Day 1589

I stopped to get some tickets to a neighborhood tour of homes when I was driving home from the post office today. Unfortunately, they wouldn't take credit cards, so I'll have to make another trip later. Sometimes these local home tours are fun. I know where most of the houses are and and am often curious what they look like on the inside. Our house could easily be on one of these home tours if we had picked designer decor instead of Dalmatians many years ago. I'm glad we picked Dalmatians though, even though they've made a mess of the doors and the furniture.

If you know where to look, you can still see impressions in the woodwork left by Spot's puppy teeth when he was teething.  There is still a giant hole that Petey tore in the carpet while he was trying to dig a hole to China during a thunderstorm. I've conveniently covered up the hole by placing the large format printer on top of it. Greta was the most destructive. She chewed holes in most of the decorative throw pillows in the living room and completely destroyed a beautiful set of Palazzetti Tomasa dinning room chairs. Despite all this, there is no doubt that the dogs have made me a better person. I don't care about all the dents and scratches. It wasn't always this way. If you think I'm OCD now, you should have seen me back in the days when I arranged all the furniture with zen-like precision and didn't even want anyone to sit in it.

We watched a news crew from the local NBC affiliate set up for a live segment on the evening news while we were taking our evening walk. It looked like a big deal because they even had a news helicopter overhead. There's a big controversy right now about building a restaurant in the park. The city wants the restaurant. The neighbors don't. I have a feeling that the neighbors will ultimately lose this battle, but who knows. The city has already turned an arboretum on the other side of the park into a hugely profitable venture. They'd probably like to do the same thing with our section of the park. I'm sure the park department would monetize every square inch of the park if they could get away with it. Personally, I don't mind the idea of a restaurant. I don't like to drive and it would give me a place to eat that I could easily walk to. I do hate the city's efforts to turn the park into an urban entertainment center though. When I first moved to the neighborhood, the park wasn't even on the city's radar. It was largely abandoned and seemed authentically wild and natural. Now it's just becoming a park department version of Disneyland.

Dash sailed though his annual physical with flying colors today. This is usually when he gets his rabies shot and any other necessary vaccinations, but we decided to wait on these until his cancer treatment is finished. Dash has more than enough to deal with right now, without the addition of even more meds that might cause an adverse reaction or additional stress. We'll catch up on the vaccinations later.

Work has been unusually slow this month. Since I had the time, I decided to gather up all the twigs and dead limbs I could find and take them out to the street for bulky trash day. I was surprised that there was still so much brush around the yard to gather up. Wasn't this what I hired the landscape guys to do last month?  At any rate, for the first time in about six months, I managed to get this chore completed before big trash day. I think the trucks are coming to pick things up tomorrow.

Mindy is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day