having people change things on me that were working perfectly fine.

I've started noticing poison ivy growing in the park again. First snakes, and now poison ivy. It's enough to make me start longing for winter again. Every year, the patches of poison ivy seem to grow larger and more pervasive. Pretty soon the remnants of Texas Native Prairie that everyone is so proud of will be nothing but a big patch of poison ivy and Johnson Grass.

Luckily, these invasive pest plants haven't ruined the park yet. Today I noticed that one of my perennial favorites, the diminutive Prairie Verbena was in bloom again. Almost overnight, the meadows have become filled with these ringlike circles of small flowers.

It looks like it's going to be a nice weekend. An absence of pending chores and a mercifully short "to do" list might make the next two days even nicer. Dash gets a rest this weekend, and hopefully, so do we.

Dottie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day