Day 2667

AT&T has spent a lot of money laying fiber optic cable in our neighborhood. Now they want people to start using it. I have been inundated with marketing messages urging me to switch to this new service. They seem to be using a carrot and stick approach. The carrot is the promise of super fast download speeds. The stick is the threat that I'm going to have to switch to fiber anyway, because my present service is going away in a few years. I never trust anything the cable companies say, because I've been disappointed too many times. On the other hand, it would be nice to have super fast Internet service. I did some research today and discovered that fiber to the home is still a work in progress. Some customers complained that the router the phone company supplied couldn't handle the increased speed. Other customers complained that their WiFi network had actually slowed down after switching to fiber. There were happy customers too, but not as many as I would have expected. If I'm going to be paying twice as much to connect to the Internet, the service had better be really good.

I waste a lot of time investigating things that aren't quite ready for prime time. I'd love to live off the grid, but solar panels are still horrendously expensive if you want to power an entire house. They don't work very well in shady areas either. Electric cars turn out to be very impractical if you don't want to spend a lot of time sitting around at charging stations. Don't even think about recharging your Tesla with an extension cord in your garage. 4K cameras often crop part of the image to get the increased resolution they promise. Batteries in your laptop never last ten hours. I get sucked in by promises again and again, but I'm learning to be more skeptical. I don't think I'll switch to fiber optic Internet service yet.

Dot still sleeps as much as she always has, but she's thrown me a curve this week. Lately, she seems to be active in the morning and sleeps in the afternoon. This is exactingly the opposite of what was happening last month. I thought she was sleeping while I was eating breakfast this morning, but I was startled by some plaintive barking coming from the back of the house. Somehow, she had gotten up by herself, walked to the bathroom, and fallen on the tile floor. Dot is just like the people in those "I've fallen and I can't get up" commercials. I'm continually retrieving her from places where she has gotten stuck.

The refrigerator was looking empty today, so I went out and picked up a bowl of noodle soup for dinner. I've become fond of Pho and Ramen dishes. The only problem with these Asian noodle dishes is that they are terribly salty. I've been on a low salt diet for years and one of my pet peeves is that chefs love salt. Whenever I eat out, I feel like I'm consuming way too much salt. It must be possible to make a tasty, flavorful Ramen without salt, but I haven't found it yet. Dinner was delicious, but I'll have to eat something bland tomorrow. I feel like I got my weekly dose of salt in one meal.

I'm not sure what to do about breakfast tomorrow morning. Last Friday was a disaster. I had to race home before I'd even taken a bite because I looked at the baby monitor and noticed that Dot had tried to get up and gotten herself in trouble. I felt a lot more comfortable leaving the house when I was confident that Dot would sleep for at least three hours after her morning walk. Now, all bets are off. I have no idea how active she's going to be tomorrow morning.

Valli is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 2628

Today was an improvement. Both dogs slept all the way through the night without any disasters or medical emergencies. Dash held down his food today, even though he seemed a little tired and disoriented. Getting him eating again is the most important thing now. We'll worry about the residual effects of his vestibular disease when we get him stabilized. Dot seemed more comfortable today as well. I've been trying to fine tune her pain meds so that her discomfort is controlled without turning her into a vegetable. So far, giving her the regular dose of Gabapentin at bedtime and cutting the dose in half at breakfast and lunch seems to be working. The pills won't make her stronger, but they do seem to make her less agitated and allow her to sleep peacefully. These are all little things, but I think we made some progress today.

To celebrate today's progress, I thought I'd reward myself with a nice bowl of Pho. There is a new Vietnamese restaurant in the neighborhood and I've been meaning to try their noodle soup ever since they opened. There is something about Pho that is very satisfying. It's a simple dish made with broth, rice noodles called bánh phở, a few herbs, and meat. Basically, it's just soup, but it is so flavorful if it is made correctly. I wasn't disappointed today. I picked up my take-out order on the way home from the post office and enjoyed an early dinner as soon as I got home. The portion sizes on all the take-out meals I order always seem huge. After I ate what seemed like a gigantic, steaming bowl of Pho, there was still enough left over to make another meal tomorrow.

Yesterday, I got a letter from my bank saying that I needed to stop by my branch and confirm some contact information on my safe deposit box. This seemed strange, since I've never changed or modified any information since I opened the account. At any rate, I stopped by the bank on the way to the post office, thinking I could take care of this problem in a matter of minutes. A banker told me that I would have to wait in line behind a lobby full of old people. I'm an old person too, but I wasn't like these people. These were the kind of people who drive ancient Lincoln town cars and wear socks with their sandals. I have no idea what these people were waiting for, but just by looking at them, I knew that their questions were going to take a long time to answer. I asked the banker if there was a time when there weren't any people in the lobby and he just rolled his eyes at me. I think I'll try this again later.

I got a request today to remove a page from a website that I'm almost certain that I removed five years ago. I checked, and sure enough the page was still on the server. Oops. Occasionally, when a hosting company does maintenance on their servers, they will restore a site from a back-up copy. I suspect that this is what happened. They must have restored something that I erased a long time ago. I bet there are a lot of other ghost pages out there. I mostly work with a local copy of the sites I manage and rarely look to see what is actually on the server. I'm kind of superstitious about erasing things on the server. I used to use the server as a convenient archive for all versions of the sites I design, but I can't do that anymore. Google can still find the unlinked pages I've discarded and clients get mad when people click on links to this outdated information. It was easy enough to remove the offending unlinked page, but I still miss the days when the Internet was simple and fun.

It's going to be hard to convince Dash to eat dry food again. He's really liking the canned Hills Prescription ID I'm feeding him to settle his stomach. Dot must like this food too, because when Dash is finished eating, she will come over and lick his bowl. I guess we'll take this one day at a time. Dash still seems to have vertigo and appears dizzy at times. Until he is stable, he can eat anything he wants.

Joey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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