Day 4416

Another slow day. I had been planning on practicing with the star tracker again but got bogged down with a variety of irritating little tasks. Now we've got two running toilets. Both should be easy to fix, but I hesitate to mess with either of them. The last time I tried to install a new toilet kit, the fit was poor and I ended up with a leak at the base of the tank. At least the second toilet uses commonly available parts you can find at any Home Depot. The weird French toilet uses hard to find, expensive parts that are only available at one plumbing supply store in town. What do you do? I can buy a ten dollar toilet kit at Home Depot or pay a plumber a hundred dollars to install the same thing. Plumbers won't even touch the French toilet. I have to handle that myself anyway. I hate things that break all the time, but that doesn't stop them from breaking.

I had trouble getting my accounts to balance in Quickbooks today as well. This is irritating because the problem is always a data entry mistake I've made and never noticed. It's surprisingly hard to find a small mistake you made over a month ago. I eventually found the error and everything balances again but it took a while. It would be a lot easier to just make a journal entry and adjust the Quickbooks files to match what the bank says is correct. Mistakes always bother me though and in the long run it is always easier to take the time to find them.

I was surprised to learn that two more pieces of my model train collection have sold. Sales dropped off dramatically when Covid started and my dealer friend hasn't sold anything in over a year. I'm glad he's still in business. Maybe things are starting to look up again. Over half the collection has already sold, but a lot still remains. I may need to put this collection in my will. How did I ever acquire so many electric trains and construction models?

Today was a nice day for walking. I managed to get 20,000 steps without a lot of foot pain. Walking slower seems to help. I didn't see the eagles today but someone asked me about them. The word had gotten out about these birds and it appears like the entire city is out looking for them. I've heard that the park department might build a fence around their nesting area to keep people away. This is probably a good idea. Keeping the nesting area a secret didn't seem to work. You can't really keep anything a secret these days.

Janet said that Dawn did really well in training class tonight. She is much less fearful now and is a quick learner. I guess patience pays off. Dawn is even a lot friendlier with me now. I don't think she completely trusts me but we are definitely making progress. It's important that she learns to trust me because Janet wants to travel again. One of these days it's just going to be me and Dawn in the house for a while. I really don't want her to feel afraid while Janet is away.

I need to remember I've got a dental appointment tomorrow. It's just a cleaning but I've finally realized that dental hygiene is important. This cleaning was originally scheduled for weeks ago, but someone in the dentist's office got Covid and they had to close down for a while. Everyone seems to be catching Covid now. It's kind of amazing that Janet and I have managed to avoid it this long.

Jazz is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day