Day 2865

There was frost on the ground this morning. That's close enough to Winter for me. I was cold when I woke up this morning, but was happy to hear the furnace running. Cold weather brings back memories of recurring furnace problems, ice storms, and power outages. My memories of snow are fading. It just doesn't snow down here anymore.

We got an early start this morning. Even though Janet got up extra early to go to this year's Race For The Cure, Dash still wanted her to feed him breakfast before she left. Since Dash was wide awake, I ate breakfast early as well. We were both ready to walk before the sun came up. Dash has a coat he usually wears in the Winter. So far, I can't figure out how to put it on over all his other gear. Luckily, it wasn't that cold this morning. I did wear a down ski jacket and wool hat though. I like to stay warm.

When I took an Instagram picture this morning, I noticed that something had changed. The format of the pictures was different. Why do people keep changing things? The old Instagram pictures were the perfect size for the blog. These new ones looked like they would have to be cropped and enlarged. After I thought about it a bit, I realized what Instagram had done. They'd changed their latest app update to optimize pictures for the newest iPhones. Since I have an older phone, I got left in the dust.

There were more app update surprises when I checked my blood pressure later in the day. The Withings app on my phone now had a Nokia brand. Didn't Nokia used to make phones? When I put the wireless blood pressure cuff on my arm, I got a message saying that I need to update my hardware before I could proceed. If I knew it was going to be this much trouble, I would have waited until next month to take my blood pressure.

At least nothing has changed with the refrigerator. It still appears to be keeping food cold. Based on the last tike I defrosted the evaporator coil, the temperature should be warming up again if there was still a problem. The temperature in the refrigerator is still 40 degrees and there is no visible ice on the back side of the freezer compartment, so maybe everything is working properly again. I hope so. There are plenty of other problems to solve.

We forgot that today was National Drug Take Back Day. There was a pile of expired meds that we wanted to get rid of and the collection location was near our house. It's too bad we forgot. Everybody probably has expired meds in their medicine cabinet. You usually end up taking all the antibiotics you were prescribed, because doctors make a point of telling you to take them all. Pain pills are different. They usually just say "take as needed" on the bottle. Dentists are notorious for prescribing too many pain pills. You don't tend to throw these pills away when you quit taking them. Instinctively, you keep them in the medicine cabinet, thinking "Well, what if I'm in pain again. I may need them." Usually you forget about them after a while and they go bad.

I looked on the DEA website to see if there was another collection location and it just said to throw the unused pills down the toilet. What? I thought the whole point of the take back program was to keep you from throwing pills down the toilet. I've always thought throwing pills down the toilet could pollute the water supply. Shows what I know. It turns out that the real pollution problem comes from people peeing. I guess this makes sense. Millions of people are taking millions of meds and their bodies aren't processing everything. Neither is the sewage system. One more reason there are to many people in the world.

On that happy note, I'll call it a day. I got one more pair of rubber dog boots repaired today and found everything on my grocery list. not bad. It was a little cold, but I'm not complaining. The furnace still works.

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