Day 2271

My breakfast restaurant seems different now. The food is still good, but something has changed. Maybe it's just that the coffee is served in paper cups now. The old baristas who jumped ship and moved across the street used real coffee cups. The music has changed too. The place used to play Austin indie rock. Now I hear 70's anthems by Journey and Foreigner. I'm a loyal person, but maybe I'll have to try out the new place across the street as well.

I might not be being fair to the restaurant though. For the past month or so, I just haven't been that interested in food. I initially thought this was because of the flu, but I'm better now and I'm still not very hungry. I typically go to the grocery store to pick up food for the weekend after breakfast and today I found myself just wandering aimlessly from aisle to aisle. Nothing seemed appealing.

Actually, the entire day was kind of aimless. I tried to glue a variety of broken things back together and then I took a watch to the watch repairman to get fixed. There was no real need to do this, since I still wear the Apple Watch all the time. Nevertheless, it seemed like a productive thing to do. I hadn't seen this watch repairman in almost two years and was a bit surprised to see that prices had doubled. Oh, well. I guess you've got to do what you've got to do to stay in business. The last time we talked, we both agreed that our respective businesses were going downhill. Today, when we were catching up on things, we both agreed that things had gotten even worse. Maybe fixing my watch will keep the guy in business a while longer.

Dot seemed stronger today. She slept well and was much more energetic and engaged on her walk this morning. I initially would have thought that she'd feel bad right after taking the Palladia pills. This doesn't seem to be the case. It almost seems like she's at her worst two days after she's taken the chemotherapy pills. I could just be imagining things though. I like to have an exact, very predictable reason for everything and sometimes there isn't one. I might just have to live with the reality that Dot has good days and bad days.

I saw my first wild iris of the season today. I've been taking pictures of plants and animals in the park for so long now, that seasonal changes have become very predictable. I could almost tell you to the day when certain flowers will bloom. I find this predictability comforting. I keep thinking that if I were just more observant, I could predict everything. That's not going to happen though. Real life is pretty random.

I can't decide whether the political events that are currently unfolding are random or completely predictable. It seems implausible that a 74 year old socialist is a serious candidate for president. It seems ironic that Bernie could actually win if he just realized that he was in a win or lose contest with a woman who wants to win at all costs. If Bernie was as passionate about pointing out Hillary's rather obvious flaws as he is about the evils of the big banks, Hillary wouldn't have a chance. It seems equally implausible that the Republicans are spending all their energy trying to destroy the own front runner. The ironic thing is that if the Republicans had super delegates like the Democrats do, they wouldn't even have to worry about Donald Trump. Oh, it's ironic too that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump share pretty much the same views on trade deals that destroy jobs and opportunistic foreign wars. No wonder that the establishment hates both of these guys. My only prediction is that whoever wins won't be able to fix anything.

I really need to go to the gym this weekend. No predictions on whether I actually will.

Orion is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2243

I daydream a lot eating breakfast. The music and the overheard conversations cause my mind to wander. If I overlook the hipsters at the next tables, it's easy to imagine that I'm sitting in a small roadside diner somewhere in Wyoming. This is an appealing thought. I used to love slow, pointless road trips along the back roads of Western America. There's nothing better than a great breakfast at an obscure roadside diner. I wonder if it would be the same today? I used to feel comfortable pulling over to the side of the road and sleeping in my car. Now, I'd be looking for the nearest Embassy Suites. I used to feel confident that if my car broke down, there would always be a friendly garage and a competent mechanic nearby. Now, I'd be calling AAA from my cell phone and hoping I could find a tow truck to take me back to the nearest big city. A lot of these little towns don't even have a gas station anymore. Who am I kidding? A lot of these little towns don't even exist. The interstates killed them off long ago. For the most part, the picturesque two lane highways I remember have been replaced by impersonal eight lane freeways filled with a frightening parade of eighteen wheelers.

If my fantasy still existed, it would be fun to wander from one obscure diner to another, sharing brief conversations with fellow travelers, eating tons of home made pie and pancakes, and stopping along the way to photograph amazing things I stumbled across. I'd never be in a hurry and I'd never really have a destination in mind. Since this is just a fantasy, I'd pay for my travels with a credit card that didn't need to be repaid and there would always be a comfortable, clean bed nearby when I felt tired. I would take tons of cool pictures and upload them to Google, so they wouldn't disappear, but I wouldn't try to sell them. There are never clients or money in my daydreams.

Since my mental road trips are about as real as a ride down Route 66, I am content to spend an hour a week daydreaming in a little restaurant near my house. I eat, I daydream, I always get a final cup of coffee to go, and I pick up groceries for Friday dinner on the way home. I'm usually back before the dogs have finished their morning nap.

There were more websites to update this morning, but no writing jobs. Writing jobs have been scarce this year. With extra time on my hands, I've been trying to stay busy. Today, I cleaned the utility room. This small room has become the repository for everything that won't fit in the rest of the house. The top of the washer and dryer are filled with empty Tupperware containers, half filled bottles of bleach, seldom used cookware, oven cleaner and Windex, and old dog toys. There is a heavy orbital floor polisher in a corner that we used to use years ago to wax the brick floors. I don't think the bricks have been waxed in ten years. The utility room is hard to clean and when you finish, it looks just as bad as it did before. I know that there's a lot of stuff in this room that could be thrown away, but I'll leave that to Janet. I'm terrible about throwing things away.

It's Superbowl weekend. I'll watch the game, but I can't say I'm excited about either team. I do like the Heinz commercial with the stampede of weiner dogs. What could be better than dogs in costumes running through an open, grassy field into the arms of a family of giant Heinz condiment bottles? I'll probably go to the Superbowl sale at my favorite clothing store. Everything is 75% off for a few hours just before the game. 75% off is the only time I can afford these clothes anymore. I can't believe it's Superbowl 50. I was already a college freshman when they played the first Superbowl. I think I listened to the game on the radio. Jeez, I'm getting old.

Zorro is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 617

I started the day aimlessly wandering through the park with the dogs and ended the day aimlessly wandering through the Quark Express manual, trying to figure out how to make tables do what I wanted them to do. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I do so many different things as part of my job that I can never remember the nuances of the various software I use. By the end of my intense week of video editing last May, I had gotten quite proficient at using Final Cut Pro. Unfortunately, I haven't had a big video editing job since, so the next time I get put to the test, I'll have to learn a lot of stuff all over again. The same thing is true with printed advertising. So few people ask me to do printed pieces anymore that some of the finer points of desktop publishing escape me. I used to know Quark backwards and forwards. Now it's all backwards.

Amazingly, it rained today. It didn't rain long enough to help all the water starved plants, but it certainly rained long enough for Dot. She could tell the rain was coming when we took our afternoon walk and she didn't relax again until about an hour after the storm was over. I thought that dog training class might be canceled for a while, but by 7 PM, all signs of moisture had evaporated. The only reminder that it had rained at all was a vague musty smell in the air.

It felt like the end of an era when I heard that Steve Jobs had resigned from Apple today. I got my very first Macintosh in 1984, right after they were introduced. That first Macintosh didn't even have a hard drive. You had to load a floppy disk with the system software and then eject that disk to insert another disk with the applications. It was pretty crude and simple by today's standards, but it made the Osborne-1 computer I had used before look like an antique. If it weren't for Macintosh, Photoshop, Quark Express, Adobe Illustrator, Media 100 and dozens of other game changers, I probably wouldn't have been able to start a company like mine. So, thank you Steve, for opening some doors for people like me that might have stayed locked for a long time without you.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day