Day 3125

There are two types of people who go to the gym. There are the ones who spend half their time obsessively cleaning the equipment with disinfectant rags and there are the ones who don't. I find myself in the latter category. I've always found that the kids who ate dirt and food they'd dropped on the floor tended to be a little healthier. You need to build up your resistance to things. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm still alive. Some of my friends aren't.

I wonder when we started to worry about germs on treadmills? It wasn't always this way. Autism was almost unheard of when I was a kid. So were peanut allergies. If peanut allergies were a big deal in the 1950's, half my childhood friends would be dead. Every Mom in creation fed their kids peanut butter and jelly sandwiches constantly. Times are changing though. Southwest Airlines recently discontinued serving peanuts on flights. This was their signature item for decades. Who knows. Maybe peanuts weren't a big deal when I was a kid because everyone was still worried about polio and nuclear war.

Maybe germs and peanut allergies were always a problem, but we just didn't understand what was going on. I was listening to NPR on my way to the gym and there was a guy talking about how we have it all wrong about how the dinosaurs died. Conventional wisdom says a giant asteroid hit the earth, kicking up a huge cloud of dust that cooled the planet for centuries. The colder weather slowly killed the dinosaurs and lots of other things too. Not so fast, says this guy. New science says that when the asteroid hit, the impact sent a column of super heated gas, 100 times hotter than the sun, out past the moon. When the gas was pulled back to earth by gravity, it heated the atmosphere to almost 1000 degrees for several days, killing everything instantly that wasn't living in a cave. Which of these conflicting ideas is true? Probably neither. Humans don't really know all that much. We just like to think we do. If there are aliens out there, they might look at us the same way we view ants.

Personally I'm not very worried about germs or aliens this Summer. Spiders have got me bothered though. We've been invaded by spiders this year. I can't remember them ever being this bad. They're inside. They're outside. They're everywhere. I cleaned the webs from the house with the pressure washer less than a month ago, and the webs are all back. When I let Dash out to pee late at night, I always have to be wary of spiders building webs across the doorway. I've gotten them in my hair more than once. Most of the spiders are harmless, but we do have Brown Recluse Spiders in the area. Our first Dalmatian got bit by a spider and had a terrible allergic reaction. I don't want that to happen again.

Dash was much better today. He pooped on his walk like a normal dog and ate all his meals without throwing up. It was too hot to take much of an evening walk, but we're doing the best we can. If you get out early in the morning before the sun comes up, it is actually pretty nice.

I spent most of my time inside today. When I returned from the gym, I cleaned the house and watched a little TV. For some reason I've become fond of The Great British Baking Show. This is odd, because I don't really like to cook. I was pretty good at decorating cakes once. Back when Janet and I had more energy and time, we used to make the dogs some pretty amazing cakes on their birthdays.

I wonder whether the roofers will show up this week? They promised, but you know how that goes. Hopefully, they will realize that the weather is perfect for making repairs and that it will be easier to just get the job done than have me pestering them for the rest of the Summer

Lizzy is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day