Day 2806

It was a little unusual to go to the gym on Wednesday, but why not. There is nothing to differentiate weekdays from weekends anymore. I've decided that stopping or reversing the muscle atrophy I've been experiencing is as important as anything else that's on my plate. I might as well go to the gym whenever I've got some free time.

Truthfully, I could go to the gym every single day if I enjoyed it as much as some of the other people I see working out. Some of them seem to live at the gym. It doesn't matter what day I pick. They're always there. I actually did pretty well today, considering that I'd already been up on the roof. If I could bring myself to consistently exercise like this three times a week, I might actually see some results.

Preparing the roof for my repairs was actually a lot more work than my workout. I cleared away the remaining standing water today. Tomorrow I will clean the damaged surfaces and hopefully on Friday I can apply the new elastomer patches. Since there is no more rain in the forecast, there is a reasonable chance of success. It is so discouraging to go up on the roof. I think the materials that were originally used to coat the roof were defective, but the roofer won't put on a completely new roof. The whole thing is eventually going to be patched one square foot at a time.

I could spend the rest of my life repairing broken stuff around the house. I think I understand now why people sometimes just get in their cars and drive away from it all forever. There is so much that needs to be fixed now that it seems a bit overwhelming. If it was hard to find a good contractor before, it's going to be impossible now. Everybody is going to be down in Houston rebuilding the city for the next ten years.

I stopped by the REI store on the way to the gym and there was absolutely nothing that I wanted or needed. I left the store empty handed. I felt the same way the last time I visited the Apple Store. Maybe I am finally moving beyond my need to constantly accumulate stuff. It would be a good thing if this was true. Every amazing gadget turns into a pile of broken stuff after three to five years. I have enough broken stuff already. Maybe possessions are actually a liability. This would be a totally new concept for me, but it's something I see looming on the horizon.

It's time for my annual physical, but since I'm thinking of switching doctors I don't know whether to go ahead and schedule an appointment or wait until I find another doctor and start over with a clean slate. Why did my doctor have to fire me as his web designer? I was reasonably happy until this happened. Now I hate to even visit the clinic. Janet's doctors are great, but they are in a whole different league than mine. It's pretty obvious that the quality of care she gets is worth the extra money, but it's still hard to put aside money for health that could be used for a new camera. Nevertheless, I'm fairly certain I'll eventually go ahead and make the switch. The older you get, the more you realize that staying healthy is the only thing that matters.

I'm glad the rain finally stopped in Houston. Hopefully, the flood waters will start to recede soon. As hard as things are now, I think it will be even harder when the news crews disappear and people are left with the enormous task of rebuilding their lives from scratch. A tornado roared through a suburb of Dallas a few years ago and the residents are still wrangling with insurance companies and trying to rebuild their homes. We'll see what happens, but I think Texas has been changed forever.

Tessa is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2756

I finished writing both my new articles today and spent the rest of the time lying on the bed with my feet elevated. It was nice to have some work to do again, but I don't think it is a good idea to sit at the computer all day. I can literally feel the fluid pooling around my ankles when I sit for long periods of time. Another bad thing about sitting at the computer is that I spend too much time Googling information about swollen legs and ankles. I'm finding lots of similarities between my condition and people who have had minor motorcycle accidents. Basically, if you are a hypochondriac, you should never Google your own ailments.

Elevating my legs really seems to help control the swelling in my legs, but unfortunately the benefits seem temporary. It kind of feels like I've got a quart of water floating around inside me. When I lie on the bed with my legs elevated, the liquid flows back into my body. When I stand up and start walking, gravity causes it to flow down around my ankles again. It's frustrating, but there's not much I can do at this point. It's going to take a long time to completely reabsorb the blood and fluids resulting from a trauma injury like this.

Maybe I need to start watching Netflix like Janet. She needs to rest for long periods of time too, but luckily she enjoys watching movies. Often I find her asleep with a movie still running on the iPad on her lap. I'm growing bored staring at the ceiling, so maybe I'll give Netflix a try tomorrow. Lying on your back with your feet in the air probably isn't the best position to watch a movie, but I'll have to improvise.

Dash threw up again this afternoon. I was hoping that he wouldn't have any problems until Janet and I were both well again. Maybe that was too much to ask for. Dash has thrown up periodically for years. Usually he seems normal again within a few hours. When I take him to the vet they can never find anything wrong and usually just suggest changing his diet. Dash will eat bugs and dead things when he can find them, and eating something bad is often the cause of his stomach problems. Janet and I have been so preoccupied that we probably haven't been watching him closely enough when we take him outside to pee. At any rate, we gave him a Pepsid tonight and hoped for the best.

Dash's upset stomach reminded me to make an appointment for him at the cancer center. His oncologist likes to do a recheck every six months and we are a little behind schedule. Dash has been in remission for so long now that his doctors aren't really worried about the cancer returning. They are more worried about an enlarged heart as he grows older.

When I look at my calendar, it's nothing but doctor's appointments for Janet, myself, and Dash. Hopefully, this is just a temporary thing. Janet is starting to feel a lot better. I'm on the mend too, but dog bites are painful injuries that tend to heal slowly. I'll just need to stay patient. It would be nice if Dash would stay healthy too. We don't need a three ring circus at this point.

Tomorrow, I take my car in for a long postponed service appointment. It will be nice to get that expensive necessity out of the way. Pretty soon, we should have grass in the back yard again too. One step at a time, we're slowly getting back to normal. Just for the record, I didn't see this Great Egret today. I didn't even leave the house. I did see the bird pretty recently though and didn't feel like showing you a picture of my feet in the air.

Sophia is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2750

Well this sucks. I found a credit card in our alley this afternoon and though it might belong to friends of our neighbor. They'd had a Fourth of July party yesterday and there were a lot of people walking back and forth down the alley yesterday evening. I knocked on the neighbor's door and before the door was even fully open, their German Shepard ran out the door and bit me in the calf. I fell down and before I could get up, the dog bit me in the other leg. I was just trying to do a good deed by returning the credit card and got some bad dog bites for my efforts.

I've been bitten before and know that puncture wounds aren't to be taken lightly. One of those new stand-alone emergency rooms had just opened up in the neighborhood, so I decided to go there. They told me that they didn't accept Medicare and I would have to pay cash. Forget that. I drove down the street to a Primacare and they told me there would be a two hour wait. The lobby was empty, so I don't know what the problem was. I was still bleeding and growing frustrated. Luckily, I remembered that my own doctor was open until 8 PM. I got in the car and drove there, arriving just before the place closed.

A nurse cleaned my wounds, gave me a tetanus shot, injected me with an antibiotic, wrote me a prescription for more antibiotics, and bandaged me up again. If I'd waited for the Primacare folks to do this, I'd probably be sitting in the waiting room until midnight. Something needs to be done about the neighbor's dog. They claim he's friendly, but he's bitten me three times in the last ten years. It's probably time to call animal control.

I was hoping the nurse could stop the bleeding, but she told me that letting the blood flow would help prevent infection. I'm probably going to need to do a lot of bandage changes for a while. Just when I thought that Janet's bandage changes were becoming less of an issue, now I've got my own to deal with. The bad thing about dog bites is that they take a long time to heal. Been there, done that.

The rest of my day was pretty uneventful. I walked Dash, took Janet to a few stores to get her out of the house for a bit, and started cloning the hard drive on my desktop computer in preparation for installing a larger and faster drive later in the week. It was just a normal hot July day until the dog bit me.

I never dreamed it would take so long to clone a terabyte of data. Everything has slowed down to a crawl while the files are being copied. I've been waiting for Photoshop to open for twenty minutes now. I hate to cancel the cloning operation, since it's been running for five hours now. Oh, well. I learned a long time ago that when you start something, you've got to finish it.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. It looks like I've got a hematoma in my left leg since it's swollen quite a bit. Everything hurts, but the nurse said I should be fine. At least Janet is improving. The drainage is subsiding and if she's lucky they'll take the remaining tubes out at her doctor's appointment tomorrow.

I hope I don't bleed on the bed tonight. The nurse did a good job with the bandages, but I don't know if they'll hold all night. I probably should take a pain pill, but Tylenol is bad for your liver and you aren't supposed to take ibuprofen if you're bleeding. Jeez, I really thought this was going to be a good day, but life is full of surprises.

Isabella is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2666

I made an appointment to get Dot fitted for a doggie wheelchair. Unfortunately, the first appointment I could get is two weeks from now. I hope that Dot hasn't deteriorated further by then. I'd really like to see her get some use out of the wheels. It's too bad she can't use the wheelchair we had built for Spot. The wheelchair has been sitting in the storage warehouse for years, but since it was built specifically for Spot and is not adjustable, it is of little use to another dog. The design of modern dog wheelchairs has improved quite a bit. They are more durable and can be easily adjusted for an exact fit. Some dogs learn to use these things almost immediately and gain a new sense of mobility and freedom. Other dogs are confused and don't know what to do with the wheels strapped to their legs. Dot is a smart dog. Well, she was a smart dogs before she became senile anyway. I hope she can understand the concept and start enjoying walking again.

I kept seeing blood in the kitchen when I was eating breakfast this morning. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. I checked both dogs paws to make sure they hadn't gotten cut on their walk. I briefly thought I had squashed a strawberry when I was making my morning smoothie. Then I looked at my hand. Jeez. Why hadn't I even noticed that the blood was coming from me? I never felt anything, but it was a pretty bad cut. My blood clots pretty easily, so the cut had already scabbed over, but it was pretty obvious that this was where the mess in the kitchen was coming from. I still have no idea how I cut myself.

A friend suggested that we try yoga mats to give Dot traction around the house. It was actually a very good idea. I don't know why I never thought of this before. Probably because I don't do yoga and have never owned one of these mats. I've seen them though. They are lighter and much easier to clean than the rugs we are using now. The only downside might be that I don't think these mats are very absorbent. If Dot peed on one, the urine would probably just roll off the surface and stain the brick floor. It's worth a try though. We certainly haven't come up with the perfect solution yet.

I mailed out my April invoices this afternoon. Invoicing clients used to take me most of the day. Now I can take care of everything in a few minutes. It's pathetic how rapidly the business shrunk after I became eligible for social security. When I was young we used to laugh about how routinely creative folks were put out to pasture at the ad agencies once they turned forty. I never even considered what might happen thirty years after that. Sometimes I think that my few remaining clients have just forgotten that I'm still on retainer. I rarely see these people anymore. Some of them probably don't even know who I am.

I need to make a doctors appointment. I'm way overdue for new blood work, but I just don't feel like going in. My doctor told me at one point that one of his biggest frustrations was that many of his older patients just quit taking their meds, despite all his warnings about heart attacks and diabetes. It didn't make sense to me at the time, but now I'm starting to understand. You take all these pills for years and years and you still keep getting older. After a while all the warnings seem pointless. When you look at yourself in the mirror and see your Dad's face looking back at you, you know how it's all going to end.

Nellie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2462

Nothing works anymore. Our security light went out last night. When the electrician replaced the fixture a few months ago with a new LED light, he said this would be the last security light we would even need. Wishful thinking, I guess. The last forever fixture lasted about six months. It's not like this was the only thing that wouldn't work this morning. I got a no signal error when I turned on the TV and had to reboot the set top box. My phone wouldn't connect to the WiFi network as well. Rebooting fixed both balky devices, but why should I have to do this every other day? When I went to get groceries, the Scan and Go app that I've been bragging about had trouble reading bar codes. The oven seems fine though. Just three days ago, I thought the oven was a lost cause. The point I'm trying to make is that very few things are reliable these days. You're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I never open the sunroof on my car because once Janet's sunroof got stuck in the open position just before a rain storm and everything inside the car got soaked. I've never had much faith in people, but it sure would be nice if I could have faith in my machines again.

I had some complicated website revisions to make this afternoon. The job should have been easy, but the files I received had been corrupted and I had to recreate them from scratch. I get a lot of work on weekends now. The people who send me these assignments must not read the blog or they would know how I feel about working on weekends. Working 24/7 is a badge of honor to some people. Maybe these guys mistakenly think I'm one of them. Not that it matters, but I did get the job finished.

It rained a lot last night. The sound of the wind woke me up and that's when I noticed that it was really dark in the back yard. Normally, I go right back to sleep when I wake up, but the darkness make me uneasy and I walked around the house checking things before I eventually went back to bed. Nobody else woke up. By morning, everything seemed normal again and I wondered if I'd just imagined things. The ground was wet and the temperature was a lot cooler, so the brief storm must have been real.

One of my doctors called and told me that my PSA levels were too high and they wanted to retest them in a month. Years ago, I would have been alarmed by this news, but today I was just irritated. My PSA levels have fluctuated wildly my whole life and I don't think they mean very much. I've read numerous studies that confirm my skepticism. I suspect that this test, like many others, is mostly a way for doctors and labs to generate extra money. The older I get, the less a lot of this stuff matters. No matter what I do, I'm not going to live forever. I'm starting to feel the same way about Dot's cancer rechecks. If one of her periodic scans showed the tumors were growing again, what could we do? Not much at this point.

Dash seems kind of lethargic today. I hope nothing is wrong with him. I feel a bit lethargic too, but my problem is just a lack of sleep. Hopefully, we'll all sleep well tonight. I'm going to need some extra energy to make it to the gym tomorrow.

Cleo is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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