Day 2051

Nothing went as planned today. I woke about 4 AM to the now familiar smell of poop. Dot had pooped in her bed again. I cleaned up the mess, took it outside in a plastic bag and found myself face-to-face with an armadillo on the back porch. The armadillo seems to return every August like clockwork to tear up the yard, and here he was, right on schedule. After I put Dot's soiled blankets in the washer, I went back to bed and tried to go to sleep again. Unfortunately, I was wide awake by now.

When everybody else woke up about an hour later, I was already tired. I kept thinking that Dot looked a little unsteady on our morning walk, but probably the only unsteady one in the group was me. I really need to start getting more sleep. When we returned from our walk, the dogs still had enough energy to bark at me as I ate my breakfast.  I can quiet them for a while by feeding them slices of banana, but barking has just become a part of their morning ritual. They think it's fun.

Work is still pretty slow, so I organized files for a while and did my bookkeeping. For some reason I decided to recharge a very old Sony Vaio laptop and see if it still worked. It didn't. I kept getting an error message saying "operating system not found." I did a little investigation and realized that the hard drive had gone bad. It wouldn't have been that difficult to replace the hard drive and install a new operating system, but I wondered it it was even worth the trouble. This was an old, very slow computer that was running Windows 98 the last time I looked. I guess I could install Linux on the thing and keep using it, but why bother. An old, slow computer that won't boot is basically just a paperweight.

Since I failed to resurrect the old computer, I thought I'd try to resurrect an equally old watch. There was nothing special about the watch, other than the fact that I had to remove eight very tiny screws to open the case and replace the battery. The tiny screws were why I had avoided the watch for so long in the first place. I carefully removed each small screw, replaced the battery and just about had the watch back together when I managed to strip the threads reinserting the very last screw. Clumsy me. Now I need an exceedingly small screw extractor so I can try to remove the broken screw from the watch. Again, is it even worth the trouble? It's a cheap watch that I'd only worn twice in five years. With this dismal track record, I didn't even try to fix anything else today.

I managed to fix my dinner without burning anything and got Dot situated in her safe place again, so I could go to an evening animal rescue meeting. We talked about the next fundraising event and it was decided that I'll be taking a promotional picture for the event featuring dogs, cats, a parrot, a miniature pig, and a snake. This ought to be interesting. Tomorrow, I'll look for a source for very tiny screws.

Queenie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day