Day 3995

It was below freezing when we woke up this morning, so we revised our schedule a bit. I ate breakfast while Janet went to the gym and then we walked Dawn later in the morning after it had warmed up a bit. The temperature went from 30 degrees to 50 degrees fairly quickly, but that's where it stayed. There was a brisk wind today and it felt chilly all day.

I went to the storage warehouse and retrieved the rest of my photo gear this afternoon. I need to remember to avoid the storage facility on the first of the month. It was crowded with apartment people today either moving their stuff in or out of storage. Every time I go to my storage space I realize that there's not much of value there anymore. I really need to clean the place out. It's just so much trouble though. It's almost worth the rental fee just to be able to temporarily forget about this stuff.

I made an appointment with my HVAC guy to have them come out and give me a diagnostic report on my old dehumidifier. It will be interesting to see what they do tomorrow. The little portable unit is almost impossible to disassemble and they'd have to sit and watch the unit all day to see the problems I've observed. The filters are clean. The dehumidifier doesn't operate in a cold environment. I'm hoping that the HVAC guys will decide that a low refrigerant level is the only logical explanation for the defrost cycle coming on all the time. If there's something wrong with the compressor I get a new dehumidifier. If it's something else, I'm stuck with the repair bill. 

I renewed the domain registration for sealander.tv today. Back when my company was doing corporate videos and commercials I thought that this would be a good domain name for me. I've never ever used the domain, but I keep paying for it every year. I've registered several other domains that I'll probably never use as well. I not only have physical clutter piling up in the storage warehouse, I have virtual clutter piling up off in the cloud somewhere. It's hard to turn loose of this stuff. I was a very early adopter of the Internet. Why didn't I register names like cars.com or hotels.com back when nobody was interested in these things? Oh, well. It's a little late now.

Dawn seemed to enjoy walking later in the day. It took us forever to walk four miles because she wanted to stop and smell everything. We always let Dawn take all the time she needs to smell and investigate things. Hey, it's her walk. If she's feeling adventurous, she can even choose the route we take. I'm not that adventurous myself. When I take my afternoon walk, I always follow exactly the same trail. I often try to remember specific details on certain rocks and trees to keep my memory sharp. Somehow, although I do the same thing day after day, it always seems different. The clouds are different every day. I see different birds and animals each day. Today, there was a fierce wind. That was certainly different.

It's supposed to start raining again tonight. This means that I'll have to deal with water on the roof again and Dawn probably won't get her morning walk. Unfortunately, there's not much I can do about the weather. The probability of rain is quite high tomorrow, but things look pretty good after that. I definitely don't want a White Christmas. I'd rather have a gentle breeze, temperatures in the 70's, and clear sunny skies.

Jada is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2584

Dash appears to be in good health. He got a precautionary chest x-ray today to make sure his thyroid cancer hadn't reappeared and his lungs looked clear. When Dash was initially diagnosed with cancer, the oncologist recommended periodic chest x-rays, because if his type of cancer metastasized, it would often spread to the lungs. He's been cancer free for over three years now, but we still give him a check-up every six months. The swollen lymph nodes in his neck have returned to normal as well. After getting his anal glands expressed, which he seems to need every time we visit the vet, we returned home to find that Dot was still asleep and hadn't pooped anywhere. I was pleased at how well the morning turned out.

One of my clients wants to change his domain name and move his website to a new server. I started making preparations for the move after Dash and I returned home. Changing domains and webservers is an easy process as long as you know where everything is located. I had to make a few phone calls to find out where the old and new domains were currently registered and see how much time I had to make the move. I got lucky and ended up talking to a good tech support person today, so I think I have all the information I need. I uploaded all the files to the new server and now all I need to do is find out when the client wants to make the switch, so I can point the domains to the right place. None of this required much imagination or was very difficult, but I was still glad to have something to do today.

Our roller coaster weather has bounced back to the unseasonably warm side of the scale. I had the furnace running this morning when we woke up, but it became so warm later in the day that I had to turn the air conditioner on. Only in Texas will you use the furnace and the air conditioner in the same day. I think it is supposed to get even warmer tomorrow and then another storm system will sweep through town toward the end of the week. I hope we don't have thunderstorms on Friday. Thunderstorms always mean that I need to stay home with the dogs and I look forward to going out to breakfast all week.

Dot seems to be improving in a lot of subtle ways. We haven't had an accident on the way to the back door in the morning for the last four days. There's generally been less leaking during the day as well. I'm hoping that the Incurin is starting to work. What's really surprising is how often Dot is able to get up on her own. I often find her standing up in her pen when I return from running errands and sometimes when she wakes up, she will walk out to her water bowl in the kitchen without any help from me. When she's tired, she still barks for assistance, but there's definitely been some improvement. It's too bad it's so difficult to improve muscle mass in older animals. Dot still has three small tumors that are slowly growing in her liver, but her biggest problem is the severe muscle atrophy in her rear legs. It seems harder for me to improve muscle mass too. No matter how much I exercise, my arms and legs are still too thin.

The new ink for my production printer arrived today, so I guess I'll spend tomorrow unclogging the thing. It's amazing how much time I spend staying prepared. There are always batteries to charge, computer files to backup and archive, and a huge, somewhat obsolete printer that seems to need a lot of TLC. I take such good care of my machines that Rod Serling probably could have used my life as a basis for a Twilight Zone episode.

Tomorrow will be another exciting day filled with laundry to fold and poop to clean up. If you didn't know that Dot and Dash were dogs, it would be easy to think you were reading a mommy blog.

Murphy is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2367

I moved the domains I own to a new registrar today. I'd been planning to do this for quite a while, but kept postponing the task because of the hassle I anticipated. Basically it was now or never. Several of the domains needed to be renewed soon, and if I renewed them at the old registrar, I would have to wait at least 60 days before I would be able to transfer them. The move was just as problematic as I feared. For starters, I couldn't remember the password to my old account. There are all kinds of safeguards to prevent domains from being hijacked, so I had to get permission from the old registrar to move the domains and then the new registrar had to verify the move to prove that I was really who I said I was. To make matters worse, there was no way to automate the process. I had to go through the complicated transfer process on a case by case basis for each domain. Luckily, I had nothing better to do today, because the process took a long time.

I didn't sleep well last night. Dot pooped in her bed twice and seemed unusually lethargic when I woke up this morning. I always worry when Dot's condition seems to change, but she seemed to bounce back after breakfast and by the time the dog walker arrived for our morning walk, she seemed fine again. Maybe I should be more worried about myself than the dogs. I have been unusually clumsy lately. I drop things all the time, which I never used to do. Yesterday, I dropped a Corningware cooking dish and broke it while I was trying to get some utensils out of a kitchen cabinet. Today, when I was eating breakfast, the glass with my fruit smoothie literally fell out of my hand while I was drinking it. The glass didn't break, but I did make a big mess. I never used to be this clumsy. I also inadvertently stepped on Dash's foot while I was walking him this afternoon. Dash wasn't hurt, but we both were startled. I wonder if this had anything to do with not being able to use the treadmill at the gym without using the handrails. Most of the other people never use the handrails, but I always do. Maybe something is going wrong with my balance and coordination. On the other hand, maybe I'm just being a hypochondriac.

After I successfully transferred all my domains, I decided to fix my voter registration online. For some reason now, the information on your voter registration card needs to match the information on your drivers license exactly. I has used my full middle name on one and a middle initial on the other. I got a letter last week saying that if I didn't fix this, I would be given a provisional ballot the next time I went to vote. This kind of scrutiny seemed a lot like making my 80 year old father take his shoes off for the TSA folks at the airport, but I learned a long time ago that it is pointless to argue with bureaucracy. I filled out the online form, which involved providing them with a lot of identifying information that I didn't even know belonged to me. When you look at your driver's license with a magnifying glass, there is a lot more information than you might think.

I'll be glad when Janet gets back. Dealing with the dogs when I first wake up is like herding cats. Dot and Dash have different agendas and are never where I need them to be. Dash sometimes wakes up with an upset stomach, and will race outside and eat grass and leaves if you don't watch him like a hawk. If I see him eating leaves, but am holding on to Dot's harness at the same time, it is hard to get him to stop. I could always let the dogs out one at a time, but they both need to pee as soon as they get up. Of course, I always need to pee as soon as I get up too, so it gets complicated.

All in all, we are doing pretty well. The soiled area rugs are clean again and back on the living room floor. I found a new kibble combination that Dash seems to like for breakfast. I'm still having problems getting Dot to pee just before bedtime, but we're working on it.  Hopefully, I'll be able to get Dot down to her physical therapy session tomorrow without another messy accident in the car. We'll see.

Domino is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2351

If you ever want to take the pulse of today's millennials, just go to an REI sale. I stopped by the store's self named "biggest sale of the year" on my way to the gym this afternoon and was greeted by the biggest collection of 20 to 30 somethings I'd ever seen. They were all stuffing their Honda CRV's and Subaru Foresters full of bargain tents, hammocks, bicycles, yoga mats, and Fitbit trackers. All I wanted was a pair of shorts, but there was no express lane. It took me forever to check out.

When I arrived at the gym a few miles down the road, the contrast couldn't have been more striking. There were no hordes of young people at all.  All I saw were a half dozen balding old men who had traded their Subaru Foresters for a Porsche Panamera decades ago. Maybe this explains why there are so few young people at my gym. From the looks of things at the REI store, all the millennials are doing something outside.

I got an e-mail today saying that my recent transaction with Network Solutions had failed to go through. What transaction? I haven't purchased anything from Network Solutions in years. I did some checking and discovered they has reset the preferences on my profile so that all the domains I had registered with them would auto-renew by default. I know for a fact that I had set all these domains to not auto renew because I wasn't interested in keeping some of them anymore. How could they just reset the preference file to auto-renew everything without even asking me? Luckily, the credit card I had listed with them had expired quite a while ago, so the sale didn't go through. I think I'm going to move the domain registration somewhere else. I don't appreciate sneaky tricks like this.

I had big plans to catch up on household chores I've been avoiding, but the small things at the top of my list took so long that I never got around to the larger things near the bottom. I did manage to get a few things accomplished. I cleaned some boots that had gotten muddy a few days ago. I lubricated a sticking sliding glass door and got it so it would open again. I swept leaves off the front porch, and of course I cleaned up Dot's latest accidents. I know there's lots of water on the roof, but the new forecast says it is supposed to rain every day next week. It's not worth the trouble to mess with the roof until things dry out a bit.

I'm worried about Dot. She's sleeping longer. She doesn't have as much energy as she did a few months ago. And her incontinence is getting worse. I still can't decide whether to resume her physical therapy sessions this coming Wednesday. The decision may end up being made for me. My car is still in the shop and the loaner car I'm driving is too small for me to transport Dot comfortably. Dot is due for another exam at the cancer center later in the week. Maybe we'll be able to find out what's going on while we are there. I hope the tumor in her liver isn't growing larger. If the cancer is progressing rapidly, there isn't much we can do.

There is a big bowl of fresh peaches and bananas for my morning smoothies. I've washed and dried all the dog blankets. I'm temporarily caught up on all my website revisions. I guess I'm ready to start another week.

Rosco is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1732

Such a busy day. I got my blood tested at the liver center. I finished the first of two new writing assignments. I brought five dead websites back online. I comforted the dogs during a thunderstorm. I got groceries for the weekend. And I still found time to have a nice breakfast at my favorite restaurant. The most problematic task was moving the websites to their new hosting company. First, I had to get a new password from Network Solutions before I could begin pointing the domains to the new server. I can never remember all my passwords. It seems pointless to write them all down on a yellow Post-it note and stick it on my computer screen, but it's just about come to that. After I received a new password and moved the DNS for each site, I tried to figure out the new server's control panel and reconfigured a few things in Dreamweaver so each site would upload correctly. I think everything works now, but it took a while.

For the first time since last Spring, it is actually colder outside than it is inside the house. A cold front must have accompanied this morning's rainfall, since it is much colder than it was yesterday. The temperature was in the mid-90's on Thursday. Today it got as low as 65 degrees. The dogs both seemed to enjoy the cooler weather and wanted to take longer walks. They didn't want to walk any faster, just longer. Needless to say, our walks took a long time today. I didn't mind. A nice walk is always more enjoyable than staring at my computer screen. I was actually delighted that Dot is strong enough now to take these longer walks. Our girl has come a long way.

I'm charging camera batteries now for tomorrow morning's photo shoot. I wonder what will happen if it rains? Hopefully, the weather will be nice, because we don't really have a contingency plan. If I wake up tomorrow morning to the sound of rain pounding on the roof, I guess our Plan-B will be to just reschedule the entire photo shoot for a sunny day. I hope that nobody suggests moving the shoot indoors, because I don't have enough strobes to light the large group I'm supposed to photograph. My client is a very positive person, so I assume that she'll make everything turn out OK. I haven't even mentioned the possibility of rain, since everyone thinks I'm too negative already.

I wonder why I keep thinking about the new iPhone 6? I certainly don't need a new phone. I barely use the one I've got. Nevertheless, there's a good chance that I'll end up getting one of these sleek looking tech toys with its fingerprint recognition system and pretty rounded corners. I'm hopeless. I wonder if there's a twelve step program for people who are addicted to pretty things?

Dot and Dash are both getting so much better that it's time to turn our attention to dental care again. It's amazing how quickly a dog's teeth get dirty. It's only been a few months since Dot had her teeth cleaned at the vet and they are already beginning to show signs of plaque buildup. Our vet showed us a new enzyme product that requires no brushing. You just add a few drops to their water bowl each day. We'll see how that goes.

Marcie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day