Day 3481

Another hot sunny day that ended with a thunderstorm. This has been happening all week. Most of the brief afternoon storms have missed us, but this one was a direct hit. Every time I hear thunder I worry that the power is going to go out or another tree will fall. No damage this time, but I'm definitely gun shy about storms.

I guess it's a good thing that I didn't attempt any roof repairs today. They wouldn't have had time to dry. Instead of going up on the roof, I went to Home Depot and bought some more river rock to fill the ever growing hole in the driveway. I thought I had fixed this several months ago, but the ground keeps sinking. Instead of buying sacks filled with rocks, I should just get a truckload delivered and cover the entire driveway with river rocks. It would be cheaper than repaving and I bet it would look pretty good. On the other hand, rocks are heavy. I can just see me spending hours shoveling and raking a huge pile of rocks so we can move our cars again. Maybe my minimal efforts to fix things will do just fine.

I keep buying peaches at the store, even though we already have peaches. Janet has already made peach bread and is making a peach cobbler tonight. It's a good thing we like peaches. I need to quit buying food out of habit and start checking to see what we actually have on hand.

Only one of the pumps on the roof seems to be working this evening. Mostly the problem turns out to be a kink in the hose, but I don't feel like climbing up and investigating. I'll fix the pump tomorrow. It's getting dark and there's still lightning in the area. It would be crazy to go up on the roof tonight.

If it had to rain I wish it could have rained this morning. The rain cools things down. I sure could have used a little cooler weather on my walks today. I'm always amazed that there are other people out jogging and cycling on these hot summer days. I feel sorry for the dogs. I think it is too hot to be walking your dog a long way on days like this. Despite the oppressive heat, I keep walking. It keeps me in shape and it beats doing yard work.

The guy who was going to give me an estimate on fixing the greenhouse never showed up. Scratch that guy off the list. It's really hard to find good people who are interested in doing little jobs. I have a lot of things that need to be fixed around the house, but they are all small jobs. Remember that handyman named Eldon on Murphy Brown? That's what I need. Somebody who's always around.  when you need them. I used to attempt difficult jobs myself. Not anymore. I think age is catching up with me.

It's time to go to the gym again. I could think of a lot more imaginative things to do on Sunday, but I guess I like staying healthy.

Cisco is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3480

The new restaurant is a winner. I was pleasantly surprised to find something so nice very close to home. This is the second new "breakfast only" restaurant I've been to recently. Is this a trend? These places seem to have a huge breakfast menu, but they close for the day early in the afternoon. There seems to be a demand for this kind of place. The restaurant had been open less than a week and it already had a good crowd.

The menus in these new places spend a lot of time talking about sustainable farming and cage free eggs. There was even a small medallion on the table that said it was made using reclaimed ash. Maybe a storm somewhere else blew down a lot of ash trees. This place was clearly designed for the Avocado Toast crowd. Maybe that's everybody younger than me though. I think people still like nice food. They just don't like to cook.

There must be a large Amazon warehouse here in Dallas. My order for the lawnmower battery charger hadn't even been processed early this morning and it arrived at my door around dinner time. Fedex and UPS have made home deliveries difficult by demanding a signature on almost everything. Amazon doesn't bother with this. They just dump the package on your front porch and leave. They seldom even knock because that would slow them down. They do something they other guys don't though. They photograph the package on your porch and send you an e-mail as soon as they deliver. Same day delivery with photographic proof that the package actually arrived. Amazon for the win on home deliveries.

Most of you know that I procrastinate on a lot of things. I've been needing to fix a sliding glass door for almost two years and had never gotten around to calling the place that a friend recommended. I finally called the company today and discovered that the guy who fixes the doors was dead. He had been killed several weeks ago in a home invasion robbery. If there is a lesson in all this it is that Dallas is a much more dangerous place than it used to be and that if you put things off too long, you can easily lose the opportunity to do them. Life is full of twists and turns. You never know what tomorrow is going to bring, so you should always do what you can today.

In an attempt to follow my own advice, I called the rest of the people I  needed to get home repair estimates from and picked up a prescription I had forgotten about at the pharmacy. The only thing I forgot was getting a new roll of stamps at the post office. I guess I forgot to mark Penny and Evie as adopted on the Dalmatian Rescue website too. I'll do that tomorrow.

I hope my new battery charger works. I can plug the receptacle into the lawnmower and the red charging light comes on. So far, so good. I just need to remember to take this thing into the house whenever it rains. Hopefully I can get a fair bid on fixing the greenhouse so there will be a roof over the lawnmower again sometime soon. Maybe I ought to just turn the greenhouse into a storage shed. I doubt that plants are going to be growing there any time in the foreseeable future.

I'm still getting a lot of steps even though it is becoming ridiculously hot outside. I hope that sweating is good for your health.

Isabella is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1989

The bad weather continues. Last night our power went out twice and strong straight line winds blew part of the roof off the greenhouse. This is the second time that winds have blown part of the roof off the greenhouse, so I'm not sure if the problem is strong winds or a weak greenhouse. Dash was upset by the thunder and lightning last night, but Dot slept through the entire thing. Even the beeping noises from the electronic devices when the power went out didn't wake her up. One of the blessings of old age is that Dot sleeps very soundly now. She needs her rest, so I'm glad the storms didn't send her into a panic like they used to.

It became obvious as soon as I looked out the living room window that one of today's chores was going to be putting the greenhouse back together again. The structure is so old and rickety now, that it's hardly worth the effort. Rain gets inside with or without the roof, since two of the roof vents blew away three years ago and a couple of panes of glass are broken. I gave up raising plants in the greenhouse decades ago, since all the local critters just looked at the place as a convenient place to have lunch. Rabbits, squirrels, rats, and possums all managed to get inside. They all seemed to love tomato plants. Now the place just houses the lawn mower.

When I was testing one of my mobile sites this morning I kept getting an error message from the phone company when I tried to make a call directly from the website. I thought I had made a coding error and wasted about an hour trying to research the problem. It was a mystery. I marked up the code exactly the same way I did on another site where everything worked successfully. Why wasn't this working? Finally I noticed that I had the wrong area code in the phone number. The number I was trying to dial didn't even exist. When I corrected the phone number in the HTML document, everything worked perfectly. Sometimes obvious mistakes aren't so obvious after all.

I hope the power doesn't go out again tonight. There's more rain on the way and I need to get some sleep. Whenever the power goes out I have to immediatly disconnect the Uninterrupted Power Supplies for the computers to save the batteries and make them stop beeping. Then I have to call in the outage report from my mobile phone and hope the battery will last long enough to navigate my way through the power company's lengthy automated messaging system. When the power finally does come back on again, I have to go to the utility room and quickly turn off the washer and dryer. They always turn themselves on automatically when power is restored. The printer beeps when it tried to reconnect to the WiFi and the thermostat has to manually be rebooted before it will reconnect to anything. The two clock radios and even the clock that turns the coffee maker on every morning all need to be reset. I try to do all this without waking the dogs, because if they see I'm up they will think it's time for breakfast even if it's three in the morning.

I'm not even going to bother with the water on the roof. What's the point if it's just going to continue to rain.

Libby is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1792 - Veteran's Day

I thought I'd try to put the greenhouse back together today. As you might expect, the job was a little more difficult than I would have hoped. This greenhouse began life in the 1950's as a cleverly designed prefabricated kit. The Fort Worth company that made the greenhouse hasn't existed for decades and the thought of finding spare parts is laughable. I've always been impressed with how precisely everything fits together, but you just can't go to to Home Depot when something breaks. I decided to salvage the damaged roof segment instead of replace it. There wasn't anything comparable to replace it with anyway. The main problem I had was that since I couldn't actually crawl up on the translucent fiberglass roof, I could only reach four of the sixteen anchor points. I tried to see if I could attach the segment from the inside, but it became obvious that this was not how the roof was designed. I did the best I could and eventually secured the segment in place, but I suspect that another big wind will just blow it down again. What is even worse, I discovered on closer inspection that many of the anchors that hold the other roof segments to the frame had broken as well. Probably the big wind storm that knocked out our power last month and landed a piece of our neighbor's roof in our yard, damaged this greenhouse as well.

The strenuous work of repairing the greenhouse roof left me hungry, so when I finished my repair work, I went to the grocery store to look for something tasty to eat. With Thanksgiving approaching, Central Market is filled with an abundance of tempting treats. I filled my buggy with enough stuff to last me until the weekend and then went home again to see how the dogs were doing.

Dot and Dash had the good sense to stay inside today. They had absolutely no interest in joining me outdoors while I repaired the greenhouse and preferred to huddle together on a pile of blankets in the bedroom instead. The cold front that arrived during the night served as a reminder that the house is always harder to heat in the Winter than it is to cool in the Summer. The furnace does a good job, but with all the single pane glass in the house, the heat dissipates quickly. Moisture is already starting to condense on the inside of the glass and I need to wear a sweater to stay comfortable. I'd keep the temperature at 80 degrees if I could, but 70 is about all the furnace can manage. This suits Janet and the dogs just fine, but I'm already missing our mild Indian Summer Fall weather. The three weeks of nice weather in the Fall is the only time of the year in Texas I really like.

Tomorrow, we get the new WiFi thermostat installed. This means that Dot will be barking non-stop while the HVAC guys are here. Dot's a good little watchdog, but she makes no exceptions for repair people and service technicians. It will be an interesting day. The temperature is supposed to dip below freezing tonight. I need to start remembering to set the outside water faucets on drip so they won't freeze. I guess it's time to bring the heavy lawnmower battery in for the Winter as well.

Dolly is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1791

I was pretty pleased with myself when I successfully repaired my iPhone case using the replacement part that came in the mail today. Good as new, I thought. Then I went outside and discovered that a big gust of wind had blown off a segment of the greenhouse roof. Oops. This repair was going to be a lot harder. I found the corrugated roof segment that had come loose, but getting it back in place wasn't going to be easy. The steeply pitched roof isn't really strong enough for a person to stand on, and to make matters worse, there are still bees inside the greenhouse. Even though the greenhouse is basically just a shed to store the lawn mower and garden tools these days, I'd still like to get a roof on the building before the bad weather arrives later this week. Since it's virtually impossible to find competent people to do little jobs like this, it looks like I'll have to tackle this chore myself.

Since I'm not stupid enough to try to modify the furnace myself, I made an appointment with my HVAC guys to come install the new WiFi thermostat that Klout gave me. I was disappointed to hear that Marty, my favorite service technician, was no longer with the company. Marty has been fixing heating and cooling equipment at various properties I've owned for over twenty years. Now that he's gone, my go-to list of service people I trust has shrunk to exactly zero. There used to be dozens of people I could depend on to repair cameras, trim trees, remodel bathrooms, and install glass. They're all gone. My favorite carpenter decided he could make more money selling life insurance. An astoundingly good plumber I depended on abruptly quit a company he'd been working with for fifteen years and just disappeared. My camera repairman hung on for as long as he could by accepting work from collectors in Japan, but he eventually went out of business anyway. I've been through four insurance agents and five stockbrokers. Nothing lasts anymore. It's sad. Is a little continuity in this world too much to ask?

The park was filled with concrete trucks this afternoon. I find it ironic to see these huge, heavy trucks trampling all the native prairie grasses that other park enthusiasts have been telling people not to even walk across because they are so rare. I'm sure there is a master plan somewhere, but all I see is a lot of people at cross purposes. The contingent that wants more bike paths probably could care less about the native grasses. Although things look messy now, I doubt that the prairie grasses have been damaged. They're basically just weeds and have been here for hundreds of years. Trucks or no trucks, they'll be back next Spring.

I got my November invoices in the mail today. This chore doesn't take me as long as it used to, because my client list has shrunk considerably. Occasionally I think that I should do some marketing and get some new clients. Then I think, "now why would I want to do that?" It's all a matter of priorities. Losing a good HVAC repairman can be devastating. Losing a client is probably a blessing.

Puppies are today's Dalmatians of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1008

When the dogs and I were out in the back yard today, we heard a loud crash that scared us all. While Dot and Dash ran back inside, I tried to figure out where the noise came from. It didn't take long. Almost immediately I saw that a large pane of plate glass had fallen off the side of the greenhouse and broken on the brick patio below. It's a good thing that the dogs were on the other side of the yard when the glass fell. There were broken shards everywhere. After I made sure the dogs were safely secured inside, I set about picking up the pieces. I'm glad that Dot and Dash instinctively avoided the glass. Petey, an earlier Dalmatian of ours, had a disastrous encounter with glass. He saw a squirrel outside on the porch and made a flying leap right through a large glass picture window. He cut himself very badly. Luckily, our vet was only four minutes away or Petey would have died. After that incident, I replaced all the glass in the house with special tempered safety glass. I never dreamed that glass could be so expensive.

There is certainly nothing special about the greenhouse glass that broke today. There is nothing special about the greenhouse itself. I thought it was pretty neat to have a greenhouse when we first moved here. After a couple of seasons of watching squirrels and Norwegian Roof Rats eat everything I tried to grow, I just gave up. Critters from the park love the greenhouse in the Winter and it is very difficult to keep them out. An explosion of feral cats in the neighborhood seems to finally be keeping the rats under control, but I've lost interest in gardening. The greenhouse is mostly just a place to keep the lawnmowers now.

It's sad to see the greenhouse deteriorate. On closer inspection, it looked like the glass had fallen off because a piece of the molding had rotted and come loose. I got a bid once for remodeling the greenhouse, but it was quite high and I ended up spending the money elsewhere. Now, the aging structure just reinforces the feeling I have that everything around me is crumbling to dust. The house, my car, even my own health is slowly, but inexorably deteriorating.

At least Dash is in good shape. He was a skinny little thing with bad skin allergies when we first adopted him. With each succeeding year, he seems to be getting stronger and healthier. Today he went to the vet for his bi-weekly antigen shot and his nurse complemented him on how nice his coat looked. I told the nurse that I wished I had paid as much attention to my own health as I do for the dogs. She laughed and said she was the same way with her own dog. Truthfully, the dogs are probably the only thing in my life that gets the attention it deserves.

Puppies are today's Dalmatians of the Day

Watch of the Day