Day 2404

Dot walked down to the end of our alley and back this morning. It was a very short walk, but it was a big step. We're making progress. She can support her weight on both front legs now and is able to walk slowly without an obvious limp. I know that Dot would like to walk further than the 300 hundred yard journey she took today, but she doesn't know her own limits. We're going to have to take this very slowly.

I finished my last writing assignment this morning and sent it off to the client. At least I think I sent it to the client. I'm still having e-mail problems. You'd think it would be easy for my hosting company to track down the spammer who is causing all the problems, but apparently not. It seems like they could just flag the high volume mail coming from the suspect IP address and see who was sending it. What do I know though. Maybe in today's politically correct environment, making an effort to track down the spammer  who is getting me blocked violates someone's privacy.

I continue to read articles about bee colonies disappearing around the world, along with an absence of birdsong in many forests. I'm sure this is true, but you'd never know it here. When I take Dash on his early morning walks, I am surrounded by a symphony of chirping birds and am amazed at all the bees I see busily pollinating flowers. Lake levels are high, ducks are having ducklings, and the tall prairie grass provides a home for tons of small animals. The world may be falling apart, but it is comforting to know that my little corner of it appears to be doing just fine.

Maybe this is why I stick close to home these days. Many of the places I used to visit seem like they belong in a horror movie now. I've been to Nice. It's a lovely city. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a terrorist attack would someday turn this picturesque French Riviera town into a kill zone tonight. This is only going to get worse unless we can acknowledge what is really happening. There is a war going on between Western Civilization and a medieval religion. Only one side can win. It's not just a few bad apples who are causing all these problems, it's an ideology.

I'm glad this week is almost over. It's been stressful dealing with Dot's latest mishap. I understand how frail Dot has become and worry that if I let her fall or do something wrong, she might never walk again. So far, we're making progress, but it isn't easy. I hope my e-mail problems get resolved soon. Clients typically aren't very patient and if it isn't easy to communicate with them, they just might go somewhere else. I'm not a spammer. I don't think it's fair that I suffer the consequences when someone using the same IP address is. When I asked my hosting company how many of their customers might currently be using the suspect IP address, they said it could be in the thousands. Hey, that's not my problem. They still should fix this. If I had a larger audience I would call them out, but I don't think they're very scared of my ten readers.

I've got to have a fasting blood test before I can go to breakfast tomorrow. I should have done this two months ago, but it hasn't been a priority. I've had so much blood work done over the years that I don't think I'm going to learn anything new. My doctor still likes to do these tests at least once a year, so I guess tomorrow is as good a day as any.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1699

So much for sleeping in late on the weekend. We're still getting up in the middle of the night to take Dot outside, but we were pleased when we looked at the clock and realized that Dot had made it two hours longer without needing to pee than she did the previous night. There's a learning curve to dealing with incontinence and I think we're all learning. Dot is finally learning to sleep on the waterproof pads. I'm learning how to prepare the bed and do laundry more efficiently. And Janet is learning how to sew larger, custom sized waterproof pads. The best news is that Dot's condition actually seems to be improving. She isn't urinating constantly now, and there are fewer and fewer accidents during the day. The messy nature of incontinence makes it easy to forget that Dot is recovering remarkably well from the surgery itself. She continues to get stronger with each passing day.

My success with the aging locks yesterday emboldened me to try fixing the fence in the back yard today. Ground settling over the years has caused the rear gate to become difficult to open. I though it would be relatively easy to level things up again. As a bonus, if I could get the gate to fit properly, the neighbor's cat wouldn't be able to get in the yard so easily. Well, I made a good effort, but nature won this one. It wasn't just the gate that had shifted. The entire fence had shifted. After adjusting things to no avail for an hour or so, I was happy to just get the gate back to the way it was before.

I made it back to the gym this afternoon, but it is becoming clear that once a week isn't enough. Just like last week, my regular workout left me winded and tired. Part of the problem is that I'm not walking the dogs as long as I used to. Dot takes tiny, short little walks and Dash is smart enough to realize that it's much better to stay inside in August. It's just too hot to take long walks these days.

I went to Whole Foods instead of Central Market on the way home from the gym today. You'd think these two upscale grocery stores would be identical, but they're not. They're both good, but if you're a vegan, I'd go to Whole Foods and if you're looking for a nice cut of meat or interesting sausages, I'd go to Central Market. I'm not very picky. I think I like Central Market better because it's easier to find a parking place and the checkout lines are quicker.

The Buttonbush plants near the shoreline are starting to flower. Bees seem to love these things. I snapped a close up of one of the small flowers with my phone this morning and the hungry bee sucking nectar out of the thing didn't even move. Usually I like to use a telephoto lens when I'm around bees, but this bee had other things on its mind.

I wonder if Dot will be able to make it all the way through the night tonight? That would definitely be a cause for celebration.

J-Lo is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1279 - Father's Day

My Mom used to tell me that I was her Father's Day gift to my Dad, since my birthday periodically coincided with Father's Day. I don't think Dad was all that happy about this situation, since I was frequently a thorn in his side. Although we were never really close, I always thought my father was a good Dad. He was a loyal, honest man who never forgot his family. Although I've never been a Dad myself, I suspect that this is exactly how a Dad ought to be.

I got stung by another bee today. In the process, I discovered where the bees were coming from. A group of them had made a home in an old stepladder that I'd been using to fix some things on the house. No wonder I was getting stung. You'd think I would have noticed the bees before I started using the stepladder. Nope. Sometimes, I don't notice much of anything.

The bee sting didn't stop me from doing some much needed Sunday yard work. I mowed the grass, front and back, and then did some weeding in the yard. Now, the house looks just as good as all the other houses in the neighborhood. I removed the remaining water from the new roof, because I wasn't patient enough to wait for it to evaporate. The cheap broom I bought at Sam's Club yesterday worked a lot better than the much more expensive professional broom I had purchased earlier at a builder's supply store. Go figure.

Without our usual Sunday trip to the dog park, the day seemed a bit empty. I guess it wasn't really a big loss. It was so hot that Dot and Dash had little interest in going outside anyway. We watched a movie on Hulu instead. I think we've finally reached an agreement on how to share the bed. There was no barking or commotion during the movie anyway.

Tomorrow, it's back to work again. I need to remember to pay my quarterly estimated taxes as well. I'm going to try to get up early, so I can walk the dogs before it gets too hot outside. Early in the mornings, it's still quite nice. Later in the day is another story. The dog days of Summer are definitely here again.

Harshey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1277

Fridays are somewhat ritualized. After I walk the dogs, I go out for breakfast and order something more interesting than oatmeal. This is usually a high cholesterol meal with several eggs, but I figure that one day out of seven with too much cholesterol is a lot better than the seven days out of seven that used to be the norm for me. After breakfast, I go to the grocery store and buy groceries for the weekend. Then I come home and try to finish the week's work so I can start my weekend free and clear of obligations.

I woke up this morning with a throbbing pain in my right leg. I momentarily thought I might have deep vein thrombosis or something equally foreboding. Then I remembered that I was stung by bees yesterday. I seem to be a lot more sensitive to bee stings than I used to be. This was one heck of a sting. Maybe the dreaded killer bees have finally arrived in Dallas.

It keeps getting hotter. The temperature was over 100 degrees at some point this afternoon. Maybe I'll finally get a tan this Summer. I've lost to much weight recently that I finally don't feel bad about walking the dogs without a shirt in the Summer. I certainly don't look like a young lifeguard, but it's better than it used to be.

I never like driving in Dallas in the Summer. The old Defender has a tendency to overheat and when I'm stuck in rush hour traffic I can literally see the temperature gauge on the dash inch upwards as I sit stranded at a traffic light. I've had to pull over to let the engine cool before, and it will probably happen again. It certainly takes the fun out of driving when every drive is a race against the clock to get home again before the engine overheats. Today, I needed to get some more ink for my large format printer. I did the smart thing. I just had my ink vendor drop ship the ink to me via UPS. I never though I'd use UPS to send things across town, but sometimes it makes sense.

I took Janet to the airport again this afternoon in 99 degree weather. It definitely made sense to take her car. No matter which Land Rover I drive, the airport is about as far as I ever go these days.

Daisy is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1276

My feeble attempts at home improvement today were an epic fail. I bought some self-tapping screws and tried to batten down the loose 4x8 sheets of plywood under the carport. I drilled hole after hole, but never found a stud where I could attach the screws. Maybe there weren't any studs and the plywood sheets were just being held by the edges. Who knows? That would certainly explain why the wood was sagging so badly.

I didn't have much better luck up on top of the roof. I also bought a new push broom while I was getting the self-tapping screws, but it didn't seem to work as well as the old broom. The new roof has a gritty, gravel-like texture that made the broom hard to push. This was unfortunate, because after three full days of sunshine, there was still standing water on the roof. I'm beginning to think that the new roof puddles up even worse than the old roof. It doesn't leak anymore though. That's one good thing!

To add insult to injury, I got stung by bees while I was working. These were the same type of honeybees that built a hive in our house a few years ago. I looked around, but couldn't find any evidence of a hive near the house. I have a healthy respect for these bees. Wasps and hornets will often ignore you, but honeybees almost always sting. There's got to be a beehive nearby. Where there are bees, there is honey.

All this futile manual labor probably explains why I am a writer instead of a carpenter. I've never been fond of sweating or lifting heavy objects. I am pretty good at working with my hands, but only out of necessity. In a perfect world, I would live on the seventeenth floor of a luxury high-rose and never do yard work or home maintenance at all. I would spend my time sharing stories with friends over cappuccino at a friendly coffee bar. Maybe someone would make movies like "My Dinner with Andre" about me.

The dogs don't have such delusions of grandeur. I'm beginning to think they do have delusions about the temperature though. Every morning they bound out of the house as if they're eager to run for five miles. It usually doesn't take them five minutes to discover that it's hot outside and they both decide they want to turn around and go home again. I don't like the heat either, but it's getting harder and harder to get my requisite 10,000 daily steps on the Jawbone UP band with such lazy dogs.

This week has gone very quickly. I guess there's something to be said for staying busy. I'm glad tomorrow is Friday though. I'm really looking forward to my regular breakfast outing. I can't say that adding flax seed to my oatmeal has added much excitement to my life.

Marcie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 528

The new printer arrived early today. I was hoping that it wouldn't be delivered until sometime next week, because I haven't managed to get rid of the old printer yet. Now, my office is awash in large, bulky wide-format printers. I hardly have a place to sit down. I think this is probably the last large printer I will ever buy. Everything is moving to the web. It's so easy to have a service bureau print high quality large posters from a PDF file these days that there is little incentive to print things yourself. Maybe I'll have another gallery show someday and need to make museum quality prints, but probably not. It's simply gotten too expensive to have a large show framed.

The dentist that I shot the Lumineers video for recently decided to edit it himself. He e-mailed me today with a link to his first rough-cut and it was actually pretty good. This is happening to me more and more. People are deciding that they like to do the things I do for a living, just for fun. They do their own photography. They design their own websites. Now it seems that they're even editing their own videos. When folks do ask me to do something, they inevitably want it really cheap, since they think I'm just having fun like they are. I don't know where this is all going to end, but it doesn't look good. Luckily people still don't seem to do a lot of their own writing. Writing still seems to be a bit of a lost art.

There are some mighty tough bees on the side of my house. Despite the massive amount of Demon WP that I sprayed on the hive the other day, there is still a determined group of bees buzzing around trying to rebuild it. Maybe the queen is still alive in the center of things. I still can't get close enough to find out.

There's a Dr. Who marathon on the BBC channel tomorrow. Maybe I'll watch old Dr. Who episodes while I clean up my office. I had to clear out a pathway through the clutter today anyway, just so I could move the new printer into place. Since I've already started this loathsome task anyway, I might as well just keep cleaning tomorrow.

When I went to Central Market tonight to pick up dinner, I noticed that you got 20% off your bill if your final total was more than $20. Spending $20 at Central Market is a piece of cake, so I was sure I'd get the discount. My final bill: $19.98.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 527

I had to go down to the Department of Motor Vehicles today to renew my drivers license. I try to do this over the Internet whenever possible, but this time they wanted a new picture. As you might expect, the picture they took was horrendous. I think the DMV has perfected the art of taking a bad picture. One problem is that they never actually take the picture when you expect they will. You smile, and wait for the flash to go off, and then you continue to wait and wait and wait. When you think they have totally forgotten about you and get that weird "what's wrong with this camera" look on your face, well that's when they always take the picture.

When I stand in a long line at a concert or sporting event, I usually feel like I am among friends. When I stand in a long line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, it's another story entirely. It's just as depressing to stand in the DMV line as it is to sit in the jury pool room. I don't think anyone in line with me today possessed any useful skills whatsoever. If this was a representative sample of what America has to offer, we're hosed. All of these people wanted to drive a car, but half of them came to the building with no documentation whatsoever and quite a few couldn't even speak English. At any rate, after a considerable wait, I got my new license and hopefully I won't need to return to this building again for a long time.

There are a lot fewer bees on the side of the house today than there were yesterday. I'm still not certain who won the first battle, however. When I woke up this morning, I noticed that I had quite a few more bee stings than I initially thought I had. Why do bee stings hurt more on the second or third day than they do when you get stung? I hate these bees. Eventually they'll be gone, but they sure are tenacious little critters.

You'd think with all the writing I've been doing lately that I'd be faster, or better, or make fewer spelling errors. Nothing has changed though. I still make the same dumb mistakes. I'm just a little more tired when I make them.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 525

I'm somewhat of a hermit these days, so having lunch with someone two days in a row is probably my equivalent of being a social butterfly. Today, I had lunch with my watchmaker. Ostensibly, the lunch was to resolve a few website issues, but we mostly just ended up talking about the trials and tribulations of owning a small business. Somehow I keep thinking that someone who fixes high-end Rolex and Omega watches might be in a bit more of a secure position than someone who designs websites, but you never know. Globalization, consolidation and declining profit margins are making things difficult for every small business. My watchmaker is faced with a growing number of manufacturers who are starting to do their own repair and service work at the factory, while I'm faced with companies like GoDaddy offering website services for so cheap that nobody has any use for people like me anymore. My watchmaker and I are both still in business though. We are good at what we do. It's just not as easy to make a living as it used to be.

It is unbelievable how bad the weather has been recently. When I was eating dinner this evening, I watched the news on TV about multiple tornadoes hitting the Oklahoma City area. We are actually under a tornado warning right now and I think they have spotted funnel clouds forming near Forth Worth. We have never had a tornado in our neighborhood, but the warnings are frequent this time of year. I always worry that if a tornado does hit, there is no place to hide. We basically have a house with no protected interior walls. There's just a lot of glass that would offer no protection at all. I can't really imagine getting both dogs in the bathtub and putting a mattress over our heads. I can't even get the dogs to go near the bathtub on a clear, sunny day.

Maybe the storms will clear away the bees. I finally discovered exactly where the swarms of bees I've been seeing on the roof are coming from. They are making a large hive on the East wall of our house up under the eaves. I don't know much about bees though. Maybe the rain will make even more bees start calling our place home. It's just one more thing I need to deal with this week.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day