Day 1569

As soon as I heard we would be having severe weather tomorrow, I began to reschedule my Thursday appointments so I wouldn't have to leave the house. I've spent so many years around storm phobic dogs, that I've become storm phobic myself. To me, rainy days are when tree limbs fall during a thunderstorm and crush your lawn furniture. Rain is when your car gets pelted with golf ball sized hail. It's when your dogs panic and dig a hole in the carpet or try to jump through the living room window. Rain makes your roof leak and your electricity go out. I don't like rain.

I was able to move most of tomorrow's appointments to either this afternoon or Friday. This made today pretty busy, but I'm glad I cleared the deck for tomorrow. If the dogs don't like the look of things tomorrow, we'll all just get under a blanket and wait things out.

Dash's blood work looked good, so the cancer center renewed his prescription for Palladia for another two weeks. Hopefully, my own blood work looked good as well. That lab test was one of the Thursday appointments I rescheduled for this afternoon. I think they are testing Dash's and my own blood for exactly the same thing. The doctors don't want our platelet count to become so low that we become anemic.  So far, so good for both of us.

I thought I was going to get a lot of writing done today, but there were a few snafus and I didn't get much done at all. This just means I will be even busier tomorrow. One of the website clients I lost late last year launched their new replacement website today. I was curious, so I took a look. The new site was much more elaborate than anything I typically do. Could I have designed something this fancy? I suppose so. Could I have done this site for the price the client probably paid? I doubt it. I'm not positive, but the new site looked a lot like one of those customized Wordpress templates. Sure, the companies that crank out these sophisticated template sites can offer them at a very low cost. They specialize in a particular industry and all the sites are essentially the same. Clients don't seem to care. They just want all the bells and whistles for a low price. I still like to design one-of-a-kind sites from scratch, but I'm becoming a dinosaur. Who am I kidding. I already am a dinosaur.

People often ask why I don't just do Wordpress template sites myself. To make this business model work, you need economies of scale. In a nutshell, you need to be a much bigger company than I am willing to be. When you can sell essentially the same thing over and over again to a huge audience, you can charge a much cheaper price. When you only do something once, you have to charge more.

I can't believe that there has been another shooting at Fort Hood. I don't understand why soldiers on a military base need to be unarmed. Using weapons is what most soldiers are trained to do. If the Fort Hood soldiers had their own sidearms, both of these Fort Hood shooting incidents might have ended quite differently.

I even stocked up on groceries today, so there is no need to leave the house at all tomorrow if the weather turns bad. I actually hope the weather forecasts are wrong and the thunderstorms leave us alone. Staying inside with two storm phobic Dalmatians on a rainy day is no fun at all.

Miracle is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1498

I'm perpetually tired these days. I follow the generally accepted practice of compensating for today's declining rates by increasing my work load. Economies of scale don't really work for me unfortunately, since I have nobody to delegate things to. There is only me. The more business I get, the faster I have to work, and the less fun everything becomes. If I didn't detest working with others so much, I would hire a bunch of young, low paid work slaves and delegate everything. This seems to work for some people. I prefer to live under the illusion that I'm an artist, working alone, and doing whatever I want. I'm not really an artist, of course. I just grind out a bunch of crap that other people don't want to bother with themselves.

I identify with what a lot of millennials are going through. They don't want to grow up and become chemical engineers and mathematicians. They'd rather do what I do instead. Hey guys, I don't think there's much future in being me. I've played around at being a documentary filmmaker, an architect, a fashion photographer, and a writer. I never wanted to have a real job, and still don't. I only manage to live pretty well because I got lucky in the 1980's. It remains to be seen whether luck will come my way again. My advice to millennials comes with a note of caution. The world just doesn't need many Peter Pans. If you don't want to compromise and collaborate, be prepared to live in your parent's basement forever.

If you are determined to pursue the creative life when the world is crying out for medical administrators and petroleum engineers, I wish you luck. I would encourage you to leave your parents immediately and learn to fend for yourself. That's what I did. I failed again and again, but learned that failure is no big deal. If one thing didn't work, I would just try something else. If something actually did work, I would run with it until I got bored. I learned that if you are supremely confident, you will survive no matter what you do. I guess I'm still surviving after a fashion, although I feel a bit like Alice after she'd gone down the rabbit hole. The world is a very strange place these days.

I'm glad I enjoy the company of dogs. Dogs keep me humble and dogs keep me honest. When I'm not writing, I'm a faithful butler, attending to the needs of Dot and Dash. Today, we walked, we ate, and we napped a bit. I took Dash to the vet for his antigen shot. I helped Dot up when she stumbled a bit on her morning walk. The dogs tolerate the long hours I spend writing and I tolerate some equally strange habits of theirs. I'm still tired though. There's no getting around that.

Molly is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day