Day 4175

Another busy day. It's rare that I get two 20,000 step days in a row, but today was one of those days. The weather was pretty decent, so Dawn got her Sunday outing. She really likes the park we take her to on Sundays, but other places we've tried have been dismal failures. Dawn is a hard dog to figure out. I'm just glad when something works. We always get ice cream cones on Sunday. This time we remembered to bring towels so Dawn wouldn't get ice cream all over the car.

We finally got rid of all the dead Asian Jasmine in the back yard. We spent hours pulling the dead vines off our back fence, which looks pretty bare right now. Surprisingly, the Asian Jasmine that survived the big freeze is coming back strong. In a few years the yard will look just like it did before. This doesn't necessarily mean that the yard will look all that great. There are still several dead photinia trees, bare patches where the grass has died, and a half destroyed greenhouse that was damaged in one of our periodic windstorms.

I was tired after Dawn's Sunday outing and all the yard work, but I still took my long walk anyway. The park was surprisingly crowded today. It was probably the holiday weekend. Usually people stay away when the weather is cool and overcast. Now that crowds are returning everywhere, I'm starting to miss the lockdown. It was nice to fly on empty planes and drive on uncrowded roads. That's all over now. Everyone who has been waiting for an opportunity to gather together is making up for lost time.

I made another effort to understand PixInsight this afternoon. I watched the first four videos in a twelve part series called PixInsight for Total Beginners. The complex astrophotography processing software was still hard for me to understand. Photoshop was designed for and by visual people. PixInsight seems to have been designed by mathematicians. It's clear that the software can do some amazing things, but it's not intuitive at all. I still think that maybe I picked the wrong hobby.

It's difficult to learn things on your own. It's easy to go down a rabbit hole and become hopelessly lost. No wonder classes and clubs are popular. I seldom take classes. I'm too much of a loner. I flounder around and eventually figure out what I need to know on my own. I'm probably doing a lot of things backwards, but does it even matter? People sometimes ask why I use such an old version of Photoshop. My answer is always the same. I'm still discovering new things that CS5 will do.

I'm not sure whether we'll visit the Dalmatians tomorrow or not. The kennel might be closed for Memorial Day. It's hard for me to relate to this day. I've lived a long time and it still seems odd that I don't know a single person who died while in the military. All the people I knew from my parent's generation came back from World War II and Korea. Several people I knew in high school got sent to Vietnam and they all came back. I don't even know anyone who got sent to the Middle East during all the various Gulf Wars. A lot of people did die though. Were any of these wars even necessary? Maybe World War II, but the others accomplished nothing. I'm not a globalist. I guess I'm basically an isolationist at heart. We ought to make all our own stuff in our own factories and stay out of other people's business. 

Ollie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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