Day 4467

All is well that ends well. Janet is home again and Dawn is a very happy dog. Actually today was Dawn's best day this week. She was finally starting to relax a little. I could clearly see the fear and uncertainty start to recede. Who knows. If Janet's vacation had lasted a few days longer we might have started to bond. I'm glad the week is over though. It's been a tough week for both of us. Dawn had to work really hard to overcome her many fears. Her worst day was when she threw up on the bed and refused to eat her breakfast. My worst day was when I felt like I'd come down with the flu. I have no idea if I really had the flu or not, but I had a persistant cough, was running a fever, and everything ached. I feel quite a bit better now and of course Dawn is over the moon now that Janet has returned..

I was determined to get something done today. I wrote several query letters with proposals for future articles. I guess it's a good sign that I've already received one reply. There's a launch in early April that Spaceflight would like me to cover, so I've already applied with Space X for credentials. Space X is much easier to deal with than NASA, so I'm optimistic that this is going to work out. The proposal I sent to Sky & Telescope might take a while to percolate to somebody's desk. They have always been very slow to respond. At least I did something. I was getting to the point where I was becoming too discouraged to even try.

I'm not sure how long I can continue taking my daily long walks. It's not fun anymore and the foot pain keeps getting worse. Usually only the last mile is terrible, so I'm thinking of scaling back my walks to 10,000 steps a day. That's less than half of what I can do on a good day, but I haven't had a good day in a long time. Maybe I'm wrong but I think reducing my daily mileage is a lot better than just quitting.

I had to make a non-standard change on the Dalmatian Rescue website today and it took me forever to remember how to write the code. I kept wanting to revert to the old way I used to build static sites years ago. This didn't work because I need to use the new mobile friendly website code. Why have I forgotten all this? I eventually figured out what I needed to do, but it was a bit disconcerting to see how quickly skills fade away if you don't use them everyday. I guess this is why I still do a daily blog post and take pictures with my phone whenever I see something interesting. If you want to call yourself a creative person, you've got to have some skin in the game.

I hope now that life has returned to normal I can finally get some sleep. Dawn and I didn't sleep well this week. The slightest noise would wake Dawn and she would sit up in the bed and look real alert until she thought the danger had past. This would usually wake me up as well. My problem was that I was always either too hot or too cold. The temperature never seemed right and my sleep stats on Fitbit and my Apple Watch were very strange. My resting heart rate was much higher than usual and my respiration rate was all over the place. At any rate, I'm tired of feeling poorly. Maybe I just don't handle stress very well.

It's hard to believe that it's already time to go grocery shopping again. My list will probably be longer than usual this week because the refrigerator is looking pretty empty. The pot roast that Janet fixed lasted all week. I don't know whether I'll need to get gas since I didn't go anywhere this week. The car never left the driveway. Hopefully the car will start tomorrow.

Skippy is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day