Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Day 4135

I slept well last night and my back is feeling better. This should have been enough to motivate me to get out of the house, but the car never left the driveway. Hey, I can always go vote and run my errands later. Oddly, my daily walks don't seem to count as "getting out of the house" anymore. These walks have become as firmly entrenched in an inflexible daily routine as the morning smoothie and the nightly blog post.

Don't think I wasn't busy however. Today was a day to pay bills. There were lots of them. I paid the bills online and then entered all the information in Quickbooks. Credit card bills take the longest, because I enter all the individual transactions as well. I don't know what it proves, but I think I've always been meticulous about keeping records. The Quickbooks files, the blog, the Fitbit statistics: they are all just records.

I also reserved a rent car for my trip to McDonald Observatory. The trip isn't that soon, but I keep reading articles about how rental cars are in short supply now. Even the rental car website urged me to make my reservation immediately, so I wouldn't be disappointed. I guess new cars at dealerships are in short supply as well. Blame the pandemic. Our supply chain apparently doesn't deal well with disruptions. Toilet paper, computer chips, my favorite cheese, Clorox wipes, and rental cars: it appears we are running out of everything.

I thought I'd take advantage of a free upgrade offer when I was reserving my car. Nope. The car I wanted doesn't qualify for an upgrade. The same thing happened a few weeks ago when I saw my running shoes on sale. Nope again. The brand was on sale, but not the particular shoe I wear for foot pain. This always happens. The things I like are never on sale. There's always some kind of camera equipment on sale, but I think I've paid full price for every lens I own.

Dawn was in a good mood today. We walked her early because Janet had things to do in the afternoon. She took the change of schedule well and didn't balk or freeze at all. I even thought she was going to walk longer for a while, but at the very end of her one mile loop, she turned and headed for home. Later in the day, Dawn sat out in the back yard with me for at least thirty minutes with no fear or hesitation whatsoever. She still won't eat her dinner if I'm out in the kitchen with her, but it's easy enough to go back to the office until she's finished. Whatever works is my motto. We all have issues and I really don't want to make life difficult for Dawn.

I spend enough time making life difficult for myself. Lately, I've been bothered that nobody is replying to my e-mails. NASA has never responded to my questions about accreditation. The magazines I write for haven't responded to queries about new articles. I haven't heard from my sister in several months. The computer memory I ordered is still lost as well. I probably just have too much time on my hands. Busy people don't spend nearly as much time writing as I do.

I'm glad I fixed the furnace. It's supposed to get down to near freezing tonight. What's that all about? All the plants that have been trying to recover from our big Winter freeze are now going to be hit with a late Spring frost. I could tell that a front was moving in when I took my long walk this afternoon. It was chilly, even thought the sky was clear and blue. With a light jacket, it was still an enjoyable walk. I picked up the pace quite a bit today and had very little foot pain. Not a bad day. Theres nothing big going on at the moment, but sometimes the little things are enough.