Day 2092 - Labor Day

You could tell it was a holiday this morning. The park was filled with cyclists and joggers when we took the dogs on their early morning walk. Judging from the number of people we saw, Labor Day is pretty universally observed. Unlike President's Day and other seemingly optional holidays, everybody stayed home from work today.

I stayed home too, but that didn't keep me from working. As soon as we finished breakfast, I went up on the roof and removed the water from Saturday's brief, but surprisingly heavy rainfall. Just like our last rainfall, I wished that I'd remembered to sweep away all the pecan shells first. If you've ever gathered these nuts, you've probably realized what an effective and permanent brown dye they make. Nothing seems to remove the stains left by pecan and walnut hulls. I"m really tempted to ask the roofers if they could paint the roof to match the color of these persistent stains, because they are not going away. You may wonder why I chose a white roof in the first place. I was under the impression that the special coating would get me a nice tax credit the year it was applied, but my accountant said the roof didn't meet the government's energy efficiency guidelines for some odd technical reason. Oh, well. Screwed by the government once again.

Since I was already outside, I decided to wash the car when I finished with the roof. The car seems to get dirty whether I drive it or not. Birds shit on it. Sticky tree sap sticks to the windows. And the wheels are perpetually coated with a mix of road grease and brake pad dust. It's almost impossible to clean the house theses days, but the car is a smaller challenge. It makes me feel good to see a clean car. I may not be able to keep everything spotless, but at least this tiny little chunk of the universe is still under my control.

I thought I'd finished my website work yesterday, but apparently not. I got input for some additional pages that needed to be created in this morning's e-mail and then I noticed on Facebook that two dogs needed to be removed from an animal rescue website because they had been adopted. Increasingly, animal rescue websites are just an afterthought. The real news goes out on Facebook now.

I think we've solved Dash's eating disorder. He was just bored. Janet got two different brands of food to try yesterday and we filled Dash's bowl with one of the new choices this morning. He gobbled it down like he was eating a steak dinner. It's a shame that Dash doesn't like his regular food anymore, because it was perfect for him. It made life easier to feed Dot and Dash the same thing too. Maybe if he eats this new food for a while, we can re-introduce the original food and he'll think it's new again. You can't fool a dog all the time, but sometimes you can. It's worth a try anyway.

Janet goes back to work tomorrow. I go back to having my fruit smoothies for breakfast. Hopefully, Dot doesn't go back to pooping on the floor. We've had a nice accident free holiday.

Bailey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day