Day 3169

I've stopped going to the library, but I certainly haven't stopped reading. I think one reason my head is filled with useless information is that on slow days like this, I can spend hours reading odd little articles I find on Google. When I click on the Google Discover tab, I'm always amazed that there seems to be an endless supply of things I've never heard about before. I'll read almost anything about astronomy and space. I like reading articles about how the human race is doomed and headed toward extinction. Most articles about Elon Musk catch my attention. I always read articles about the best diet to feed your dog. Sometimes I'll read articles about the pills I'm taking or the stocks my broker recommends. I like articles about exotic cars and vintage guitars. I'm not interested in politics at all, so I skip over a lot of stuff. Apparently, a lot of people are only interested in politics.

Today I read articles about what might have existed in the universe before the big bang, learned about a new mass extinction theory that says the dinosaurs all died in a single day, read about a Ferrari prototype that uses a "virtual" windshield made out of air, and did some research on several stocks my broker wants me to buy.

My broker and I don't agree on much. I like to contemplate large scale trends like young people preferring pets to children and ordering meal kits from Hello Fresh rather than going to the grocery store. I'm bored by technical analysis and usually could care less when a stock dips below its two hundred day moving average. My broker thinks Gilead Sciences is a good buy right now. What? I hate that company. They're the ones who charged me $1000 a pill for Sovaldi. OK. It is a revolutionary drug that cured my Hepatitis C, but $1000 a pill still seems a bit steep. I wish I'd just kept the first three stocks I'd ever bought: Apple, Boeing, and Southwest Airlines. If I'd kept adding to those positions over the years, I'd have done a lot better than decades of hit and miss trading.

Forget about stocks. What I should be researching is what's causing Dash's loose stools. According to everything we've read, what we're feeding Dash now should be very easy to digest and contribute to firm stools. It's just not happening. It's hard to get a definitive answer from the vets either. The older your dog gets, the more "old age" seems to be the cause of everything. I doubt that I'm going to find a cure for Dash's incontinence, but it does get tiring having a world centered around poop.

I've stopped carrying a camera on our walks because I really need to concentrate on keeping Dash upright. It's kind of a shame. This morning I missed a spectacular shot of a Great Egret. Yesterday evening the setting sun reflecting off the downtown skyscrapers was equally spectacular. I still carry my phone in my pocket, but I would have needed a telephoto lens to capture these images. It probably doesn't even matter. Everything I see in the park, I've already photographed dozens of times before. Just to prove my point, I took another picture of Jimson Weed flowers with my phone this morning.

Dash had a good day, but he still hasn't pooped yet. I'm nervous. I still can't decide whether to apply to join the Jet Propulsion Lab team for the InSight landing either. I guess I'm nervous about that too.

Mandy is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2427

Sometimes I get distracted by the smallest things. Today when I turned on the computer, I noticed that there was a fifteen second difference between the time on the computer and the time on my watch. Since both the computer and the watch receive a signal from the same NIST atomic clock in Fort Collins, Colorado, either the computer or the watch was wrong. The two displays should have been identical. It puzzled me that I didn't know which one was right. I rebooted the computer and replaced the battery in the watch, but the fifteen second difference remained. It was odd that this bothered me, since I could care less what time it actually was. This was an anomaly and it shouldn't have been happening. I get curious about things like this.

Last week at this time I was curious about a new app that lets me use my phone to purchase groceries and bypass the checkout line. I downloaded the app and was going to try it this week, but I completely forgot about it and ended up using the regular checkout line, just like I always do. I wonder how many weeks it's going to take before I remember that I have this handy tool in my pocket. We'll try again next week. Eventually, this thing will become second nature. I'm a creature of habit though. There's always a chance that I'll never use my phone to purchase groceries. I downloaded an app that lets me deposit checks to my bank using my phone two years ago and I still haven't used it.

It was so hot today that neither of the dogs wanted to walk very far. They did their business in a perfunctory way and returned to the house where it was air conditioned. When I was out with Dash, I saw a Great Blue Heron. Even the bird seemed hot. I made sure to water the lawn before the 10 AM water restriction deadline and started wishing for Winter to return. August is probably as bad as it gets. It's still hot in September, but the days are noticeably shorter. Hopefully, the air conditioner will keep working until October, when the weather gets nice again.

I started thinking about what I wanted my new website to look like and came to the inescapable conclusion that I didn't even need a website. Maybe I should just sell my domain to that company in Germany that makes the Sealander amphibious travel trailer. It figures that someone would use my name for a trailer that is also a boat. Who would want something like this? It's pretty expensive, not very big, and the literature says "for calm waters only." I bet more than a few of these things have sank. The unlikely vehicle must be getting more popular though, because I get e-mail messages almost every week asking for information about how to buy one.

It's time to go to the gym again. I should just quit taking Statins instead of going to the gym. One of the worst side effects from taking Statin drugs is that they cause muscle atrophy in some people. Even though I am active and get a lot of exercise, I have real trouble building muscle tissue. I know it's the Simvastatin. I keep asking my doctor if I can quit taking the pills, but he is obsessed with heart attacks and keeps reminding me that my Dad had a quadruple bypass at about my age. I guess I'll have to keep taking the Statins and just exercise a little harder tomorrow.

Margo is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2278

Curiosity finally got the better of me. When I was driving to breakfast this morning, I turned right instead of left and pulled into the parking lot of the new restaurant across the street from my regular place. Yes, despite my loyalty, I abandoned ship. Hopefully, the consequences of turning right won't be as disastrous as they were for Dr. Who when Donna Noble made a wrong turn and then had to go back in time to convince herself to turn left and save the world. I liked the new place. Instead of breakfast tacos and migas, this place featured locally sourced meat and eggs. Apparently this is what hipsters like to eat, because the place was filled with men sporting long beards and man buns. I ordered cinnamon pancakes, bacon, and homemade biscuits and gravy. Everything was delicious. I won't abandon my breakfast restaurant, but I'll return to this new place whenever I'm in the mood for comfort food.

I can't figure this weather out. The day was punctuated by short fierce storms interspersed with longer periods of relative calm. During one of these calm periods, I thought the rain was finished and decided to clear the water off the roof again. As soon as I was finished, another squall swept through town and erased all my efforts. I'll never learn. I cleaned the car when I saw a patch of blue sky in mid-afternoon and then got it dirty again when I had to go out and pick up the take-out meals I had ordered for dinner. At least I was able to walk the dogs without getting wet. These relatively dry walks and my cinnamon pancake were probably the silver lining to a day filled with some some very dark clouds.

I had some website work to finish today, but it wasn't really enough to distract me from the terrible weather. I think I'll abandon any future plans to remove water from the roof or clean the car until I'm convinced that the skies have cleared. I've really wasted a lot of time dealing with water issues and accomplished absolutely nothing. I'm still trying to get Dash to go outside and pee and Dot hasn't pooped since breakfast. It's been that kind of day.

I'm worried about Dot. She has been stumbling a lot today and seems to have difficulty standing without assistance. Some of this weakness is caused by the weather, since the damp, cool air aggravates her arthritis. My fear is that the cumulative effects of her chemotherapy is starting to wear her down as well. We've got one more week to go before we do another scan to see whether the Palladia pills are working. Then we've got to decide whether all this is worth it. I wish we could ask Dot what she wants. I'm guessing that she wants to live as long as she can, because she still seems to enjoy her life and doesn't appear to be depressed at all. As long as Dot wants to keep going, I'll do my best to help her.

The weather forecast says the rain will continue thru tomorrow. Then we are supposed to have four days of sunshine before the Spring rains start again. That's about as good as you're going to get during the rainy season. We'll hope for the best.

Tyson is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2264

When I went to breakfast this morning, something seemed missing. The place was half empty and when I entered the building, the coffee roasters where I always got my morning coffee were gone. I was confused at first, but it didn't take long to figure out what was going on. Directly across the street there was a brand new competitive restaurant. The little coffee company that shared space with my restaurant, along with half the customers seemed to have jumped ship. I even noticed a number of familiar cars parked at the restaurant across the street. I found this all a little unsettling. Where did these people's loyalty go? Like me, most of these customers had been coming here for years. Jeez, I skip one week because of the flu, and when I return, everything had changed. You know how I feel about change. Now, every time I go for breakfast I'm going to feel torn between a sense of loyalty for my familiar meal and a sense of curiosity about what's just across the street. I would have preferred that this didn't happen.

After breakfast, I went to the nearest early voting location and voted. I still can't figure out why the early voting locations have modern touch screen ballots and the regular voting locations still use paper ballots where you select your candidate by making a black dot in front of the name with a pencil. I'm still a little suspicious of the electronic ballots, but I suppose my vote gets counted. Like I expected, there were several pages of judges to vote for. I had no idea who most of them were. Unless a judge has gotten involved in a scandal and been on the local news, I'll probably never recognize their name. I vote for judges the same way I bet on horses. I just pick a nice sounding name and go for it.

Dot did not want to go to the vet today. I had a hard time getting her in the car and when we arrived, I had an even harder time getting her inside the building. Usually, she is fine about going to the cancer center, but not today. I could tell she was nervous when we were sitting in the lobby, but I couldn't figure out why. There were no scans today or anything that might be remotely frightening. I felt bad. Dot struggled while the vet tech tried to draw blood and ended up getting a hematoma in her neck. The oncologist wants to continue her chemotherapy for another three weeks and then do another scan to measure the growth of the tumor in her liver. We'll decide at that point whether this has all been worth it.

Although voting and Dot's vet appointment ate up a big chunk of the day, I still managed to get quite a bit of work done. I completed a big website update, balanced my checkbook, and picked up something for dinner at the grocery store. That seems plenty for one day. Although it was still quite cold this morning, there's already a feeling of Spring in the air. The trees are starting to bud and I'm already starting to see some early Spring flowers. Spring flowers are always a good thing.

Bingo is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1945

I spent quite a while today getting re-acquainted with Pro Tools. I used to use this software frequently and knew it well. Not anymore. It's been several years since I've had a need to create or edit audio files. There was a time when I was always thinking about music. I wrote songs, played in a band, and knew my way around a recording studio pretty well. Once upon a time, I even took an audio engineering course and learned to run a 48-track SSL console. I've still got a lot of audio gear to remind me of those days, but I've forgotten virtually everything. Use it or lose it, as they say.

Maybe if I was more familiar with Pro Tools. I might start writing songs again, I thought to myself this morning. It's possible. I suspect it's the other way around though. If I started writing songs again, I might have a need to use Pro Tools. I still hate to forget things though, so I played around for hours with the software and was somewhat amazed at all it could do. Without an active project to throw myself into, what I rediscovered today will probably stay in my brain for about a month. Then I'll have to re-learn it all over again if I ever have the need.

It's hard to believe that I used to be able to program simple games in FORTH, create and render three-dimensional objects using Maya, and do architectural drawings using AutoCad. I had working versions of all these programs running on my Mac at some point, but it eventually became pointless to dabble with these complex applications. Unless you did computer animation for a living, you never really understood Maya. Unless you were an architect or engineer, there was little reason to master the complexities of AutoCad. Even veteran programmers didn't know what to make of FORTH, but to this day it is the only programming language that ever made sense to me. I suspect that the odd language appealed to me because the variables and basic operators were defined as words. A programming language based on creating things using words seemed magic to me at the time.  I even went to FORTH user groups for a while.

I get nostalgic when I try to re-learn something. I spent the entire afternoon playing with a little two track audio file, re-learning how to route compressors, equalizers, and other effects processors through the send and return buss. I was going to try working with a MIDI synthesizer, but then I remembered that all the synthesizers were in the storage warehouse. Since I have forgotten even more about playing the piano than about playing the guitar, I doubt that those synthesizers would have done me much good anyway.

I am curious about almost everything, but since I had no desire to become a full-time computer animation expert, multi-track recording engineer, or even a practicing architect, many of the skills I learned over the years just withered away. It was just too difficult to keep learning a lot of complex things you never used. I always returned to writing because there was no software involved. In a pinch, a yellow pad of paper and a #2 pencil will do just fine.

I'll probably be writing something for someone tomorrow. With all that has died on the vine over the years, I guess I should be glad that there is still one thing I do that people seem to need.

Valli is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day