Day 3412

If you measure days by your level of activity, today was pretty good. The weather was nice too, so I really can't complain. I'm finally getting enough sleep as well. It's nice to know that I have no trouble sleeping under normal circumstances. Rest and activity are good. The rest allows me to stay active and the activity should motivate me. Why do I not feel motivated?

People keep suggesting things for me to do. Take a class. Volunteer. Go back to work. These are really just things my friends like to do. I need to find my own path. I've always been a clever person and have tended to work for praise. Being told you are creative over and over again can be a strong motivator to actually do something creative. Once you figure out what is going on, this doesn't tend to work anymore. I'm not looking for feedback these days. I need to find something that I intrinsically enjoy even if no one else in the entire world knew I was doing it.

I think about things like these while I'm at the gym. It's a kind of daydreaming where conclusions are unnecessary. I wonder if it is possible to do something significant if you don't have a goal? Maybe. My only goal in writing the blog was to write something for 5000 days. This sounds simple enough. You can't write for this long without thinking though. You are forced to explore your thoughts just to continue having something to say. Do this long enough and maybe you never become senile. Taking 10,000 steps a day is kind of similar. It's a mindless, repetitive activity, but it does keep you active. When I look around I find that I am healthier than people I know who don't take 10,000 steps a day.

I am not competitive at all. Even if I start taking 20,000 steps a day I will never have any desire to run a 5K. I won't join a yoga class or go to boot camp either. Even if I manage to keep writing until the day I die, I'll probably never care if anyone else is reading. I've been keeping journals long before the Internet even existed. I don't do a lot of talking. This is just a convenient way to make sure my brain is still working.

I'm happy enough to take long mindless walks and write about walking dogs and drinking fruit smoothies forever. Mowing the grass and removing water from the roof aren't part of the equation though. Even though I added quite a few steps by mowing the lawn after I got home from the gym this afternoon, it was still an irritating activity. I hate mowing the grass. The only reason I mowed today was that there is rain in the forecast all next week. If I didn't mow now, the yard would be a jungle by May.

I hope the forecast is wrong. I don't look forward to spending the week worrying about whether the roof is going to leak. Eventually it will leak again. I need to call the roofers who haven't submitted their bid yet. You'd think they'd be more interested.

Lucky is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2575 - New Year's Day

I had no desire to get up this morning. My body reminded me that I don't drink anymore. Just the small amount of champagne I had last night to celebrate the New Year slowed me down considerably. Dot kept us on schedule though. She always does. When I saw her trying to get up, I instantly jumped out of bed and raced to open the back door. To celebrate our success at peeing outside, we all went back to bed for another hour.

Eventually, we all got up and started our morning routine, but the New Year definitely got off to a slow start. Dot peed on my house slippers yesterday, so I thought I'd throw them in the washing machine. This just revealed how poorly they were constructed. One of the shoes fell apart and appeared to be made of some sort of compressed paper. This was definitely a job for superglue. I didn't have enough superglue left, but found a bottle of Gorilla Glue in the utility room. The stuff doesn't dry very fast, so the jury is still out on this experiment.

I finally found the receipt for the candelabra base LED bulbs that wouldn't fit in my floor lamps and took them back to Home Depot to exchange for some more of the old fashioned halogen bulbs I was trying to avoid. The guy in the electrical department didn't realize that there were several sizes of candelabra screw threads either. Apparently, I was the first person who had purchased this style of LED bulb. Maybe someday I'll be able to abandon incandescent bulbs entirely, but it wasn't going to be today.

I had high hopes of seeing Neptune this evening, but it wasn't meant to be. The faint planets are almost impossible for someone like me to find in the sky, unless they happen to be located very close to something familiar. Tonight there was a conjunction of Neptune and Mars. I could definitely find Mars. Neptune is supposed to be easily visible through a pair of decent binoculars, but you can't see it through clouds. Like the candelabra base LED bulbs, I will have to wait until some other time.

I wish I had some sort of game plan for 2017. If I had a goal, I probably could accomplish quite a bit. I've had long term goals before. I worked really hard to build my business back in the early 1990's. I worked hard to get healthier when I discovered I had Hepatitis C. I need to remember that keeping Dot alive is not really a realistic goal. I can do my best to keep her happy while she's here, but I have little control over how long she's with us on this earth. Just getting from one day to the next is not a very ambitious goal. I know I can do that. What could I realistically achieve that would actually make me happier if I was successful? I'm stumped.

Goals are a lot like the sailboats I see out on the lake. From a distance they look so peaceful and serene. When I'm out on the water, it all looks different and I almost instantly wish I was back on dry land. I have a feeling that I don't understand sailing any better than I understand goals.

Jasper is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2400

I like big, round numbers like 2400. I'm only 100 days away from the halfway point of this journey. I wonder if I'll be able to continue this peculiar marathon for 5000 consecutive days? Will I run out of things to say, or have I already run out of things to say. It's often hard to tell the difference. When you spend year after year ending each day with a 500 word recap, you start to realize that life consists of a relatively small number of recurring themes. There are so many thing that all of us do over and over again. I'd still like to think that this somewhat monotonous journey is a grand adventure. There has to be some small justification for the thousands of hours I've spent telling this tale. I hope I don't wake up one morning thinking that this has all been a monumental waste of time. I'd really like to make it to Day 5000.

I've learned some valuable things about life along the way, but I definitely don't learn something every day. Some days I just try to chart a course that takes me from waking up to drifting off to sleep again. Today, I thought I'd clean the house before I went to the gym. One reason the house is so dirty is that when I wait until I return from the gym, I'm too tired to do anything else. I vacuumed, did the laundry, and returned the rugs that had been drying in the back yard to their original places. I finished my chores and arrived at the gym a few hours later than usual. I was surprised at how crowded the place was.  Could a few hours really make this much difference?

Dot seemed a bit tired today. Janet thought we should just let her rest, but I thought she still needed a little bit of exercise. I felt a bit guilty when she immediately went back to her bed looking exhausted and went to sleep as soon as we returned. Maybe she did need to rest today. I really try not to push her too hard, but I know that physical therapy is not a part time activity. You have to be relentless with physical therapy in order to make any progress. Later in the day, Dot bounced back and I felt a little better. It's still hard to know where to draw the line however. If Dot seems to want to walk, we walk; even if it takes us forever to go around the block.

I think desire is everything and I want to encourage Dot to maintain her desire to live. We must be doing something right, because if she makes it through the summer, we will be sharing our lives with a 17 year old Dalmatian. There aren't many 17 year old Dalmatians. In many ways, the journey Dot has already made is much more remarkable than my own quest to create a 5000 day journal.

In addition to my household chores and workout routines, I updated some websites this afternoon. Working on weekends is commonplace now, mostly because my clients seem to have more important things to do during the week. Websites aren't as much of a priority now. Everybody still has one, but they often don't spend much time thinking about it. I guess getting my assignments on Friday afternoon is still a lot better than not getting them at all.

I continue to do my assignments immediately, as if they were rush jobs, because I don't want to acknowledge how irrelevant I've become. I continue to post a blog entry every single day, because I'm afraid that if I skip even a single day, I'll conclude that the whole experiment was a silly pursuit and just quit. I continue to walk Dot each and every day, because I realize how quickly one can become an invalid. I never give up, but there are times when I would like to.

Good grief. Dot just pooped in her bed again and it looks like she's about to eat it. Gotta go.

Keller is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2020

I kind of hate to admit it, but I love to track things. I track the weather. I use fitness bands to track my steps. I use apps on my phone to track where I go in the car. Probably this blog is just a way to track how I feel over a long period of time. At any rate, now that I've learned how to use an Apple Watch, I've discovered that there are whole new worlds of things I can track. The device keeps a continuous record of your heart rate and the calories you burn and sends them to the Health app on your phone. If you are so inclined, you can add WiFi scales, blood pressure cuffs, and lord knows what else so you can track even more. I'm not interested in the day-to-day, but the long term trends are fascinating. The number of miles I walk each day has been in a slow, steady decline for almost three years. My weight peaked about twelve years ago and has been very gradually declining ever since. I'm almost back to my college weight now and I don't really know why.

There was certainly plenty to track today. I kept moving all day long. Dot was tired and needed a rest, so I let Dash walk as long as he wanted. We walked about three miles and were gone over an hour. A little later I burned 150 calories getting the water off the roof. It felt like I should have burned a lot more, but there wasn't a setting on my fitness app for pushing a broom. I set the thing for a brisk walk instead. I have a feeling that I should have used the setting for the elliptical machine, or something more strenuous. All these fitness things on my phone seem to be very goal oriented. They set goals for you and then when you reach the goal, they set a new goal to push you a little harder. The first thing I do when I install one of these apps and turn all the goal reminders off. I'm a curious person and am interested in everything, but I'm not very goal oriented. I certainly don't need my phone telling me to work harder.

Dash doesn't understand the concept of sleeping in on weekends. For the past several weeks he has started getting out of bed about 6:30 AM and barking at the foot of the bed until he wakes everyone else up. Dot would be content to sleep a bit longer on her own, but when Dash starts barking, she always joins in. At this point it is useless to try to sleep any longer. The only good thing about these canine alarm clocks is it forces us to get up and walk the dogs while it is still cool outside. It warms up so fast once the sun is up, that even an hour delay in getting the dogs out can make a huge difference in how hot they get. Since we had a long walk this morning, it literally felt ten degrees warmer by the time we got home.

I'll probably need to mow the grass again tomorrow. The yard has never looked this green so late in the year. I'm surprised at how fast the grass is growing, since some years it doesn't grow at all in the Summer. I wonder how many calories that mowing the grass will burn? There's not a setting for mowing the grass on the fitness app either. When are these people going to learn that there are more ways to exercise than going to the gym and spending thirty minutes on the Stairmaster?

Space X is going to launch another Dragon 9 rocket tomorrow. I had an opportunity to go to Florida and view the launch with the NASA folks again, but the trip was too expensive and I didn't want to leave Dot anyway. Oh, well. For the time being, life has become too complicated for these kinds of trips. I guess I'll just watch the launch on my computer.

Rascal is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1800

I like big round numbers like 1800. They give me hope that I'll be able to continue doing this for 2000, or if I'm lucky, even 5000 days. As incremental days go, this really wasn't much of a milestone. It was still chilly outside, although the temperature was warmer than yesterday. The day went fast, because there were a ton of minor chores to do. After walking the dogs and fixing myself some oatmeal for breakfast, I went to the bank. Then I went to the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions, did a load of laundry, and balanced my checkbook. Each of these things took a lot longer than it should have, but like I said, the day went quickly.

I don't know why it takes me so long to balance my checkbook these day. This used to be a snap. Now, I'm always entering something twice, or not at all, and ending up with a perplexing discrepancy after all my efforts. Since I'm an obsessive type by nature, I keep checking and rechecking until I eventually find my error, but I doubt that all my calculations even matter. It would probably be a lot easier if I just accepted what the bank said I have each month and let it go at that.

My writing assignments took longer today as well. I wish I could do these things faster since they don't pay a lot, but there are days when my mind is a blank. Just like the checkbook, I eventually get all the words in the right place, but there is often a lot of staring off into space involved. By the time I got all the writing, bookkeeping, and other errands taken care of, it was time for dinner. It wasn't an exciting day, but it was a productive one.

We skipped dog training class for the second week in a row. It's just too cold for Dot. Her joints are old and stiff and the ground is damp and cold. On nights like these, she prefers to sit on a pile of blankets in a warm house. Dash doesn't seem to mind missing class either. He enjoys seeing the other dogs, but I think he lost interest in being obedient several years ago. When it warms up a bit, we'll be back. It's good for the dogs to stay active and mingle with other dogs.

It's time to start thinking about Christmas pet pictures again. I can't even remember how many years I've been shooting pictures of dogs sitting on Santa's lap, but it's been a long time. Janet and I got a new backdrop for this year's round of pictures. Since a lot of the same people come to these events year after year, it's nice to have something different to offer them. I think we have five events this year, so I hope all my equipment still works.

The refrigerator looks pretty empty, so I'll probably have to go to the store tomorrow. Dot has her physical therapy session as well. We'll see how the day goes. I'd like to go see Interstellar at an IMAX theater sometime soon, but tomorrow looks pretty busy. Maybe Friday might work.

Jasper is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1143

This is going to take a while. Usually, when I'm in a hurry and don't feel like cooking, I'll run down to a nearby barbecue joint and get the brisket platter to bring home for dinner. Tonight, I went to Central Market and got a broccoli, tomato and garlic salad; a grape, walnut and blue cheese salad; and a bowl of tomato bisque. The meal was tasty and satisfying but I couldn't visualize portion sizes very well and bought too much. That's one of the things I don't like about fresh vegetables. They don't stay fresh very long. I forget about the leftovers and they inevitably go bad. Cured meats on the other hand, seem to last forever.

I really haven't had any major goals for quite a while. I have a tendency to just get up and plod through the day, doing whatever is necessary to keep treading water until bedtime. Goals probably aren't such a bad thing. Maybe staying alive a little longer would be an excellent goal to start with. I'm going to try my best to make this healthy diet work. So, if you hear me talking about bacon and cheeseburgers in a month from now, you'll know I'm just another backslider.

We're planning on taking the dogs on a little road trip. We've always wanted to go on a real vacation with them, but so far we haven't been able to go more than five miles without a major mishap. Dot is just as territorial in the car as she is at home. When we pull up at a stoplight, she'll start barking like crazy at people crossing the street or waiting for a bus. Dot's barking usually throws Dash into a panic and he'll wriggle out of his car harness like a canine Houdini and then he's all over the place. Janet is an optimist though. She thinks that if she sits in back with them, the dogs will be calm and well behaved. I have my doubts, but since they spend most of their day sleeping around the house, there ought to be a way to get them to sleep in the car as well.

A friend of mine wants to send a little health care business my way. He asked if I had ever done any of this type of writing and of course I said "sure." I knew I'd done quite a bit of health care writing. I just couldn't remember what it was. A quick search revealed that I'd written an ad campaign about impotency, some brochures about surgical scrubs made out of paper, and a physical therapy video that featured a lot of old people bobbing around in a huge swimming pool. I've done a huge amount of work for veterinarians, of course, but I'm always a bit hesitant to tell doctors and hospital administrators that I consider veterinary medicine to be more or less the same as whatever they're doing. We'll see how it goes. My new business pitches usually go pretty well unless someone wants to actually see me in person.

Cooper is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day