Day 2285

The Palladia appears to be working. When Dot had her Ultrasound scan this afternoon, there was no evidence that her cancer was continuing to grow. Everything appears to be stable. This was good news, although it does mean that she will need to continue her chemotherapy. We'll take things one month at a time, scanning her abdomen every thirty days to evaluate the status of the mass in her liver. Dot's oncologist seemed encouraged by today's results and told me that often the tumor starts to shrink after about three months of treatment. If Dot's mobility doesn't continue to deteriorate, I think we're OK. We can always discontinue the Palladia if it is making it harder for her to walk.

I went back to my original breakfast restaurant this morning. It was disappointing to see how much the new restaurant across the street has hurt their business. This morning, there were a lot of empty tables and it looked like they had to lay off some kitchen staff.  The food was still excellent, but you could see a look of resignation of everybody's faces. Things have changed.

It looked like the construction crews, cyclists, and moms who didn't have time to fix breakfast for their kids were still regular customers, but that the hipsters had all abandoned the place en masse. This confirmed something that I have long thought about hipsters. They are conformists at heart. If one hipster does something, they all have to do it.  Maybe this explains the proliferation of man buns, messenger bags, and Amish style beards. At any rate, the local hipster community has decided that the restaurant across the street is the place to be.

I got a call from the guy who has been hosting all my websites since the mid 1990's. He wanted to give me a heads up that he was planning on selling his business soon so he and his wife could travel more. The guy is 72 and I've been amazed that he's run a successful web hosting company for as long as he has. It's not an easy business. Almost every day someone is trying to hack into your servers and cause as much chaos as they can. I wished my friend well, but I was sad to hear the news of his retirement. It was the end of an era. I will probably have to move my websites somewhere else. There are plenty of places to choose from, but I really enjoyed having a friend I could talk to personally when things went haywire, instead of calling a tech support number and talking to somebody in India.

The decline of my favorite restaurant and the upcoming demise of my hosting company seem like different aspects of an ongoing trend. The march of time is gradually making my world irrelevant. Stores I have done business with for decades disappear overnight. Software I depend on is no longer supported. Clients retire or in some cases even die. I am forced to change or adapt just to survive. I don't like this. The world seemed as it should be from the day I graduated from college until the mid 1990's. Those were good times. Now, I can barely recognize where I am.

I'm always nervous that Google will abruptly decide to abandon Blogger someday. That would be just my luck. I'd wake up ready to continue my journey to Day 5000 and discover that my blog and all the other Blogger blogs had simply disappeared. It could happen. So much has changed already that further changes like this seem almost inevitable.

Nick is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day