Day 2199

It was a quiet day. I don't think I'll hear from my clients again until the first of the year. I'm more or less caught up on things, so I spent the day catching up on correspondence and wrapping Christmas presents. Correspondence these days mostly consists of talking to customer service about broken things. My favorite weather radar application crashed recently, so I needed to figure out how to get it running again. Since the application is subscription based, I couldn't just download a fresh copy and start over. First, I had to prove that I actually had a subscription when no records of it seemed to exist. It was my fault, since I apparently forgot to register the software, but the whole process was still far more complex than it needed to be. The fact that I subscribed to this service in the first place shows how addicted to weather radar I am. I generally hate the entire software subscription model and stubbornly continue to use outdated copies of all the Adobe products to avoid subscribing to the dreaded Creative Cloud. It's a good thing I wasn't busy, because it took several hours to get the weather radar working again on all my devices.

Two more watch winders have broken, so I sent another letter to the watch winder company, asking for a return authorization number. Hopefully, they will fix these two like they did with the first one. The company was very nice when the first winder broke and sent me a brand new replacement at no charge. I wonder if they'll continue to be this nice when they discover that every product I've bought from them has turned out to be defective. Truthfully, I probably don't even need the watch winders anymore, since I've gone over to the dark side and wear the Apple Watch almost exclusively now. Judging from the reviews I'm probably in the minority here, but I really like the Apple Watch.

I finished wrapping my Christmas presents this morning and put them under the tree. Dalmatian Rescue used to do gift wrapping at local bookstores during the holiday season as a fundraiser and I got surprising good at wrapping packages. It's not a skill I use much anymore, but my packages do look clean and crisp. I doubt that I'll wrap any more packages until this time next year.

When we were returning from walking the dogs this morning, I saw the garbage truck coming down the street. WTF? My trash can was not out at the curb yet and neither were the cans of most of my neighbors. Why was trash pickup two days early?  Maybe it was because Christmas was on a Friday this year. At any rate, since the automated trash truck goes up one side of the street and then returns along the other side, I had time to get my can in place just before the truck picked it up and dumped it in the hopper. Of course the can was mostly empty. Most of this week's trash was still in the house.  It's silly to obsess about the garbage truck, but since the city only picks up once a week now, trash can pile up fast.

The humidity was so low today that I didn't even need the dehumidifier. Since the temperature was in the low 70's, I opened the back door and a few windows and let the dry outside air come inside. I used to just leave the back door open on rare days like this, but now I'm afraid that Dot will try to wander outside without her harness and hurt herself. A single unsupervised attempt to chase a squirrel could instantly erase months of physical therapy. I let Dot stay outside as long as she wants, but I'm always there to hold up her rear legs. There was only a small amount of poop to clean up today. It was a big improvement over yesterday's disaster. I'm getting almost as good at cleaning up poop in the house as I am at wrapping packages. I should add these skills to my resume.

Ziggy is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day