Day 1756

I awoke this morning to the unmistakable sound of rain pounding on the roof. A few minutes later, a loud thunderclap woke Dot and Dash. The storm phobic dogs didn't want to get out of bed, and frankly, neither did I. On a rainy Monday with lots to do, I'd almost always rather go back to sleep. It was raining so hard at one point that I was afraid we were going to lose our power all over again. Luckily, the downpour was short lived. I postponed walking the dogs while I ate breakfast, in hopes that the skies would clear. By the time I'd finished washing the breakfast dishes, the brief thunderstorm was over and we were on our way.

There are sections of the park we have to avoid these days. The area where the city has torn up our favorite trail to build a concrete bicycle path has become a huge mud pit after the recent rains. Last Thursday's violent windstorm uprooted an enormous number of trees, leaving some areas completely blocked. You have to be careful where you walk. Often trees that were left standing have huge limbs that were broken off and left dangling up in the tree. These branches can come crashing down at any time, so I'm always looking up before walking under a large mature tree. If your tree trimming business isn't doing so well, you might consider moving to Dallas. There is enough tree damage in this city to keep you busy for a very long time.

There was plenty of work to do today. I don't have local versions of some of the websites I manage on my laptop, so I had to wait until power returned before I could deal with the update requests. When I used to travel more, I would keep all my client's sites on the laptop as well, but they changed so frequently that it was a pain to keep the laptop and desktop computers in sync. I probably should start duplicating everything I do on the laptop again. I'm certain that this isn't the last power outage we'll ever experience.

I was pretty well caught on website changes by the end of the day and am working on writing assignments now. There is probably still a good day's work before I'm completely caught up, however. When I get finished, I'll climb up on the roof and see how much water this morning's thunderstorms left behind. Maybe I'll never get caught up. Today, I had to go out and pick up some more thyroid medicine for Dash. Tomorrow, I'll need to go to the grocery store and pick up some food for the rest of the week. Eating fresh produce has certainly increased the amount of time I spend at the grocery store, but I think it's worth it. Fresh is much better than frozen.

The nasty bird that always shits on my car has returned for the Winter. I don't know how long birds typically live, but I'm convinced this is the same bird. At least the spiders in the back yard are starting to disappear. I'm methodically starting to clean up the spiderwebs littering the back windows now. Maybe we'll have sparkling clean windows again by Thanksgiving. There was one good thing about last Thursday's wind storm. The wind blew away all the remaining dead branches that were stuck in our Live Oak trees after the power company left them behind when they trimmed the trees during last Winter's ice storm power outage. Another problem solved. I always like it when doing nothing turns out to be the right thing to do.

Cassie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day