Day 2233

It's a good thing I had my movie today. Absolutely nothing happened. It was cold and grey outside. The phone didn't ring. There were no deadlines to meet. It was a perfect day to watch The Martian. It was a long movie so I waited until the dogs took their even longer morning nap after breakfast. Coincidentally, this is also when I tend to get the most work done. Almost like clockwork, both dogs sleep soundly from about 9 AM until 1 PM, when they wake up again for lunch.

I'd already read Andy Wier's book, so I was wondering how a story with very little dialog would work as a film. Drew Goddard leaves out quite a bit in the screenplay, but still managed to transform one of the best books I've read in a long time into a nail biting and compelling script. I'm old enough to remember when Ridley Scott and his brother Tony directed television commercials at RSA. If you were in advertising during the late 1970's and early 1980's, Ridley Scott Associates was the gold standard for commercial production companies. Before he went on to direct groundbreaking movies like Alien and Blade Runner, he created the famous 1984 commercial which ran once during the Super Bowl and launched the Apple Macintosh computer. I loved that commercial. With all this in mind, I was expecting a lot from this movie and I wasn't disappointed. I really should have seen it in a theater, but for me a large, high resolution monitor in a dark room was almost the same thing.

I hope The Martian does something to rekindle interest in space. I remember clearly the excitement that the race to land a man on the moon generated. It was one of the few things in my lifetime that genuinely seemed to unite people around the world. A few years after Apollo 11 landed in the Sea of Tranquility, the real life drama of the the failed Apollo 13 mission seemed to capture the world's attention in much the same manner as Mark Watney did when the world learned he was stranded on Mars. We are explorers. I think we need to direct our energies outward again. We're spent far too many years looking inward.

The only thing I explored today was how to use my old Olympus camera lenses on a new Panasonic camera. Manufacturers have virtually stopped making digital cameras with optical viewfinders. Everyone is migrating to the new smaller mirrorless cameras. Since I like the Panasonic GH4, I've been trying to salvage some of my favorite older lenses and use them with this micro 4/3 format. With the right adapter, you can use just about any lens manually, but I wanted to keep using the auto-focus and image stabilization features of newer lenses. I tested an adapter today that was supposed to let me do this, but I was disappointed. The auto focus of my favorite Olympus lens still worked, but it was so slow. I think it's back to square one with this idea. It's too bad that expensive technology becomes obsolete so quickly. Back in the film era, my Nikon cameras and lenses served me for decades. It doesn't work that way anymore.

Dot seemed kind of shaky today. I always worry a lot when she's having a bad day. There's no way to stop this slow, degenerative process she's going through, but I sure wish there was a way to slow it down a bit more. Dot seems to react to sunlight and warmth the same way I do. I'm hoping that when the weather improves, she'll get her mojo back.

Jazz is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 2082

Not my circus. Not my monkeys. This has become my universal response to just about everything I see these days. The world has become such a strange and chaotic place that I am having difficulty relating to things that are apparently normal now. Almost every time I turn on the TV I am reminded of this old Polish idiom. I feel the same way on those rare occasions when I visit a client's office or go to a public event. "What planet am I on," I sometimes think. Coincidentally, I drove by an actual circus when I was running errands this afternoon. I didn't see my monkeys there either. Even this little parking lot circus seemed strangely out of place to me.

Reading books used to seem normal to me, so I bought a book today. I've been meaning to read Andy Weir's The Martian for quite a while, but somehow never got around to it. I've known about the book for ages since it is a favorite of the space geeks I follow on social media. I've actually read big chunks of the book online, but have never read the whole thing. Maybe now would be a good time. I always like to read a book before they make a movie out of it. 9 times out of 10, the book is better than the movie.

I went to the storage warehouse today and picked up the equipment I'll need for this weekend's photo shoot. The equipment seems to get heavier every time I load it in the car. It would be nice if there was a place in the house to store this stuff, but that option disappeared years ago. Now that Dot has trouble moving around, the house has become more crowded than ever. There are dog beds everywhere, so she'll have a comfortable place to rest wherever she is. Dot has limited mobility, but she is much happier when she still has free reign of the house. She has a comfortable bed in every room now and I don't have to confine her in a small pen to keep her safe. When we go to sleep, I move several of these beds together to create a large area that she won't slide off of when she tries to re-position herself during the night. One of the beds goes in the car whenever we go to her physical therapy sessions. I feel like I'm always moving dog beds around.

I tried to rig up an alternate pet cam this afternoon. The baby monitor that I use to monitor the dogs when I'm away has been crashing a lot lately. It makes me nervous when I open the app on my phone to see what's going on and all I get is an "unable to connect" message. I usually fix the baby monitor the same way I fix every other electronic device in the house. I turn the thing off and then turn it back on again. It's amazing how simply rebooting something just about always solves the problem. At any rate it would be good to have an independent back up camera in case the baby monitor goes wonky again.

It doesn't take a lot to make me happy. I saw Mars on the Eastern horizon as we walked the dogs this morning. I got one of the three good parking places when I went out for breakfast. Dot didn't poop in the house at all today. And I'm all caught up on the week's work. Quite a few things make me unhappy as well, but maybe it I don't turn on the TV, don't pick up the phone, and avoid rush hour traffic I won't notice them so much.

Mandy is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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