Day 601

What a dismal day. I got my August invoices out this morning and was forced to acknowledge that everything I billed out for the entire month didn't even come close to offsetting what I lost in the market in a single day. I'm utilizing a complex strategy involving gold, managed futures and inverse ETF's to minimize the carnage as best I can, but there's no way to avoid losing money on a day like this.

On the business shows, I keep hearing about contagion. The pundits keep wondering if the contagion will spread. I've got news for you guys. It's a bit late to worry about contagion when the patient already has the disease. When you look at all the mindless riots in London, the ineffectiveness of our congress here in the United States, the endless unrest in the Middle East, and the fact that the entire world is drowning in debt, it's no surprise that the markets were in turmoil today. We've managed to make a big mess of things and I wonder if we've got what it takes to clean everything up. What did that nursery rhyme say? All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.

On a brighter note, I'm now the mayor of the Post Office on foursquare. Pretty soon I'll be the mayor of everything in my tiny, self-contained world. Foursquare has made me realize that I really don't do all that much away from the computer. If Dalmatians could design websites, I think my life would be more or less identical to what my dogs currently experience. Eat. Work. Sleep. Repeat. That's about it.

For months now, I've kept thinking that one of the wooden mileage markers on a trail where I walk the dogs was out of place. There was a marker that said "1/2" that was placed after the one mile marker. I was convinced this marker should have been placed before the one mile marker, until I realized today that it was exactly midway between the one mile and two mile markers. Duh. It's been saying one and a half miles all along. What a dummy I am.

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Day 591

One one hand, it was a perfectly normal doctor's visit. On the other hand, it was a perfectly normal client meeting. I'm still getting used to having my personal physician as a client. During my visit today, the doctor would check me for signs of Carpal tunnel syndrome, while I would take videos of him talking about osteoporosis. These two sides to the visit would be happening almost simultaneously. The doc would tell me how to reduce my cholesterol levels, while I would be telling him how to improve his SEO.

I actually like having everyone I know as a client. It makes life simpler. I probably have slipped over to the dark side though. While the rest of the world worries about keeping medical records private, I kept asking the nurse if she could burn me a disk of my X-Rays today so I could put them on the blog.

There are other signs I have succumbed to the digital world as well. I have this cool smart app on my iPhone that lets me deposit checks in my bank just by taking a picture of them. Do I ever use it? Well, not exactly. You see, I also have this cool dumb app on my iPhone called foursquare that tells me I am the Mayor of my bank. So, instead of taking a quick picture with my phone, I drive all the way to bank, just so I can check in and keep someone else from becoming Mayor. I'm Mayor of several other places too, but they're all equally boring pedestrian venues. I'm right on the verge of becoming Mayor of the Post Office.

I got a message from my broker today, saying that the comptroller of a REIT I've been investing in had been caught embezzling from the fund and had managed to steal 7% of the fund's total assets. Nice. What could top this bad news? Oh right...the country's going to go bankrupt next Tuesday. I can't believe that congress still can't get their act together. What did we elect these guys for anyway?

I just found out that two Dalmatians in the rescue program passed away today. I knew both dogs were sick, but kept hoping that they would improve. Harley had bone cancer and I don't know if we'll ever really know the true nature of Bentley's illness. It's really sad when you do everything you can possible think of to bring these guys back to good health and it still isn't enough.

I'm glad our own two dogs are still healthy. I'm also glad that I'm apparently a bit healthier than I thought I was. In between everything else we were talking about this afternoon, my doctor told me that the meds he put me on are working and that although I'm still in a risk group for getting diabetes, I definitely don't have the disease.

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Day 583

The water bill is going to be horrendous this month. I turn on the sprinklers and then I keep forgetting to turn them off again. Maybe it's because so many things turn themselves off automatically these days. The washing machine turns itself off when its done. The coffee maker turns itself off. Even the new television turns itself off when we go to sleep. Maybe I should get some more of those battery powered timers that attach to the faucet. I've bought them before and they all seem to last about two weeks. It really shouldn't be that hard to remember to turn the sprinklers off after a couple of hours.

I feel like I've doubled the size of one of the veterinary websites I manage today. When I started working for these folks, they had eight employees. Now they have over thirty. Since they like to feature employee bios on the site, I need to bring things up to date periodically. This isn't even the largest vet I work for either. Another veterinarian I work with has over fifty employees. If you are young and still considering a career path, you definitely ought to look into veterinary medicine. I'm sure there are unsuccessful vets somewhere, but I sure don't know any. If you don't think you've got what it takes to make it through vet school, just open a doggie day care center. These businesses are becoming increasingly popular too.

I couldn't figure out why my foursquare score kept going up and down. Then, someone told me today that the points are reset every week. I suddenly lost interest in the game. If the points aren't cumulative, I'll never get anywhere. I don't even leave the house all that much.

Trash day again. I just got back from hauling this week's accumulation of trash out to the street for pickup early tomorrow morning. Yeah, I know it's Friday tomorrow, but when the trash can is empty, I consider the week officially over.

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Day 578

I'm going to have to apologize for ignoring all those Farmville and Mafia Wars requests. Lately, I've been finding myself checking in compulsively on foursquare and will have to admit that this is just another online game, like CityVille and all the rest. Does it really matter if I'm mayor of the dog park? Probably not. Will I keep checking in? Probably so. Hey, a little mindless entertainment never hurt anyone.

I had to pick up some stuff at Sam's Club today and of course I couldn't find it. Why does this store keep moving things around all the time? Just as soon as I learn where a particular item is, they move it to another part of the store. This must be part of some diabolical plan to get people to buy more groceries by forcing them to push their buggy up and down every single aisle in search of peanut butter or paper towels. Maybe it's good marketing, but I find it irritating. Walmart and Sam's Club aren't places where I particularly want to linger. Do me a favor guys and just leave the strawberries where they were last week.

I've put together a little harness so Dot can wear the GoPro camera and help me make a movie from a dog's perspective. We'll wait till it's a bit cooler outside to try everything out though. It just wouldn't be right to have her wear this contraption while it's 105 outside. She's miserable enough in the heat as it is. You might wonder why Dash isn't going to wear the camera. There's an easy answer to that one. The camera would be destroyed in about five minutes.

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Day 569

When I took the dogs out this morning, I almost stepped on a giant snake that was lurking just outside the back yard fence. Judging from where the snake was located, I would guess that it spent a fair amount of time inside the back yard as well. I don't like snakes. There are over a dozen varieties of snakes that make their home in the park behind our house. At least a third of these snakes are poisonous and I can never remember which ones are harmless and which are to be avoided. With the unpredictable behavior of dogs around snakes, I don't take any chances and do my best to avoid them all. Now that I've seen this huge snake so close to home, I'm going to be thinking it is slithering around in the bushes whenever I'm outside. This was one thing I liked about living in Alaska when I was in high school. The state has no snakes.

The first thing I noticed when I went to the office this morning was that the main switch that controlled all the lighting had burned out. None of the lights would come on at all. This wasn't much of a problem in the morning when light was streaming in from the window on the East side of the room, but as the day wore on, the room kept getting darker and darker. I knew I was going to be forced to fix this thing soon because it would be hard to write the blog in the dark.

I had made an appointment to get a haircut today anyway, so my outing quickly expanded to a haircut and a search for a very weird switch that I had installed years ago and didn't think was available anymore. True to form, I went back to my expensive stylist instead of going to a barber like I had vowed to do the last time I got a haircut. Equally true to form, something as easy as changing out a light switch turned out to be quite difficult. I never did find a match for the old switch assembly, but I finally found something completely different that I thought might work. I wasted the rest of the afternoon trying to get the wiring hooked up properly, and after some initial trial and error mistakes, the lights are on again.

When I was at that networking breakfast yesterday, one of the guys sitting at my table said that foursquare was really good for small businesses, because they could add their own coupons for specials that would show up whenever somebody checked in at their business. I'd been trying to avoid foursquare because I don't like things that involve badges and competition. Against my better judgment, I joined foursquare today, because I didn't want to be ignorant about it and I do happen to have several retail clients that might be interested in the coupons. Right away people started signing up as "friends." I was perplexed. Why would you need friends on a GPS location app? One of my clients told me that the whole point of the application was to make it easier for you to find your friends when you were out and about. Hmm. What a novel idea. When I'm out and about, I just want to get my business done as soon as possible so I can go back home again. Maybe I'm not part of foursquare's target audience.

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