Day 2389

Do you feel like you are inundated with an onslaught of spam and phishing scams? I do. Everyday my inbox is filled with e-mail spam and bogus offers. My land line is worthless. Nobody calls the land line anymore except for telemarketers and scammers. Today I received a voicemail that implied that I was in big trouble and needed to return the call immediately to avoid being called before a grand jury. This seemed highly unlikely, so I entered the phone number in the Bad Numbers website and sure enough it was a scam. Hundreds of other people had received exactly the same message today. The older I get, the more I find myself a target of these scams. Scammers target older people because they are more vulnerable. I don't understand the mentality of a scammer. Some scams are very elaborate and require a lot of thought. Wouldn't it be easier to just get a real job and work for a living?

I could tell that Dot was tired today at our physical therapy session. Part of the problem was that she was stressed from riding in the car. When Dot is stressed, she always poops in the car, which makes me stressed as well. It also didn't help that the water in the treadmill tank was too warm. Dot likes the water cold, although most of the other dogs apparently like it warm. At any rate, she didn't bring her A Game to therapy today. When she got home, she pooped in her bed and made another big mess. She's fine now, but it's been a long day for both of us.

I wonder if the new fiber optic lines in the neighborhood are working? I haven't seen the AT&T installation crews for weeks and everything looks finished, but my Internet speed hasn't improved a bit. If anything, it has gotten slower. I'm not even sure who to ask about this. It's not surprising that the AT&T technical support people in India or Indonesia don't know anything about the fiber optic line. Why would they? I thought the folks at the AT&T store a few miles down the road could give me some answers, but they didn't know anything about the new lines either. If I hadn't seen the men laying the cable with my own eyes, there would be no reason to believe that anything had happened at all.

It's amazing how polarized our society has become. I'm a channel flipper and I compulsively use the remote to switch back and forth between channels while I eat breakfast. Sometimes I'll see exactly the same news story explained in three completely different ways. If you only listen to one account, you'd probably believe what you were hearing was true. When you hear competing views presented in real time as fact, it can get confusing. I think we've gotten truth and belief all mixed up. The Internet is even worse. People go to elaborate lengths to make up false stories and present them as true. I'm not talking about obvious satire or websites like The Onion. There are some serious efforts to deceive out there. Why? I'm a simple person and I'd like to know what's really going on without having to check Snopes.com all the time. What if what I'm reading on Snopes isn't even true? That would be really disorienting.

I've got a day of rest tomorrow and then on Friday, I've got to load Dot in the car again and take her to another vet appointment. She's due for her monthly re-check at the cancer center. This time we'll be doing a chest x-ray in addition to the usual Ultrasound scan and blood work. Sometimes I wonder if this extensive monitoring is even necessary, and then I remember how some of our first dogs died suddenly and painfully when nobody realized that they had cancer. It's always good to know what's going on. There will always be a lot that I don't know, but I do make an effort.

Sparky is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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