Day 4297

As expected, they didn't finish working on my car today. I knew they wouldn't and it's not even a big deal. I think I am finished with the dealership. This whole experience was the last straw. I looked on the Internet and discovered two places in the Dallas area that exclusively work on Land Rovers. Both had excellent reviews along with much lower prices than the dealership. I don't know why I haven't looked for something like this earlier. I just got in the habit of going to the dealership. I liked the free loaner cars and the place wasn't far from my house. Now that the loaners cars aren't a sure thing and prices have gone through the roof, it looks like my loyalty to the dealership was a bad decision. It would be smarter to just pay for a rent car myself and take advantages of the lower prices at other repair shops.

The rain I was expecting last night never arrived. It was still dry this morning when we took our sunrise walk with Dawn. We have to leave later now because the days are getting shorter. I wish they would make the change back to Standard Time a little sooner. I don't care when it gets dark at night because I do almost everything in the morning now. It would be nice to wake up to sunlight again though.

My pace is improving on my long walks. I've lost weight, but I feel like I'm back to normal now. I'm probably ready to start lifting weights again. Truthfully, I was probably ready a week ago, but I just haven't felt like going to the gym. Something needs to be done about muscle atrophy, so I can't avoid the gym forever. I'll probably return as soon as the weather turns bad. Our beautiful Fall weather isn't going to last forever, so I might as well take advantage of it while it's here.

I still haven't heard anything from the observatory, but it might be best if I postponed any travel plans for a while. October is going to be an expensive month with car repairs, plumbing bills, along with various doctor and dental bills all coming due at the same time. Living on a fixed income is fine when nothing goes wrong, but you can start to feel poor pretty quickly when you are hit with surprises. I never liked surprises even when I was younger. Now I hate them.

I finally found something to enter in the Olympus photo contest. The theme for the contest was "Into the forest" and I had to go all the way back to 2004 to find a wildlife photo shot with an Olympus camera. This certainly wan't one of my best, but it will have to do. I'm glad the rules didn't stipulate a new Olympus camera. My photo of a male and female Mallard duck sitting on a log together was shot with one of the first serious digital cameras available. It took pictures natively in tiff format at 300 DPI. Even my current cameras don't do that anymore.

Janet said that Dawn did really well in training class tonight. Apparently, she's ready to graduate to a more advanced class starting next week. Progress with Dawn has been slow, but she is definitely becoming more comfortable with her new life. Dawn seems confident now and a lot of the fear she had initially is gone. When I fixed her dinner tonight, she was right there beside me and eager to eat. Six months ago this would have seemed impossible.

Sweetpea is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day