Day 3179

I enjoyed breakfast this morning. There was real china, heavy flatware, and waiters in white coats. The place was quiet and relaxing. Although the menu was limited, my egg sandwich was delicious. Eating in a nice hotel wasn't a bad idea. I'll probably go back.

I was surprised to see how high the lake levels were this morning because we didn't get any rain yesterday. It must have rained heavily to the north of us. Whenever there are heavy rains, huge amounts of trash and litter flow into the lake from the creeks that feed it. The water definitely looked ugly this morning. When the water recedes, this litter will be left on the shoreline. Eventually, people from the Parks and Recreation Department will pick it up. It's a shame that nobody in Dallas seems to be able to throw their trash in a can, but I'm sure other cities are even worse.

I'm glad there was time to take Dash on a nice walk this morning because it was our turn to get rained on today. As the day progressed, the sky got darker and darker. It's raining right now and that means there will be no evening walk. People always say we need the rain, but I don't know why. It hasn't been a particularly dry year. I don't like rain, but I'm slowly learning to respect it. Whenever I see all the forest fires out West and the hurricanes and floods to the East, I realize that Dallas is in kind of a sweet spot. We've managed to avoid weather extremes for quite a while.

I feel sorry for Elon Musk. He's getting crucified for making a casual comment about taking his company private and then smoking pot on TV. Musk is the Thomas Edison of our generation. I think people ought to cut him some slack. Steve Jobs got treated the same way for quite a while. It's weird. If you're a businessman or a politician, you're expected to follow conventional rules. If you're a musician, anything goes.

We've discontinued the probiotic Dash was taking and his poop is slowly becoming firmer. This is counterintuitive but what do I know. The disappointing thing about veterinary and human medicine is that everything is so compartmentalized. Nobody seems all that good at evaluating the big picture. It seems obvious that health is a combination of lifestyle, diet, heredity, and medications. Doctors always focus on the pills though. Somehow, I feel that Dash would be doing better if he were eating exactly the right thing. I'd probably being doing better if I were eating exactly the right thing as well. I don't have any answers, but I do think that nutrition should be just as important as pharmacology in medical school.

I saw the auction catalog for one of the Fall auctions today. It was weird to see my picture right up there with some pretty well known art. I'm no art historian, but I recognized some of the other images up for auction immediately. I'm hoping that this might be is my Antiques Roadshow moment. I don't want to get my hopes up though. Auctions are weird and unpredictable. Nobody might bid at all. I have art in two different auctions and both are in October. Lets hope they do well.

Janet wants to take pictures of some new rescue dogs this weekend. If the weather improves, that's what we'll do. I still am unwilling to leave Dash alone in a storm, but I'm actually looking forward to taking photos again. Life is so slow, that I look forward to doing almost anything.

Bailey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 3178

I've noticed that some of the Spring flowers have started to come back in the Fall. This doesn't happen every year, but I've seen it before. I wonder about things like this. Apparently, even annuals and perennials aren't entirely predictable. You usually don't see Antelope Horn Milkweed in the Fall, but there it was this morning.

The wildflowers may not be predictable, but the congressional hearings certainly are. I think you could substitute footage of Neil Gorsuch for Brett Kavanaugh on TV and nobody would know the difference. The questions are the same and the two guys even look kind of the same. Why do we even do these things? Everybody decided how they were going to vote a long time ago. Just vote guys. The endless bickering isn't going to change anything.

Dash was confused this morning. Janet left the house before dawn to take a new class at her gym. When Dash woke up, he panicked when he discovered that his friend was no longer next to him on the bed. It took me forever to convince him that everything was OK. He kept looking for her in every room in the house. I tell Janet now to be sure to say goodby to Dash when she leaves. He's become very needy and doesn't like surprises.

I wish Dash knew that I don't like surprises either. Especially at night. Dash is never very predictable about when he needs to go out at night. Luckily, I almost always wake up when he jumps off the bed. I immediately get up and race to open the back door. For the past several nights he's made it through the open door and pooped on the porch. I'm always grateful when Dash makes it outside. The mess is much easier to clean up when you can use the garden hose.

I got this letter today saying that some company had been bought by another company. "This change will have no impact on your current policy or the quality of service you receive," said the letter. What the hell were they talking about? I didn't recognize the name of either company. Was this a scam, a mistake, or something I had forgotten about? It could be anything. It looks like one more useless thing I'll have to track down. This is what modern life has become. Everything is a potential scam and even if it's legitimate, you know it's going to be a nuisance.

There were storms all around us this evening, but we managed to give Dash his evening walk without getting wet. The trash has already been taken to the curb as well. Basically, I'm done for the week. I'm thinking of going to a hotel for breakfast tomorrow. I haven't done that for a while. Sometime eating at a hotel gives me the illusion of traveling without having to go anywhere. We'll see how I feel in the morning. If it's raining when I wake up, I won't be going anywhere.

April is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 2156

We've got water! The broken pipe was exactly where the plumber said it would be, which kind of amazed me. The leak was located right on schedule too, which amazed me even more. I was afraid it might take weeks to resolve this problem. If you're wondering what actually caused the leak, it turns out that a section of the copper pipe that supplies water to the house was located right next to a larger cast iron pipe that carries waste water away. There were places where the two pipes touched and over the years, the rusting cast iron caused the copper to corrode and fail. That's what the plumber said anyway. He showed me a small hole in the damaged pipe about half the diameter of a pencil. It's still hard to believe that such a small hole could have caused so much damage.

I asked the plumber if there might be other places under the house where the copper supply lines could be touching the cast iron drainage lines. "Sure," said the plumber. "There could be lots of places like this." "Is there anything you can do to prevent this from happening again," I asked. "Nope," said the plumber, "You could have another leak like this tomorrow, or it might never happen again." That wasn't the kind of reassurance I was looking for, but I guess I'll have to live with it. Even though there's a huge hole under the house, it only exposed a tiny fraction of what the builders had put there over sixty years ago. Lord knows what still lurks under the dirt.

In the grand scheme of things, the problems we've experienced this week are tiny compared to the disasters some people have to deal with. The house wasn't hit by a tornado. It didn't catch on fire. A tree didn't crash through the roof. Life was a little inconvenient, but it could have been so much worse. You always see these stories on TV about people rebuilding their lives from scratch after a major disaster has destroyed their home. I don't know how they find the strength to put the pieces back together. Just having no toilets or running water for a week just about drove me over the edge.

There is still a lot of cleanup to do, but life is already starting to return to normal. I ran the dishwasher today and will do a big load of laundry tomorrow. The tunneling company is supposed to come out in the morning and fill in the big hole they created. It's too bad they can't just add concrete walls to the sides and put a door on top. It would be the tornado shelter I've always wanted. They could just keep digging and we could put in a full basement, but it would be much cheaper to just buy a new house.

The environmental cleanup company is supposed to clean our vents before they haul away their big dehumidification machines and leave. When the water was off, I used the opportunity to re-grout the shower stall, so maybe we'll see some improvements there as well. We'll have a lot of bottled water left over when this is all finished with. I was anticipating a long siege and bought too much.

If there's a silver lining to all this, it would be that being trapped here at the house forced me to buckle down and finish the complicated mobile ready website I've been working on. I'm actually caught up with all my work now. Tomorrow I get to see whether the tunneling crew can make the huge mountain of dirt in our back yard disappear. I bet they can't. They'll probably leave us with a smaller pile of dirt and tell us to plant a garden. I'm going to miss taking showers at the hotel. Their shower was so much nicer than ours.

Puppies are today's Dalmatians of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2154

This was the last day before they start digging a tunnel under our house, so there was lots to do. The day started normally enough. We got up early, cleaned up a small mess Dot had made and then took both dogs on their morning walk. It was surprisingly cold this morning. The temperature was in the low forties. For the first time in ages the outside humidity was in the low forties too, so we could finally open up the doors and windows and air out the house without worrying about raising the humidity again. We didn't even attempt to cook breakfast at home this morning and went to a nearby restaurant instead. This was a restaurant I'd been meaning to try, so I was curious about the food. The Eggs Benedict I ordered was good, but I still like my regular restaurant better.

I'm wondering if we'll have to go to the laundromat every day. Janet did a big load of dog blankets yesterday and there are more soiled blankets today. We had to go buy more water too. We forgot and used the wrong toilet in the middle of the night and had to refill it with 6 gallons of water instead of the 1.5 gallons that the more modern toilet uses. It's a learning process. Janet wants to buy one of those big dehumidifier machines now. The house really feels better now that it isn't humid anymore. The machines not only sucked out the moisture related to the plumbing leak, they continued to suck trapped moisture out of the brick walls, the rugs and even the clothes in our closets.

The big job today was providing an entrance for the tunnel diggers. They are planning to access the broken underground pipe through an interior atrium garden that is enclosed on three sides by the house, with a screened porch as a fourth wall facing the back yard. There are several panels to the large screened-in wall, so I decided to remove one of the screens. The 60 year old nails holding the trim in place seemed fused to the partially rotted wood. The nails had all rusted and were hard to remove without breaking the trim in several pieces. I was eventually able to remove the screen wire and might even be able to re-use it later. I cracked one of the wooden trim pieces than hid the exposed edges of the screen wire. All in all, the job was a success. I didn't totally destroy anything.

After I had created a passageway so the tunnel diggers could remove the dirt they were excavating, it occurred to me that Dash will want to investigate this new opening in the atrium and would probably jump in the hole and wind up getting stuck under the house. I went back to the storage warehouse and got some plastic fencing that we used as temporary kennels at rescue events. I turned this dog pen into a makeshift gate that will keep Dash out of the atrium while the tunnel crew is digging the hole.

It's nice having the hotel as a place where we can take refuge when necessary. When I finished taking apart the atrium this afternoon, I drove over to the hotel to clean up and take a shower. This is a nice hotel and I always look like hell when I arrive. I usually look much more presentable when I leave a few hours later. The shower in the hotel is really nice. The tile grout is sparkling white. The water is nice and hot. There's even a clever, invisible anti-slip surface so you won't fall and bust your butt. I guess we could have a shower like this too if we just ripped out the old one and put in something new.

When I was working outside this morning, it occurred to me that the weather was absolutely perfect. The sky was clear, the temperature was 68 degrees with very low humidity. There wasn't even any pollen in the air today. I was enjoying the clean, fresh air and then I began to smell wood smoke. Yup. That time of year again. When the temperature dips below 80 degrees, Texans start lighting fires in their fireplaces. I attribute this odd behavior to non-stop Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel, but it could be anything.

My last job for the day is to cover up a large picture window in the hallway with brown wrapping paper. I have this theory that if Dot can't see the workers tomorrow, she won't bark at them. We'll see how that goes.

Spot is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1144

I think even Dot was amazed today. Our first attempt at a car trip with the dogs was a resounding success. Dash was unbelievably good. He whined a bit for the first 50 miles, but after that we didn't hear a peep out of him. It probably helped that Janet sat in the back seat between the two dogs during the entire trip, but Dot and Dash certainly did their part. They were good little travelers.

When we arrived at our destination, the surprises continued. The hotel staff seemed delighted to see two Dalmatians checking in and were very nice to us. When we got the food and water bowls set up in the room and scattered a few dog blankets around, Dot and Dash acted like traveling was the most normal thing in the world.

Truthfully, the dogs adapted to the rigors of traveling much better than I did. I'm never very good at planning ahead. I should have checked the temperature and worn a warmer coat. I should have worn more comfortable shoes for driving as well. Luckily, I did remember my reading glasses, or I'd have had a hard time writing tonight's entry.

Dash seems to be having a great time making flying leaps onto the hotel bed. To make things easy on the dogs, we've always had very low platform beds at home. Dash seems very proud of himself that he can hop on top of a bed five times taller than the one he's used to at home. Dot, unfortunately is not so nimble anymore. She's getting old and we have to lift her into the bed. Luckily, she sleeps soundly. If we put her in the middle of the bed, there's little danger that she'll fall off.

Tomorrow will be an even bigger adventure than today. Dot and Dash, along with about a dozen other Dalmatians, will be featured guests in a big Mardi Gras parade. All the dogs have elaborate, satin embroidered Mardi Gras coats that make them look suspiciously like Elvis in his latter years. The dogs will all be riding in a special trolley and their handlers will be tossing small Dalmatian plush toys out to the crowd instead of the traditional beads.

I had initially thought about making a short documentary about this unlikely event, but holding on to Dash's leash during the parade will be a full time job. I've already learned the hard way that cameras and Dalmatians don't go well together.

Dash is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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