Day 2715

Every time Dot has a good day, I expect the next day to be even better. It doesn't work that way though. The whole process seems completely random. When Dot is eating well, she seems like a normal dog with mobility problems. When she isn't eating, there is little I can do to interest her in food. When nothing works, I wait and try again later. It is not uncommon for Dot to refuse food and water until 4 PM and then eat an entire cup of kibble at 6 PM.

Today wasn't a great day. It was hot. There wasn't the additional stimulus of having plumbers around the house. Maybe Dot overexerted herself yesterday, because she didn't have much energy today. Our morning walk was shorter than usual and there was no evening walk at all. I always think there is a rational reason for everything, so it baffles me whenever a good day like yesterday is followed by a bad day like today. Was something out of sequence? Did I do something wrong? I really wish this journey was a little more predictable.

Dot finally ate a little when Janet came home from work, but there was no real enthusiasm. The only thing Dot really wanted to eat today was bacon. I like bacon as much as the next guy, but you can't live on the stuff. Dot ended up eating part of a steak sandwich that Janet brought home from work  and about half a cup of dry food that Dash used to eat. I'm beginning to think that Dot will eat anything she has never tried before. I'd totally forgotten that we still had the bag of food Dot decided to eat tonight. Dash has been off that particular diet for at least three months.

It seems almost impossible to get enough sleep. I don't finish the blog until almost midnight now. We always get up early so Janet can help with the dogs before she goes to work. In between, Dot usually gets me up several times during the night to go outside. That doesn't leave much time for shut eye. Napping during the day doesn't work very well either. When Dot is sleeping, Dash usually wants something, and when Dash is sleeping, Dot needs attention. Dot and Dash never seem to be on the same page anymore.

It's a blessing in a way that work is so slow. If I had a lot of deadlines, I don't know how I'd ever be able to do what I'm doing now. I still try to do a few work related things every day, even though it is largely pointless. Today I figured out how to restore the Favicon that had disappeared from the blog. It turned out that I'd added the Favicon years ago when Blogger didn't support such things. When Blogger added Favicon support, my custom code became invalid. I don't know why it took me two years to figure this out, but better later than never. I also downloaded several instruction manuals for equipment I used to use everyday. The original manuals are lost in the storage warehouse somewhere and the skill I once had operating this equipment seems to be lost as well. I can learn again. I like the fact that practically everything on my bookshelves is available in PDF form somewhere. It's much easier to do a search on Google than to acctually search for something in my office.

We've got one last chance to Dot to eat her quota of food today. It gets kind of dicey after 10 PM. On one hand, you want to make sure that Dot eats enough. On the other hand, if she eats too late at night, she'll throw up. We do the best we can, but we don't always succeed. Hopefully, the pendulum will swing back the other way tomorrow. Maybe I can find another plumbing problem that needs attention.

Amy is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2297

I'm beginning to wish that I could move Dot's physical therapy appointment back to Thursday. Traffic is worse on Wednesday. The vet clinic seems busier too. As a result, Dot and I spend at least an hour and a half longer away from home. It's not like I have that much to do anyway, but I never realized that switching our appointment would make such a difference. I'll have to admit that there are some benefits to the new schedule. I don't have to struggle to get Dot ready anymore. We leave right after I feed the dogs their lunch now, and it's always easy to get Dot up when there is a meal involved.

Dot seemed stronger than she did last week. She did really well in the underwater treadmill today. I'm convinced there is a reason for everything, but I can never figure out why Dot has good days and bad days. She has had some very good days after resuming her chemotherapy, which is somewhat counter-intuitive. She has also had bad days when she is relaxed and well-rested. The only thing for certain is that every day is a new day. I never really know what to expect.

The rain returned today. There were severe thunderstorms and even tornado warnings in the area, but luckily all we saw in our own neighborhood was a gentle, steady rain. Today's storms didn't last all day, so the dogs still got their normal walks. I'm sure there is water on the roof though. I'll deal with the standing water and a very dirty car when the skies clear again.

I think my transition to the new web server is just about complete. I've finished troubleshooting the online forms and all the e-mail accounts are working now. The only difference I've noticed in performance so far is that the new server occasionally gets overwhelmed by heavy traffic. It's just like U-verse in a lot of ways. The site will go down for a few minutes, but by the time I get through to customer service, everything is running fine again. Maybe big hosting companies are like the airlines and try to keep things as close to capacity as they can. At any rate, it's going to take a while to get used to this, since my old server hardly ever went down at all.

Tech support people are probably going to hate me as I grow older. I can already see that I'm turning into one of those irritating people who continually call with some esoteric, weird problem just to have someone to talk to. During my transition to the new web server, I've already called tech support half a dozen times. I'm a curious person and generally just wanted to know why things were configured a certain way. I used to have lots of geeky friends to ponder these issues with, but now tech support will have to do. Maybe somebody knows why the favicon has disappeared from this blog. The little icon is loaded on the server and the code I added in the blog header is correct, but the favicon doesn't show up anymore. One more of life's little mysteries.

A bigger mystery is where all the writing jobs have gone. Last year at this time, I was swamped with writing assignments. This year my work load has slowed to a trickle. I write about watches and the oil and gas industry a lot. Both of these industries have suffered setbacks in recent years. Hopefully, when the dust settles, the writing assignments will return. Life is easier when there's always something to do. It's also nice to have extra money at the end of the month.

I have no idea what I'll be doing tomorrow. I'm pretty well caught up on almost everything.
 

Sparky is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 970

I'm trying to eat more fruit. I've acquired a taste for mangoes lately and thought I'd buy a few while I was at the grocery store. Instead of doing the sensible thing and buying whole mangoes, I got a box of mangoes that had already been sliced. "How do you tell if these are any good," a guy next to me asked. "These look good," I said. "They're all nice and yellow." Shows what I know about picking fruit. When I got the mangoes home, they were as hard as raw carrots. I guess they weren't ripe yet, because they sure didn't taste like the exotic looking peaches I thought I was buying. This is the problem with buying fruit. I can never tell when fruits and vegetables are ripe. It's much easier to buy cheese, or frozen pizza, or chocolate.  Janet will probably come home with a nice ripe mango and ask me why I bought these.

I didn't get nearly as much done as I thought I would today. I get easily sidetracked by trivial things and this morning when I turned on the computer, I noticed that the favicon on my website was gone. Favicons are those little 16x16 pixel square images you see on the menu bar when you bookmark a website in a browser. It doesn't even matter whether your website has a favicon or not, but I was determined to figure out where mine went. I looked at the HTML code. I tried uploading a new favicon icon to the server. I looked on Google for alternate ways to code the favicon script. Nothing worked. I finally decided that my ISP must have just turned off favicon support on the Apache web server. I put my little favicon icon on a different server that I had access to and referenced the URL back to my landing page. Everything works now. Time spent on this worthless endeavor: three hours.

I also opened up a Pinterest account and began pinning all my Instagram pictures. I never really liked Pinterest before, but when I discovered how easy it was to take the pictures that are for sale in my InstaCanvas Gallery and pin them on a Pinterest board, I was all in. I've got so many apps connected to other apps now that I never know what's going to turn up on Facebook or Twitter. I still write the blog by hand each and every evening, but everything else you see online is more or less automated.

I think the dogs are going to get a bath tomorrow. They've gotten themselves so dirty that they feel sticky when you pet them. Dash is the dirtiest. I have a feeling that a few of his spots are just dirt and are going to wash off when he gets his bath tomorrow. We'll go to the dog park first. Giving dog a bath before you take them to a dog park would be pointless.

Hannah is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 402

I had a new business meeting today. I think everything went well, but I won't really know for sure until I show them a prototype website design sometime next week. All my website clients are different, but they all share one thing in common. Whenever I ask them to show me an example of a website they like and admire, they inevitably take me to some wildly extravagant corporate site that probably took two years to build and had a budget in excess of $100,000. Everyone seems to think that I should be able to duplicate these high-end sites for a few hundred dollars and have everything up and running in less than a week. Today, the example sites I was shown were for Audi and for a major university. Budgets may have declined for retail storefront websites, but expectations are as high as they ever were.

I've been trying to put one of those little favicon icons on my business website today. No matter how much I monkey around with the code, the icon just won't display properly in my browser. For some reason, someone else's favicon shows up, even though my icon file is sitting right where it should be on the web server. It's kind of embarrassing. I've put these things on other people's sites, but I can't seem to get one working on my own. This is why I can never seem to get caught up on everything these days. Trivial little projects like this can eat up hours and hours of time. I'll figure it out though. By this time next week, there will be a favicon on my site. Hopefully it won't be the same strange little cartoon duck I saw up there today.

It was still dark when I took the trash out to the street for pickup this morning. Sometimes I wish I was more of a morning person. The sky was absolutely beautiful. Venus was exceptionally bright and I could see Saturn as well. Did I go get a telescope and do a little predawn observing? Nope. I was cold. I went back inside and got a cup of coffee instead. I've missed a ton of fabulous sunrise pictures over the years because I was still under the covers. That's just the way it is though. I never was a morning person and never will be.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day