Day 3725

I think I figured out a way that my Facebook readers can still see the blog. I created a new Facebook Group called Some Assembly Required and each night after I publish my blog entry, I take a picture of the post and upload it to the Facebook Group. There are no links and no text for the robot censors to pass judgement on. The only thing I'm actually putting on Facebook is a JPEG image. The group is private and only people who seem to like reading the blog anyway are invited. I think this is a clever plan. Let's see if Facebook can block this. If you read the blog on Facebook and didn't get invited, let me know and I'll add you to the group. I know who some readers are, but I certainly don't know all of you. If you have trouble reading the blog entry, just click on the picture and it will become larger, making everything much easier to see. I'm not sure if you are notified when new posts are added, but the Group is easy to find once you've joined. Let's see how this works. Posting this way is certainly a lot easier than convincing all of you to move to Twitter.

Today's big event was giving Dawn a bath. We took her to a self-wash place where we always used to bathe Dot and Dash. I didn't expect Dawn to enjoy the bath, but she was much better behaved than we expected. She even let the lady who runs the place clip her nails and clean her ears. Why did we go to all this trouble to get Dawn looking sparkly clean? Someone wants to look at her tomorrow and she might get adopted. Janet and I both have mixed feelings about Dawn going to a new home. She's a wonderful dog and we've become attached to her.

This is why so many fosters fail. I wanted to keep Ginny and it wouldn't have been hard to convince me to keep Hank. Basically, I've wanted to keep every Dalmatian we've had at the house. We knew this would happen when we agreed to foster dogs. The bottom line is that if Dawn gets a great home, that's all that matters. I still think that fostering is important. Janet and I don't have a dog now, which make our home the perfect place for a sick dog to recover or a scared, shy dog to develop trust. That doesn't make it any easier to say goodbye to Dawn though. She's just about perfect. We'll see what happens tomorrow. I don't think we would ever let Dawn go to a bad home. Dalmatian Rescue has an excellent record of matching the right people with the right dog.

I'm still worried that the Spring activities at McDonald Observatory are going to get cancelled at the last minute. I was shocked to learn today that SXSW was canceled this year. This is a huge event for the city of Austin. The city will lose millions and millions of dollars. Is the coronavirus really that bad or is this a case of mass hysteria? It's hard to tell at this point. If the observatory is going to cancel their Spring Break activities, I hope they tell me before I start the long drive to West Texas. I'd hate to discover that things have changed when I'm stopping for gas in Amarillo.

I think Spring might have finally arrived. Today was beautiful and I'm starting to see small flowers pop up everywhere. Crow Poison is always one of the first flowers to emerge. I wonder how this plant got its name. There are huge fields of the stuff in the park, but there are still plenty of Crows. Acording to Cherokee legend this plant was used to make a poison that would kill the crows eating their corn. The jury is still out on whether Crow Poison actually kills crows. Don't add any of the flowers to your salad though. The plants are poisonous to humans.

I bought some more socks and underwear today since I was told to bring enough clothes for my entire trip. Probably most volunteers would do this automatically. I like to travel light and would much rather do laundry every few days. I don't think this is an option.

Anne is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day