Day 2090

The holiday weekend is getting off to a good start. Miraculously, the dogs let us sleep in a little this morning. Even though we got up later, Dot didn't poop in her bed. That's always a good sign. We set off on our morning walk around 7:30 AM, which is much later than normal. Dot continues to get stronger and I've noticed recently that she is actually starting to walk a little faster. Dash, on the other hand, is still acting strange. He is still finicky about eating in the morning, but seems completely normal the rest of the day. I don't know what's wrong. Maybe nothing is wrong at all. We're thinking about switching the brand of food he eats, just to see if that makes a difference. I'll ask the oncologist if we need to bring in Dash for another round of tests when I take Dot for her next Ultrasound scan this coming Friday.

Having bacon for breakfast made it seem like a holiday, but when I turned on the computer and checked my e-mail, I knew it was going to be another work day. There was a long list of website revisions to make. I guess I could have postponed the updates until Tuesday, but it made much more sense to go ahead and do them now. It's not like I was going to do anything special today anyway. Today's changes involved altering a Wordpress site. I've grown to hate Wordpress because clients often pick a template and then immediately set about trying to change it. It is almost always easier for me to create a custom site than it is to modify someone else's Wordpress template. Oh, well. Like I said, I didn't have much to do today.

We're trying to figure out how to clean the rugs we use to keep Dot from falling in the house. The little ones will fit in the washing machine, but most of them are too big even for commercial laundromat machines. The rugs in the kitchen are the worst, because that's where the dogs like to hang out. The Dyson is pretty amazing, but even this super vacuum is no match for two Dalmatians eating breakfast for several months. I'm torn between buying a power washer and renting one of those Bissell carpet cleaners. A power washer might actually work pretty well, since the rugs are all made of synthetic material that dries quickly. I need to clean all the spider webs off the windows anyway, so why not take the rugs outside and clean them both with a power washer at the same time. The only downside to this plan is that we'd have to buy even more rugs, so Dot would have something to walk on while the other rugs dried. If I spent my time trying to solve real problems instead of fretting about dirty rugs and broken optical drives, Lord knows what I might accomplish.

Yes, I did make one more attempt to revive the DVD burner in my desktop Mac. I failed again. The thing is probably just dirty, but there is no easy way to clean these drives anymore. My older Mac towers had flat CD trays that slid out to insert a disc. You could buy special cleaning discs that had a little brush glued to the surface of the disc. You would put some solvent on the brush, insert the cleaning disc in the players and run it for a few minutes. The brush cleaned off the laser head and almost always cured sluggish or faulty optical drives. If worse came to worse, you could just unscrew the entire broken drive from the chassis and replace it with a new one. New Macintosh computers are completely different. Almost nothing is meant to be serviced yourself. Some components are epoxied directly to the motherboard, so they can't be removed at all. I have no idea how I'd remove the optical drive from my current Mac. You can't even open the case. I'm sure Apple would prefer that I just buy a new one.

It looks like I'm going to have time to go to the gym tomorrow. I skipped my workout last Sunday since I was doing the photoshoot with the two children and their menagerie of animals. Nothing exciting like that this weekend, so it looks like I'll have to burn off some calories on the treadmill.

Allie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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