Day 3123

Not a bad day for Friday the 13th. I had a nice breakfast. Dash seemed in good spirits. Even the weather improved. You'd think with such an auspicious start, I might have done something amazing. Nope. It was Friday, after all. On Friday, I'm happy enough to just make it through the day.

Today, I had an appointment to take my damaged lithograph to the art conservator. I wonder how someone becomes an art conservator? It's a strange occupation. You learn intricate details about how paper and fiber behave and are somehow able to turn back time and make something old look new again with damaging it in the process. These people are often hired by museums to restore old maps and documents. In my case, I needed someone to take some art that has become wrinkled by humidity and make it flat again.

The whole process seems like a black art to me, but the conservator came highly recommended. I learned something during my visit today. Evidently the reason that my lithograph had become damaged has a lot to do with the way it was originally framed. Paper and even the metal frame itself naturally expand and contract over time. Art it supposed to be framed to allow the paper to breathe. The frame didn't allow this to happen. Evidently, the paper and the aluminum frame expanded at different rates, causing the paper to curl and wrinkle when it pushed against the edge of the frame. The whole process took decades, so it was very hard to notice at first. It didn't help that I bought the art in Seattle and it is now in Dallas. These are two very different climates.

The good news is that the Ellsworth Kelly can be restored to it's original condition. the bad news is that the restoration process is very slow, expensive, and when everything is finished, I will need a new and different type of frame. Oh, well. My bad. I never should have stored art in a storage warehouse for twenty years. I shouldn't have stored my guitars in the warehouse either. Three of the four guitars are fine, but one is in even worse shape than the damaged lithograph. The finish has cracked and some of the hardware has rusted.

The ironic thing is that I placed a lot of things in the warehouse because I was worried about humidity and water damage in the house. We have had water problems in the house for as long as I can remember. It questionable whether everything would have fared better if I'd left it at home. I guess I'll never know. A lot can happen in forty years. I guess it could have been worse. My sister's house burned down once and she lost a library of books she had spent a lifetime collecting.

The auction house in New York is already featuring one of my photos on their website. I guess this means they like it. Hopefully, it will do well at auction. It's weird that as objects continue to disappear from my life, absolutely nothing has changed. I don't miss these things. My life has been focused around dogs for many, many years. Dogs still matter. The art, model trains, and guitars seem like they were from a parallel universe that doesn't even exist anymore. I kind of wish I'd discovered this a long time ago.

Watson is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1446

It's hard for me to remember what day it is on holiday weekends. Since I did most of my regular weekend chores yesterday, there was little for me to do today. With Thanksgiving out of the way, it was time to go looking for the Christmas decorations at the storage warehouse. I'm always amazed at how neat and tidy the warehouse looks in comparison to our house. I wish my office looked as nice as my storage warehouse. Maybe it would if everything in the office remained untouched for months at a time.

It's an unfortunate fact of life that doing things almost inevitably creates a mess. Doing things with dogs creates an even bigger mess.  I don't help matters by being such a pack rat either. Almost everything in my tidy storage warehouse came out of my messy office. It's hard to believe that I have removed so much stuff from the office and it still looks full.

The weather was so warm today that I decided to wash the car. I like washing the car. It is a simple task with tangible results. Getting my large format printer working again is a much more difficult task. I've been using the supplies that UPS finally delivered with mixed results. I think I'll eventually be able to clear the clogged lines, but it is almost certain that I will use up all my ink in the process. I'm beginning to wonder if there's a point to this madness. I feel the same way about the watches I've collected. At some point in the distant past they all worked. Now, the batteries in the watches with quartz movements are all dead and many of the mechanical watches need cleaning. I took three of these watches to my watchmaker over two years ago for service. They still aren't done. These watches are still making better progress than the repairs on my Citroën Maserati. That car has been in the shop for over nine years.

My possessions are literally screaming at me to simplify my life. I won't live long enough to replace all the dead batteries,  re-solder all the loose wires, and clean all the gunk out of various dirty fuel lines. Mechanical things make me happy, but why do they always break? Oddly, things seem to deteriorate whether you use them of not. Batteries corrode and leak inside of old tape recorders. Gas goes bad and won't even ignite after several seasons of sitting in the fuel tank of an unused rototiller. Radiator hoses crack and break even if the car they're connected to is sitting on blocks inside a garage.

What's a boy to do? I don't need to be reminded that it's all ashes to ashes and dust to dust in the end. My own body has been telling me that for years. All is not lost though. There's actually a smile on my face right now. As I was writing this somewhat gloomy missive, I received a message on the printer display panel that the lines are clear. The printer lives!

Belle is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1090

My Dad would have been 95 years old today if he'd been healthier. The last birthday I remember celebrating with him was his 80th. After that, he began to go downhill quickly. Although my Dad and I were never terribly close, I find that I am becoming more and more like him as I grow older myself. I've never seem to acquire Dad's good habits; just the bad ones. Dad could never throw away anything. When I was settling his estate, I discovered a large dresser filled entirely with socks. There were stacks of old National Geographic magazines five feet tall. Shoes never became worn enough to actually throw away, and even paper grocery sacks were carefully folded and placed near the refrigerator for some ambiguous future use.

I don't think I've gotten this bad, but Janet says I'm headed down the same cluttered path. I can certainly appreciate the benefits of keeping only what you need. I'm just having trouble actually getting rid of anything. In an attempt to declutter, I thought I'd throw a few things away this afternoon while I was packing up photo gear to take back to the storage warehouse.  I threw away all the phone-books in the house. There were quite a few. I haven't looked up anything in a printed phone book for years. Google seems just fine for finding just about everything. I threw away a lot of catalogs for the same reason. You can always find a wider selection of whatever you're looking for online these days. Some three hole paper punches got dumped. If you're trying to git rid of paper, what's the point of a three hole punch?

Janet was packing up things for her storage warehouse as well. Yes, we both have our own storage warehouses. If she ever got into my space, she would just throw everything away. I leave her space alone as well. I know I would be continually retrieving things she no longer had a use for. It works better to have two storage spaces. At any rate, we filled up both cars with stuff that didn't need to be in the house any longer and the place looks a lot tidier now.

The dogs had a great time at the dog park today. You could tell that Dash had been missing his off leash time. There was a nip in the air and both dogs raced around making up for lost time. Dash even played with other dogs, which is something he only does when he is an exceptionally good mood. Dot never plays with the other dogs, but enjoys the opportunity to stroll around at her own pace, smelling everything in the 22 acre park.

There's a doctor's appointment on my calendar for tomorrow. I can't even remember what I'm seeing the doctor for this time. I guess I'll find out when I get there.

Puppies are today's Dalmatians of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1052

I went and visited with my watchmaker today. Although Kevin is technically a client, he seldom has much for me to do. Good watch repairmen don't need to advertise. With so few young people going into this line of work, the handful of remaining watchmakers have more work than they know what to do with. I wanted to learn how to repair watches once and quickly discovered that I was much too clumsy to become a good watch repairman. I would continually drop tiny little screws on the floor and never see them again. This is why I was visiting Kevin today. Janet doesn't even want me to change the batteries on her watches anymore, so I take them to a professional instead. My own watches are a different story. I've got so many basically worthless timepieces that I can afford to lose a few screws with my clumsy ways.

One of my New York clients called me today. He said he'd been sitting in his car waiting to get gas for over an hour and a half. We talked for a while about upcoming assignments and then he abruptly told me he had to go. Evidently someone was trying to cut in line right ahead of him and he wasn't going to let that happen. I'm glad I don't live on the East Coast right now.

I got the large format printer running for long enough this afternoon to print out some posters I needed for an upcoming animal rescue event. After printing only four posters, the red warning light came on that said I needed more Light Cyan ink. Didn't I just buy a lot of expensive ink the last time I used this printer? This is getting ridiculous. I'm beginning to think it would be a lot more economical if I just scrapped the printer and took a CD with the file to Kinkos whenever I needed to print something big.

Years ago, when I was fascinated with automobiles, a friend told me that practically anyone could afford to buy an old worn out Ferrari, but that you had to be rich to keep it running. I'm discovering that this is true with practically everything in life. I've got a fabulous printer, but I can't afford to keep it filled with ink. I've got a ton of old watches, but I can't afford to keep them all running. It's too bad that simplicity never really appealed to me. I'm surrounded by musical instruments I can no longer play and perfectly good shoes that haven't kept pace with my expanding feet. A day will come when I'll probably even have more blog posts than I know what to do with.

Jeda is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 545

I'm finally starting to get comfortable with the idea of giving stuff away. Don't get me wrong. I still don't feel any inner peace from this process of simplification, but I am able to get rid of stuff now. Maybe the reason this is all so hard is that I always envisioned that at some point I'd have this huge loft building where I could spread everything out and have lots and lots of room all my photography equipment, musical endeavors, painting experimentation, woodworking projects and so on. Maybe there would be a separate huge room for electric trains and another just for framing pictures. I don't think this is ever going to happen though. I have no desire to live in marginal industrial neighborhoods with affordable lofts anymore. The dogs rule now. A small house near a beautiful park where the dogs love to walk is a much better alternative.

It's time to toss stuff. Maybe, even though I'm a die-hard Gemini, one of everything is actually enough. Today, I took three very large CRT monitors and an old aerial reconnaissance camera down to the animal rescue resale shop. I thought this effort would clear out a large amount of space in the storage warehouse, but when I was ready to leave, the place looked just as full as ever. At first I was confused and then I realized I'd put the big stack of boxes that was blocking the door back on the shelves I'd just emptied by removing the monitors. It's slow progress, but I do feel like I'm accomplishing something.

I also finally resolved the mystery of how my recent software purchase got totally screwed up. When I made one of my daily calls to the support center, my call mistakenly got routed to the company's headquarters here in the United States instead of going to the offshore call center like it normally did. This time the representative I talked with almost instantly had a grasp of the problem. She found my account, told me that it had mistakenly gotten merged with the account of someone else and then proceeded to cancel my order as I had requested. This all took less than five minutes. When I asked why repeated calls to the support center weren't able to produce this result, the representative said. "Oh, we only provide the offshore call center with a very limited amount of information. They can't access the same database that we can." I'm still puzzling over this one. What use is a customer support center if they don't have any information? If I hadn't accidently reached the wrong person this morning, my order would still be in limbo.

It was interesting to me to see how many people seemed genuinely happy to see Lebron James fail last night. The Internet was buzzing with Lebron James jokes this morning like: Today is National LeBron James Day. Everyone gets to leave work 12 minutes early! and Why didn't LeBron James go to college? He didn't want to show up for finals. I think this all has a lot to do with people's expectations of loyalty. You certainly expect loyalty from a friend and Cleveland definitely considered James a friend. Not anymore. John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, issued a resolution today praising the Dallas Mavericks for their loyalty, integrity and teamwork. Of course there were all these people in Ohio saying the governor should be concentrating on "serious things" instead of praising the Mavericks. Hmm. I'd say loyalty actually was a serious thing.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 385

I'm trying to simplify. Today, when I was setting up categories for my new accounting program, I decided that groceries would suffice as a category for all my grocery shopping. In my old accounting program, there were a multitude of sub-categories for paper towels, laundry detergent, juice, vegetables and lord knows what. It took me forever to reconcile things because by the time my credit card bill arrived a month after I bought the groceries, I'd totally forgotten what I'd bought. For years I just made up things to put in these categories. The totals were correct, but who knows if I really bought paper towels or not. I don't know why I felt compelled to fill out all the sub-category boxes, because my accountant told me several times that he wasn't interested in how much I spent on juice or multi-vitamins. Well, all that's in the past now. From now on, when I got to the grocery store all my purchases are just going to get lumped together as groceries.

I overcomplicate my life in so many odd little ways. I save the boxes for most things I purchase and put them in the storage warehouse. I always thought that if we moved to another part of the country someday, it would be good to have the original boxes to pack things in. Over the years, I've put some things back in their boxes as I've retired them. The problem I'm having now is that I can't remember which boxes are full and which are empty. I need to throw away some boxes to make room for more stuff, but I'd hate to throw away a full box. Especially if it contains a vintage camera or something. I'm having to open and look through all the boxes, just to see if they are empty or not.

As part of my simplification campaign, I'm going to switch to Final Cut Pro for editing video projects. I probably should have done this several years ago. I've edited using Adobe Premier, Avid Media Composer and Media 100. For some reason I grew fond of Media 100 and kept using it long after it fell out of favor in the editing community. Nobody uses Media 100 anymore. Come to think of it, nobody even uses video tape anymore. It's been several years since anyone asked me to finish a project on video tape. All they want is a DVD now. Maybe I'll be able to retire the tape machines soon. That would certainly free up some additional space in the office.

I took Dash to get his antigen shot again today. His coat is looking great and he only needs the shot once every two weeks now. I hope he stays healthy. My vet has gone on maternity leave again. She won't be back until March.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day