Day 1402

Today was an odd assortment of obscure tasks. Since the skies finally turned blue again, I went up on the roof and swept away a slurry of decaying leaves, pecan shells, and brownish water. I keep thinking that if I can keep the Fall leaves from turning into a big compost pile, the new roof will last longer. I could be wrong though.

Later in the day I found myself taking all the spots off of a vector art illustration of a Dalmatian. I needed to create a large image of a Dalmatian without any spots, so children at a Fall carnival could add the spots back one at a time and create their own Dalmatian. I sent the outline of the dog off to be printed on a 36" square sheet of plastic. Small kids should have fun putting the spots on a Dalmatian, shouldn't they? Hey, maybe it's a silly game, but it was all I could think of for our booth at this event.

Since work was unusually slow today, I found time to go back to the gym again. Three visits in one week is pretty good for me. I am still baffled by people who love to exercise. I don't find my workouts any different than vacuuming the floors, or mowing the grass. There's no endorphin rush for me. It's just another kind of work. I will admit that I enjoy shooting baskets on the gym's basketball court. Who would have thought? My Dad would have been pleased to see me pick up a basketball. It was his favorite game.

I just remembered that I left six of my favorite CDs in the Defender 90's CD changer when I sold the car. If the car is still up at the dealership, I should go up and get the discs while I can. You may wonder why it took me three weeks to remember that I'd misplaced my favorite CDs. I guess I don't listen to music much anymore. I certainly don't play CDs very often. Music is just files on an iPhone now.

I have to take Dot to the imaging center for her MRI first thing tomorrow morning. She's not going to be a happy camper when she discovers that she can't eat breakfast. Dogs live to eat and missing a meal is a big deal to them. She has to fast though, since they will be giving her anesthesia for her brain scan. I'll be glad when this is over with. I don't like to be anesthetized myself, but at least I know what's happening. The dogs have no idea what is going to happen to them, but I'm sure they blame me when they wake up again. They always give me one of those "how could you" looks when I pick them up after the procedure. This needs to be done though, so I hope Dot will be safe.

Lucky is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1351

Some days are a lost cause. I thought today would be a good time to finish a print job with a looming deadline. I don't do much print design anymore, since most of my clients have forgotten what it is. I fired up Quark Express and proceeded to re-learn all the things I'd forgotten since the last time I'd used this software. As it turned out, I'd forgotten quite a bit, but it all started coming back to me after a couple of hours of fumbling around. Eventually, I had a nice looking design and I started reading the printer's file upload instructions. Oops. This printer couldn't handle halftones. They wanted line art only, and unless I wanted to pay a huge setup charge for multiple spot colors, they wanted single color files only. I should have read all this before I got started. Oh, well. All I've got to do is throw away all the photos, find some line art vector files that look kind of like the photos I threw away and re-do the entire design using Adobe Illustrator instead of Quark Express. Piece of cake.

In the dumb and dumber department, ABC news sent out a tweet today saying that Neil Armstrong had just died. I felt sad reading the tweet, thinking that pretty soon none of the men that walked on the moon would be left. But wait a minute! Neil Armstrong was already dead. He died last year. Just goes to show that you can't believe everything you hear on the Internet, or on the evening news.

The weather was so nice this morning that I started looking for signs of an early Fall. I didn't find any, of course. By mid-afternoon the temperature was up over 100 again and it was clear that Summer wasn't quite finished with us yet. I always look forward to Fall. As the days shorten and grow cooler, I start to see beautiful sunsets that tempt me to carry a camera with me at all times. I get to quit mowing the grass for another year. And a blanket of leaves covers up the landscaping mistakes. If I'm lucky, the bugs disappear as well.

I got a letter from my historian sister who refuses to use the Internet. I learned that she'd gotten a post office box because a truck knocked over her mailbox and she didn't feel like fixing it. That she'd  fallen off a tall ladder and was walking with a cane. And that after having half a dozen books published, she'd lost interest in writing. Sounds like everything's normal.

Jordan is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day