Day 3480

The new restaurant is a winner. I was pleasantly surprised to find something so nice very close to home. This is the second new "breakfast only" restaurant I've been to recently. Is this a trend? These places seem to have a huge breakfast menu, but they close for the day early in the afternoon. There seems to be a demand for this kind of place. The restaurant had been open less than a week and it already had a good crowd.

The menus in these new places spend a lot of time talking about sustainable farming and cage free eggs. There was even a small medallion on the table that said it was made using reclaimed ash. Maybe a storm somewhere else blew down a lot of ash trees. This place was clearly designed for the Avocado Toast crowd. Maybe that's everybody younger than me though. I think people still like nice food. They just don't like to cook.

There must be a large Amazon warehouse here in Dallas. My order for the lawnmower battery charger hadn't even been processed early this morning and it arrived at my door around dinner time. Fedex and UPS have made home deliveries difficult by demanding a signature on almost everything. Amazon doesn't bother with this. They just dump the package on your front porch and leave. They seldom even knock because that would slow them down. They do something they other guys don't though. They photograph the package on your porch and send you an e-mail as soon as they deliver. Same day delivery with photographic proof that the package actually arrived. Amazon for the win on home deliveries.

Most of you know that I procrastinate on a lot of things. I've been needing to fix a sliding glass door for almost two years and had never gotten around to calling the place that a friend recommended. I finally called the company today and discovered that the guy who fixes the doors was dead. He had been killed several weeks ago in a home invasion robbery. If there is a lesson in all this it is that Dallas is a much more dangerous place than it used to be and that if you put things off too long, you can easily lose the opportunity to do them. Life is full of twists and turns. You never know what tomorrow is going to bring, so you should always do what you can today.

In an attempt to follow my own advice, I called the rest of the people I  needed to get home repair estimates from and picked up a prescription I had forgotten about at the pharmacy. The only thing I forgot was getting a new roll of stamps at the post office. I guess I forgot to mark Penny and Evie as adopted on the Dalmatian Rescue website too. I'll do that tomorrow.

I hope my new battery charger works. I can plug the receptacle into the lawnmower and the red charging light comes on. So far, so good. I just need to remember to take this thing into the house whenever it rains. Hopefully I can get a fair bid on fixing the greenhouse so there will be a roof over the lawnmower again sometime soon. Maybe I ought to just turn the greenhouse into a storage shed. I doubt that plants are going to be growing there any time in the foreseeable future.

I'm still getting a lot of steps even though it is becoming ridiculously hot outside. I hope that sweating is good for your health.

Isabella is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3478

It's almost an unwritten rule that something will quit working when you need it the most. Now that the huge pile of brush is gone, it was time to tame the front yard. A big patch of grass was dead, but the rest was about a foot tall. I plugged the mower into the charger when I got up this morning and quickly discovered that the charger didn't work. It was pretty easy to see why. There was water leaking out of the case. I shook the charger and I could hear water sloshing around inside. This must have happened during the big windstorm that blew the greenhouse apart. The charger for the electric lawnmower is a rectangular plastic brick. It never occurred to me that it wasn't watertight.

I looked for a replacement charger online and quickly discovered that the part isn't available anymore. Hey, it's an old lawnmower. Was I going to have to buy a new lawnmower just because I couldn't find the right 24 volt charger? I kept looking and eventually discovered other folks in the same situation I was. A few people mentioned that there was a charger for another brand of lawnmower that could still be used instead of my discontinued model.  Ordering things that people recommend online can be a risky business. Often people don't know what they are talking about. I wish they would just agree on things. According to the reviews, this replacement charger worked perfectly, was better than the original, didn't work at all, arrived broken, or had a plug that was difficult to attach to the mower. Oh, well. It was still a heck of a lot cheaper than a new mower. I ordered one from Amazon and we'll see pretty soon if it works.

The mower battery still had about half a charge so I was able to chop down some of the high grass and tall weeds before the mower died. This is why I'm not a big fan of yard work. It never goes as planned. Janet asked why I hadn't gotten any bids on replacing the greenhouse yet. It's on my list. I do things every day, but I just haven't gotten to this yet. I don't think making the greenhouse a higher priority would have saved the battery charger anyway. I'm pretty sure that this thing was ruined on June 10 when the violent storm blew through town. I just haven't gone inside what's left of the greenhouse since then.

I had thought about going up on the roof today, but by the time I finished monkeying around with the lawnmower it was too hot. There is a metal flashing around the edge of the roof that gets so hot during the summer that it burns your hands. Somewhere I have some lightweight gloves I can use to keep from getting burned but I didn't feel like looking for them. I was tired anyway. The roof can wait. I took my two long walks and called it a day.

Janet and I were wondering what to eat on the Fourth of July and decided on hot dogs. We haven't had hot dogs in ages. They're not good for you. You don't even want to know what they're made of. But few things could be more American. My childhood is filled with memories of hot dogs. Sometimes we grilled them. Other times we just boiled them in a pot of water on the stove. They were even good cut up and mixed with baked beans. Hot dogs and potato salad actually sounds like a good idea for the Fourth.

Bob Hope is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day