Day 3543

There was something new on the menu when I went to breakfast this morning. I ordered the Braised Short Rib Benedict basically because anything new on a hot Friday morning is a plus. The odd meaty concoction tasted more like a pot roast than ribs and the creamy sauce definitely wasn't Hollandaise. Hey, I'm easy to please when all I've got ahead of me is a long walk in the park.

I picked up something for dinner on the way home and got ready to walk. It's a little harder to leave the house now with a huge tree blocking the path to the back gate. This weather is really getting old. I'm encountering fewer joggers now and even the cyclists are starting to have second thoughts about a ride through the park. If the prairie grass gets much drier it's going to be a fire hazard. The city doesn't usually mow the areas designated as Native Prairie, but occasionally the risk of a grass fire becomes too great. I wouldn't be surprised to see mowers soon.

Doing all my walking at once definitely saves some time. It also saves me the trouble of taking two showers. After I cooled down for a bit and had a piece of cheese for lunch, I decided to finish my article. I'm pleased to say the first draft is done. I'll do some editing and check for typos over the weekend before sending it to the magazine on Monday. It's admittedly a long shot sending an article to an astronomy magazine about a rainy day at an observatory where I saw nothing. Nothing ventured, nothing gained I say. I made the trip and it definitely was an interesting experience. Maybe others will be interested as well.

I'm still used to being paid well to write very short advertisements. Often a day's work wouldn't even fill up a single sheet of paper. Writing much longer pieces where the prospect of any form of payment is often non-existent seems strange. Luckily, I'm retired and don't have anything better to do. I think this would be a stressful way of making a living if you depended on the income.

Janet wants to clean out the greenhouse so we can get the repairs started. Seems like a good idea. It also seems like a lot of work. The building is filled with materials for projects that never got off the ground. There are old bags of fertilizer, half empty bottles of weed killer, a bunch of rusty garden tools, a tiller that never worked in our rock hard soil, several lawn mowers that broke years ago, and lots of unidentified stuff. I should probably keep the live traps that have caught everything from rats to raccoons. We have a lot of critters in our yard.

Tomorrow, we need to transport some of the new Dalmatians from the vet back to the boarding kennel. There are several dogs, so there will be other people helping as well. The dogs have had a rough life so far and have spent most of their time outdoors. The challenge now is to help socialize them and make sure they are healthy. I'm confident that the second phase of their life will be a lot better than the first.

April is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day