Thursday, April 14, 2022

Dasy 4494

I'm losing track of the days again. I thought it was Friday for a while this morning. Nope, it's only Thursday. It's an easy mistake to make when all days seem more or less the same. Now that the days are getting longer, our sunrise walks with Dawn don't seem quite so early anymore. The sun is usually well above the horizon before we leave the house. It's interesting to see where Dawn will lead us on these walks. Now that she is more confident, she takes a slightly different path each day. I don't really think she's being adventurous. She's a dog and is probably just following interesting smells.

After breakfast this morning I wrote an overdue letter to my sister and took it to the post office. In all the years we've lived here, I've never just left a letter in our mailbox for the postman to pick up. I have no faith in mail carriers and somehow think the mail will never be delivered this way. I still like to drop the letter in the slot myself at the posts office. 

On the way home I needed to stop at CVS and HomeDepot to pick up a few things. CVS is really strange these days. I think there is only one employee in the entire store. Usually there is nobody at the register. You have to search around the store to find the employee who is usually stocking shelves and tell them that you need to check out. It's kind of ironic that businesses say that they can't find employees when they don't really want them either. Just about everyone is trying to get you to use an app on your phone to make your purchases. I do use an app for grocery shopping, but it seems to get worse with each new update. Now you have to wade though a bunch of ads before you can get to the scanning function. 

I have to go to Home Depot to find light bulbs. I still have two lamps in the living room that use quartz halogen bulbs instead of LED bulbs. It's getting hard to find these kind of bulbs. Home Depot still has incandescent bulbs if you are really old school. I don't go that far. Most of the lights in our house have been converted to LED bulbs by now.

It was a nice day for a walk. It was 70 degrees with clear skies and very little wind. I'm back to walking my regular six mile route again, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to get back to my old pace. It used to take me 18 minutes to walk a mile. Now it takes me at least 21. It's hard to say if it's my feet or just general wear and tear that is slowing me down. All I know is that I sure feel older than I did last year.

I was finally able to order the custom camera part I wanted from the weird Chinese website. A nice lady from the company guided me through the arcane order process using Facebook Messenger. We'll see if I actually get this part now. Actually, I've ordered everything from photo backdrops to watches directly from Chinese companies and they've never let me down yet. Many of these companies seem more modern and efficient than their American counterparts. Ordering from Europe is the worst. I really try to avoid ordering anything from Europe.

I hope the Elon Muck is able to buy Twitter. It's a long shot because corporate America and the investment community hates Elon. He's a loose cannon to them and might ruin the privileged little world they've created for themselves. Something got to be done about social media though. It's gotten out of control. Even I have been censored and all I do is write about dogs. I still miss the old days when all we had was IRC and newsgroups. The Internet was nice when it was all about conversation. Now it's about influence and power. That's not good. I think we'd be better off if social media and today's connected world just disappeared. We don't need a hive mind. We need people to start thinking for themselves again.