Day 2052

I renewed my storage warehouse lease for another year. I always rent the storage unit for a year at a time, because I get thirteen months for the price of twelve this way. I've had the storage space for so long that I think I've received an entire year in free rent by now. When I first got the storage space, it was just a convenient place to store amplifiers and guitars between gigs and bulky lighting equipment between photo shoots. Now, it has become a repository of memories. The remains from just about everything I've ever enjoyed doing in my life is sitting on a shelf somewhere. There are wind surfing boards, electric trains, framed pictures from old gallery shows, obsolete computers, old guitar amps, and much more. I wish I didn't need a storage warehouse at all, but I get very attached to things. Even broken things are hard for me to throw away.

The latest thing I'm trying to resurrect is the old Sony laptop I told you about yesterday. I asked the guy in the repair shop at Fry's if he could install a new hard drive for this 1997 machine and he told that I could get a brand new laptop for less than the cost of repairs. When I explained that I didn't actually need the computer and that it was just something I wanted to fix, he gave me a blank look like he didn't understand. Maybe the guy had a point. Why would anyone want a computer that only ran Windows 98 and had a hard drive that with less capacity than the memory sticks I use with my cameras. I did a little research on Google and discovered that nobody even makes IDE hard drives any more. All the replacement hard drives are SATA. I found a website that showed how to disassemble the computer, but it looked a little tricky. The article with the hard drive upgrade instructions was dated 2008 and the author considered this particular computer to be ancient even back then. It might be harder than I thought to bring this thing back to life. Jeez, if it's this hard to bring a modern looking little Sony laptop back to life, I wonder how hard it would be to get my old Osborne-1 running again?

Dot had kind of a rough day today. She was a bit shaky on her morning walk and walked with a limp around the house. I still can't figure out what makes some days good and other days bad. I may be wrong, but I think it has a lot to do with how she sleeps at night. If she goes to sleep with her bad leg tucked under her, she always seems to have a limp the next day. I always try to make sure she is sleeping on her side with the bad leg on top, but it doesn't really help. She always wakes up two or three times a night to circle around and reposition herself. Usually when I wake up the next morning, she has managed to get the bad leg tucked up under her.

I managed to find a replacement the tiny watch part I destroyed yesterday. The little screw cost me $5.00 but I considered that a bargain. I'll try to be more careful when I try to reassemble the watch this time. I received another writing assignment toward the end of the day, so maybe doing this new article will keep me busy enough so I won't be tempted to fix anything else this week. I've broken enough things for one week.

Tink is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2051

Nothing went as planned today. I woke about 4 AM to the now familiar smell of poop. Dot had pooped in her bed again. I cleaned up the mess, took it outside in a plastic bag and found myself face-to-face with an armadillo on the back porch. The armadillo seems to return every August like clockwork to tear up the yard, and here he was, right on schedule. After I put Dot's soiled blankets in the washer, I went back to bed and tried to go to sleep again. Unfortunately, I was wide awake by now.

When everybody else woke up about an hour later, I was already tired. I kept thinking that Dot looked a little unsteady on our morning walk, but probably the only unsteady one in the group was me. I really need to start getting more sleep. When we returned from our walk, the dogs still had enough energy to bark at me as I ate my breakfast.  I can quiet them for a while by feeding them slices of banana, but barking has just become a part of their morning ritual. They think it's fun.

Work is still pretty slow, so I organized files for a while and did my bookkeeping. For some reason I decided to recharge a very old Sony Vaio laptop and see if it still worked. It didn't. I kept getting an error message saying "operating system not found." I did a little investigation and realized that the hard drive had gone bad. It wouldn't have been that difficult to replace the hard drive and install a new operating system, but I wondered it it was even worth the trouble. This was an old, very slow computer that was running Windows 98 the last time I looked. I guess I could install Linux on the thing and keep using it, but why bother. An old, slow computer that won't boot is basically just a paperweight.

Since I failed to resurrect the old computer, I thought I'd try to resurrect an equally old watch. There was nothing special about the watch, other than the fact that I had to remove eight very tiny screws to open the case and replace the battery. The tiny screws were why I had avoided the watch for so long in the first place. I carefully removed each small screw, replaced the battery and just about had the watch back together when I managed to strip the threads reinserting the very last screw. Clumsy me. Now I need an exceedingly small screw extractor so I can try to remove the broken screw from the watch. Again, is it even worth the trouble? It's a cheap watch that I'd only worn twice in five years. With this dismal track record, I didn't even try to fix anything else today.

I managed to fix my dinner without burning anything and got Dot situated in her safe place again, so I could go to an evening animal rescue meeting. We talked about the next fundraising event and it was decided that I'll be taking a promotional picture for the event featuring dogs, cats, a parrot, a miniature pig, and a snake. This ought to be interesting. Tomorrow, I'll look for a source for very tiny screws.

Queenie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day