Day 2891 - Thanksgiving

I feel like I've spent the entire day eating. Thanksgiving is the one time of year that Janet and I throw caution to the winds and fill our plates with way more than we need. We quit cooking at home years ago and prefer to go to a nice restaurant instead. For many years our favorite place was the revolving restaurant on the top of Reunion Tower. It was relaxing and the slowly rotating restaurant gave us an opportunity to see what had changed in Dallas during the previous year. Eventually the place got sold and became part of Wolfgang Puck's restaurant empire. Puck had no interest in continuing the lavish Thanksgiving brunch we had come to enjoy. We floundered around for several years and eventually found the Melrose Hotel. So far, so good. The waiters never rush you. The food is interesting and always includes several things you would never expect to eat at Thanksgiving. The salads are amazing. If they kept these salads on the menu during the rest of the year, we would go back more often.

We used to go up to the Dalmatian Rescue kennel after our dinner and give each of the rescue dogs a boiled chicken breast as a Thanksgiving treat. I forget why we quit doing this. Maybe one of our own dogs got sick, or we no longer had the time after the rescue dogs were relocated to a different kennel in Lewisville. It was a nice tradition for a while though. Now we just make sure that Dash has had a nice day.

I was so full when we returned home that I felt like calling it a day at 4 PM and going to bed. Dash has other ideas though. He wanted his own dinner and a long walk. A long, slow walk after Thanksgiving dinner is another tradition we have kept as long as we've had dogs. It was certainly a beautiful day for a walk. The sky was clear and the air was crisp and cool. The walk felt good. I was still full when we returned, but I no longer felt sluggish and catatonic.

We watched the Cowboys game for a little while, but the Cowboys really suck this year. There have been some memorable Thanksgiving day games, but this wasn't one of them. I still remember a game where it snowed in Dallas on Thanksgiving. It seems to snow less and less with each passing year. I don't think we got any snow last year. I can't say that I miss the snow, but it is strange how dramatically the weather has changed in just a few decades. Climate change? Probably. When we had our first Dalmatian, there was a year when our lake completely froze over. It hasn't happened since.

When I took Dash out to pee late last night, I saw Orion rising in the eastern sky. It's nice to see the Winter constellations return. There is so much light pollution in Dallas that's it's hard to see the stars in the Summer. The Winter stars are much brighter and bring back childhood memories. I was going to be an astronomer until I realized that there was a lot of math involved in this profession. I still like looking at the stars though. Maybe someday I'll live in a place where it is dark enough to see the Milky Way again.

It's been a lazy but pleasantly fuzzy day. I drank Mimosas. I consumed more calories than I normally do in a week. I didn't even attempt to do anything useful. Next week I'll start thinking about getting healthy again. Tomorrow, I'll probably just wish I hadn't eaten so much today.

Petey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 2208 - New Year's Day

I woke up around 5 AM to the sound of Dot trying to throw up. Why does this always happen on a holiday? I remember we had a similar problem on Thanksgiving. We took her outside and she immediately tried to eat leaves. This would have only made things worse , so we brought Dot inside again and let her lick an ice cube until she calmed down a bit. I don't know when we discovered that licking an ice cube often causes the urge to throw up to subside, but it sometimes works. Maybe she just had a dry throat. The next time I took her outside, she pooped instead of trying to eat leaves again. We got lucky. We all went back to bed for another hour or so and then fixed the dogs breakfast and had our first walk of 2016.

It was still really cold outside. If it wasn't so important for Dot to keep moving her rear legs, I think we'd just skip the walks on days like this. When we returned, Janet went to the store to get some orange juice to make Mimosas with the leftover New Years champagne while I cooked French Toast for breakfast. It was a nice way to start the year, expecially since Dot wasn't as sick as it first appeared.

After breakfast I installed the new version of Media Composer I downloaded yesterday. The first thing I saw when I opened the application was a large error message telling me that my computer didn't have enough memory to run the software. WTF? My computer has lots of memory. I work with huge files in Photoshop all the time and had no problem running the previous version of Media Composer. Apparently all the trouble I went through yesterday to update this software was for nothing. It wasn't going to work. I sure wish I'd known this before I bought the new version.

I enjoy a challenge though, so I was determined to make this work. After a little research on Google, I realized that Avid really wanted me to be running their software on one of those sleek new black Macintosh towers that look like some sort of a space age wastebasket. My own computer was way too old and slow. Hey, not so fast. A little more research revealed that my aging Mac might still be able to run the new software if I maxed out the memory. It was worth a try. So, where do you find computer memory on New Years Day? Oddly, Fry's was still open today.

I got in the car and drove to Fry's. I bought two 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM memory modules and then went on Google again to figure out how to open up my computer. Against all odds, I had the right kind of tiny screwdriver to open the case, installed the memory modules properly, and everything worked. The next time I tried to open Media Composer, it worked. This new version sure looks a lot like the old version, but there must be something to make it worth all the trouble I went through to install it.

New Years used to be a day where everybody watched the Rose Bowl Parade in the morning and then spent the rest of the day watching four different bowl games on TV. First there was the Sugar Bowl. Then came the Cotton Bowl. The big one was the Rose Bowl in California, followed by the Orange Bowl in the evening in Florida. Now, most of these bowl games are named after a corporate sponsor and aren't even played on New Years Day. The Cotton Bowl Classic isn't played in the Cotton Bowl anymore. There is still a game with this name, but it is played in the Dallas Cowboys stadium on New Years Eve. I have no idea who won.

Today didn't even seem like a holiday, but it wasn't a bad way to start the year. Dot gave us a scare this morning, but she's OK now. My computer gave me another scare, but I still managed to show it show it who's boss. We made it through the first day of 2016. Now, there's only 364 days to go.

Camp is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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