Day 2108

It seems to take longer and longer to get Dot to her physical therapy sessions. Today, when I started to get her ready, she didn't have her harness on. It took quite a while to get her suited up, since she wanted to sleep instead. When I got her ready to go, she wanted to go out in the back yard instead of to the car. Once I had her outside, she stood around aimlessly for about five minutes and did nothing. She didn't even pee. When I finally got her in the car, we were already late. Traffic appears to be worse on Wednesdays too. I'm, glad we'll go back to Thursday sessions next week.

For the second week in a row, Dot seemed tired. We slowed the treadmill to one mile an hour and her walk was steady, but she used to be able to do much better. The treadmill speed goes all the way up to five miles an hour. That's pretty fast even for a regular human treadmill. I asked what the faster speeds were for and apparently dogs who compete in agility events use the treadmill's faster speeds for conditioning and endurance training. I imagine that there is a lot of water splashing around at five miles an hour. Dot enjoys the acupuncture portion of her therapy more than the treadmill. I think it relaxes her. Even though Dot is slowing down, we're still hanging in there. The therapy and the morning walks really do help.

I upgraded my Apple Watch to the new 2.0 operating system today. The upgrade took forever. Since you can't really plug the watch into anything, software upgrades have to be done using the Bluetooth connection to your phone. I guess the software download goes from the Apple server to your phone, and then from your phone to the watch. I initially got a bunch of error messages saying that I didn't have enough storage space available for the download. I abandoned the download, took Dot to the vet, and when I got home again thought I'd try downloading the software again. Apparently, it never stopped downloading the first time I tried, because the progress bar said that there were only 48 minutes left before the download was complete. That was a lot better than the eleven hours to completion message I got before taking Dot to physical therapy. The error messages were all gone too. Apparently the computers knew what they were doing, even if I didn't. I ate dinner, walked Dash, and when I got back, the new 2.0 operating system had been installed. The whole procedure seemed to take about six hours.

A former client called me this evening and asked if I could help him edit his Dad's first novel. This really wasn't my area of expertise, but I enjoyed catching up on things. When we used to work together, we both had a Dalmatian. I asked him if he still had Dalmatians and we spent the next twenty minutes talking about a succession of great dogs who lived long and happy lives, only to die of cancer at the end. Between the two of us, we had shared our lives with over a dozen Dalmatians.

I'm not Catholic or even very religious, but I've got to admit that I like Pope Francis. If only our own politicians could be this humble and direct. When politicians call themselves "public servants," it's a joke. The pope really does appear to be a public servant. He doesn't rely on opinion polls or focus groups, he just asks himself, "what would Jesus have done." I'm not sure that this philosophy would work for politicians though. It probably doesn't make the Vatican very happy either. If the president kept asking "What would George Washington have done" before making a decision, a lot of outcomes would be very different. I don't agree with everything the Pope says, but you could learn a lot from his simplicity and directness.

I'll need to remember not to go to physical therapy again tomorrow. We did that today. I'm so set in my routines that I could easily imagine putting Dot in the car and repeating things tomorrow. That's why I need the Apple Watch. I can't remember anything.

Sage is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day