Day 3343

Winter is just a process of continually adding layer after layer of clothing so I won't be too cold when I go outside and then removing layer after layer of clothing as soon as I come back inside so I won't get too hot. I'm always trying to shortcut this lengthy process, so I'm usually too hot or too cold. Maybe some of you find all these seasonal changes invigorating, but I wish mother nature would make up her mind. 72 degrees all the time would be nice.

I thought that Dash might want a later walk this morning because he was still sound asleep when I woke up. This was just wishful thinking on my part. Dash was waiting at the door and ready to go before I finished getting dressed. I'm always amazed at how empty the park is on cold windy days. There are all these young, healthy dogs in the neighborhood and it's always the old dog who can barely move who is still out there. I admire Dash's tenacity, even though on days like today I'd rather just stay inside myself.

Dash's vision has been getting worse for some time. Occasionally, I think he navigates entirely by his sense of smell. To a casual observer he seems to meander all over the place, but maybe he is just smelling his way from one familiar landmark to the next. Every once in a while he will stop and smell the air for a long time and then turn around. It's frustrating when he does this when we're almost home. "Don't do this to me buddy," I think. "We're almost home and I'm getting cold." I've learned that if something doesn't smell right to Dash, it's better to just change our route and forget about it. Getting Dash to change his mind is not an easy task.

I guess today was a holiday. President's Day never seems like a real holiday to me. Today was just a day when I couldn't go to the post office or listen to the market news on the business channel. I don't buy or sell very often anymore, but I still like following the market. When I hear politicians talk it all just sounds like blah, blah, blah to me. Market moves are easier to understand. The market operates almost entirely on fear and greed. When investors are scared, the market goes down. When they are confident, the market goes up. If you follow these sentiments, you can get a pretty accurate picture of what is going on in the world. It's certainly a more accurate picture than listening to politicians.

Without any market news to follow, I watched Jay Leno's Garage instead. I'd love to have a huge collection of cars like Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld. I don't think either of these guys are trying to impress anyone. They are just rich and really like cars. I've had some interesting cars in my time, but I can't imagine being a collector. Cars take up a lot of space and they can be quite expensive to keep running. One at a time is plenty for me.

I tried going without antihistamines this morning. It didn't work. Within an hour or two I was blowing my nose again. I wonder if I'm going to need to take the antihistamines all Winter. I have seasonal allergies every year, but they've never lasted this long. Is something weird going on with the pollen count this year, or am I just becoming more sensitive? Of course there are always the conspiracy theories. Maybe the Chemtrails are starting to get to me.

I haven't used my laptop or iPad in so long that the batteries in both were completely dead. When business travel was a part of my life, I used to depend on the laptop. Not anymore. The only time I use it now is during power outages. Be prepared is my motto, so I charged the batteries and updated software on both devices. Hey, you never know. I may need an old laptop someday.

Bailey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2087

It didn't take me long to finish my book. Hmm. Now, what am I going to do? Without any pressing deadlines, it looked like it was going to be a long day. I could have used up some time making biscuits and gravy this morning, but I didn't feel like eating anything that heavy. I had my fruit smoothie again. For the third time this week, Dash didn't want to eat his breakfast. I switched bowls and put his food on a dinner plate and then he finally finished his meal. Eating shouldn't be so difficult though. Something is wrong.

I was a bit surprised that I was so captivated by a novel where the hero spends much of his time staying alive by solving complex math and chemistry problems. Unlike Interstellar and Farscape, there were no wormholes to make travel to other planets easy. Unlike Firefly, this wasn't a spaghetti Western with spaceships. The ship wasn't alive like Lexx. And nobody fired a gun. From what I learned during my visit with the NASA folks in January, The Martian is pretty realistic. It will be interesting to see how Ridley Scott adapts the story to film, especially since the main character spends most of his time completely alone without the ability to communicate. There certainly won't be much dialog. The story works great as a book, since the narrative is in the form of a logbook, much like the real log kept by Samantha Cristoforetti while she was a crew member on the International Space Station.

I guess this blog is kind of a logbook too, although my own ship is going nowhere and if I'm trying to escape from anything, it is only in my own mind. Like Mark Watney, I try to stay busy. I sewed a button on some pants today. I cleaned up poop in the living room after Dot couldn't quite make it to the back door after dinner. I keep the TV on a lot, but usually mute the sound. Typically, I just watch the moving stock ticker at the bottom of the business channel. It's not like knowing what is going on with the stock market makes any difference. I just like to know.

I thought about getting a new battery for my laptop today, but I didn't want to deal with the hassle of making a reservation at the Apple Store Genius Bar, only to discover that I'd have to come back again later. It's frustrating that you can't really call an Apple Store by phone and ask a simple question like whether they could replace a laptop battery while I waited. I've tried calling these stores before. Each store actually does have a local phone number, but when you call, it is really just a call center in another state. Getting a simple answer about anything isn't so simple anymore.

I paid a few bills and took them to the post office this afternoon. I mostly just did this to get out of the house for a little while. I would rather have taken a check to the bank, but there were no checks for me in the morning mail. It's always a good day when there's money in the mail, but mostly it's just bills. The mailbox is where the rubber meets the road. It is here that I watch my expenses continue to increase while my income slowly decreases.

Maybe I'll have the energy to make a decent breakfast tomorrow. I hope that Dot has the energy to have a good workout in the underwater treadmill. It seems like I just took her for a therapy session yesterday, but time goes by quickly these days. Dot actually does seem stronger since we stopped the chemotherapy. She's walking about the house again unaided. I'm often surprised to find her next to me while I'm working and wondering how she managed to get up without her harness. Moments like these make even the slowest day worthwhile.

Daisy is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1889

If I were starting a blog today I would probably title it What New Kind of Hell Is This instead of Some Assembly Required. The current title is entirely too positive for my present frame of mind. I don't have a lot held in reserve anymore. Small setbacks are starting to bother me much more than they should. Case in point. Our power went out again last night. Actually, we lost power twice. Yes, it rained, but it was only a light rain. So far this year, the power has gone out almost every single time it has rained. You would think the power company could do better than this. Clearly, something in the system needs to be upgraded. We have had notoriously unreliable electric power ever since we moved to this neighborhood, but I think the outages this year are worse than ever.

I was dreading spending the day in a cold house with a sick dog that can barely more. Luckily, the power was restored this morning, the furnace kicked in, and pretty soon we were back to normal. Taking Dot out to pee in the rain was problematic. The ground was wet and slick and I had to be extra careful not to fall myself. On cold days I have to position things around the house so that I'm ready to go when Dot lets me know it's time to pee. Once I'm holding her hips up with the harness, it's hard to turn her around to look for a coat or a missing pair of shoes. I'm trying to remember to leave a pair of easy to slip on shoes sitting by the back door, but half the time they're still in another room when I need them most.

Dot and I are learning to establish the new routines and rituals that will get us through the day. She sleeps a lot anyway, and I've learned that if I'm patient and hold her up while she wanders around aimlessly for a while, she will quickly find a comfortable place to sleep and I can get some work done. It works better if I try to adapt my life to her schedule, rather than the other way around. Since she can't move on her own, I need to make the short amount of time when she still feels like trying to walk as relaxed and comfortable as possible. I've learned how to massage her legs and at least three times a day I manually work her leg muscles in a gentle bicycle motion to help prevent atrophy. When Dot is resting and lying down she actually seems to like this.

The Withings Baby Monitor only covers one room, but I've discovered that I can use the camera in my laptop as a petcam to watch her if she wants to sleep in a different room. I just move the laptop to wherever she happens to be. Despite the unfortunate power outage and my duties as a watchful 24-7 pet nurse, I was able to get quite a bit done today. My big objective was getting a major website update completed. There is a new team responsible for this website now and we are still figuring out the best way to work together. Since I managed to get the updates online, I guess we are doing something right.

I hope the weather warms up and dries out quickly. Rain certainly complicates things. I definitely don't want to get Dot's special harness wet, because she is helpless without it. I am already resigned to the fact that I'll probably have to replace a lot of the landscaping later in the Spring. As I tramp around in my work boots, holding Dot up as she looks for the perfect place to pee, I am destroying the bedding plants and ground cover. This happened once before when I was helping Petey walk during his final year with us. When Spring arrived that year, most of the Asian Jasmine was completely dead. It's easy to re-landscape though. It's going to be a lot harder to get Dot walking again.

Joshua is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1335

Now I remember why we tried so hard to wean Dash off of phenobarbital the first time he had seizures. The drug seems to make our excitable boy even more hyper and agitated than normal. Dash never could ride calmly in a car when he was on phenobarbital before, and it appears like this behavior has returned. It's weird that a barbiturate would make a dog agitated and wild, but that's what happens with Dash. When phenobarbital was given more commonly to humans, a paradoxical reaction was sometimes observed in children. This is where the drug causes the opposite effect of what you would normally expected. Makes sense in a way. Dash certainly acts like a child.

It was a nerve wracking trip to the dog park this morning, but once we got there, Dash seemed fine. After they had a chance to play in the park for a while, we took the dogs to the Dalmatian Rescue "meet and greet" event. Dot and Dash were both polite and well behaved. I was surprised at how many people came up and told us that they had never seen a real Dalmatian before. The breed is becoming increasingly rare and that's a good thing. When the "101 Dalmatians" Disney movies were popular, everybody wanted a Dalmatian and puppy mills began breeding them. Now, the dogs are harder to find and most people who have a Dalmatian understand the breed and really want one.

I think I determined the problem with my old Apple laptop myself. All it took was thirty minutes of searching on Google and I discovered that if I took the keyboard off and disconnected the PRAM battery underneath, the computer would probably start up and began to recharge. Sure enough, when I did this, it worked like a charm. I bet this is exactly what the technician did when I took the computer in for repair last year. Just like the electrician who charged me $100 to fix a switch, the computer technician probably charged me $100 to disconnect a wire, recharge the battery, and then connect the same wire up again.

So many things in life seem easy once the mystery has been revealed. I am continually amazed at how easy some plumbing, automotive, and household repairs turn out to be when you actually watch the repairman at work. Of course charging a lot for intrinsically easy things is a double edged sword. Some of my best clients have discovered how easy it is to design websites and decided to do it themselves.

Next week looks busy already. There are client meetings on the calender, I've got to take my car in for repairs again, and then there's the vexing question of phenobarbital vs potassium bromide. I've read everything I can find about both meds and still don't know which is the best way to control seizures.

Hannah is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1314

I helped Janet get her laptop ready for making a presentation on a big flat panel TV and was a bit surprised that I'd never tried to hook up a laptop to our TV before. I guess that just shows you how important presentations are to me these days. I don't think I've made a formal presentation or even shown my portfolio to anyone in almost ten years. Hey, if you don't already know what I do, it's probably a little late to show you now.

Hooking up the Macbook Pro to the TV was much easier than I thought it would be. I went to Fry's and got a Mini DisplayPort adapter and some HDMI cables. I hooked the computer up to the TV, set the computer screen to mirror mode and all of the sudden I had a huge image of the computer screen on the TV.

It's to bad that it wasn't this easy to figure out why the garbage disposal isn't working. I'm going to have to leave that task to an appliance repairman who will hopefully come out and fix things very soon. A garbage disposal doesn't seem like a very essential appliance until you've got a non-working one still hooked up to your plumbing. I'm discovering that the sink clogs up very quickly when the garbage disposal isn't doing its job.

Dot and Dash really enjoyed their trip to the dog park today. Dash saw a dog that he recognized and liked and proceeded to race around the park showing his friend how fast he was. Dot took advantage of the mild weather to sniff every tree in the park. She seemed to have more energy today than she usually does.

I wish I had more energy than I usually do. Mowing the grass today was tiring. I think I've reached some sort of plateau with my new diet and exercise regime. I saw dramatic incremental improvements for a while, but now not so much. I think from now on out, it's going to take a lot more effort to continue losing weight while I'm building my strength and adding muscle mass. I probably don't actually need to lose any more weight, but I do need to keep working on building my strength.

I had a terrible dream last night. I frequently have dreams about being lost as I futilely try to find my way back to the dream's starting point. In last night's dream, not only was I lost, I also seemed to have lost my luggage and all my money. When I was young, I found myself lost in caves a lot during these types of dreams. Now I'm usually lost in labyrinth-like hotels. I guess that's an improvement of sorts.

Katie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1263

Today was even busier than yesterday. It wasn’t as long though. I’m already on my way back to Dallas. I spend the morning catching up with things that were impossible to do yesterday. There were several new products to photograph, along with three new people to interview. I interviewed a mix of CEO’s and support people at the show this year. You can usually tell pretty quickly why the top guy is the boss. The CEO never gives you much time, but they are almost always articulate and to the point. All the CEO’s I talked to at the Couture show did their interview in a single take. The rest of the people were a mixed bag. I’ll give my client plenty to choose from though.

I think I have a new favorite hotel. The Wynn was fabulous. It reminds me of the way The Mirage used to be many years ago when Steve Wynn first opened that venue. The guy definitely knows how to run a classy hotel. It’s too bad I didn’t have more time to explore the place. Just walking back and forth between my room and the Couture Show ballrooms, I saw an abundance of great restaurants I’d like to try. The food was such an abundance of riches that I was even able to find delicious things to eat on my severely restricted diet. The bed was really comfortable too. I slept a lot better than I usually do at home. Of course, that probably had a lot more to do with Dot and Dash than with the mattress.

I got an e-mail from the roofers last night. Evidently, there are problems and they want to have a meeting. Why are there always problems? I have visions of spending a lot of money on a new roof and still having to sweep the standing water off after every rain. The roofers I hired mostly do new construction, so I’m sure they’re going to tell me that I need to rebuild the house, or something equally drastic. That’s the problem with older houses. They settle and sag. If they sag too much, there aren’t many good solutions.

When I went through security at the airport, there was a distraught woman right ahead of me in line who had lost her laptop when it was going through the scanners. With the general level of chaos at the Las Vegas airport, I can easily imagine losing almost anything. One of the TSA folks asked a woman sitting at the scanning machine if she’d seen a laptop lately. “I’ve seen hundreds of them,” she said. “How should I know where it is?” I hurried to put everything back in my pockets and return my own laptop to my bag before it disappeared too.

This week has really gone fast. It’s hard to believe it’s Friday already. Even though I’m in a different city, I kept my Friday morning tradition alive with a nice breakfast at one of the Wynn restaurants. I’m sitting at my gate at the airport now, waiting for my ride home. This was a quick trip, but I look forward to returning sometime in the near future. I like Las Vegas. It’s a fantasy city. Nothing is real here, and that’s fine with me.

Patches is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1118

I took some filing cabinets from the office over to a little resale shop that benefits homeless animals. I love this place, because you can donate absolute rubbish and they always act like it's exactly what they needed. They are really doing me a favor to even take this old stuff, but they always make me feel like I'm the one doing something good. I like that. I have a feeling that these folks are just nice, but maybe they're being polite in hopes that I'll eventually bring them something good.

After I got rid of the unneeded furniture, I went back home and tried to thin out the closets a bit by getting rid of equally unneeded clothes. I used to just throw away shirts that I couldn't button around the neck any more. Since most of these tight fitting clothes from younger years are already gone, I have to rely on Janet to tell me which things are hopelessly out of style. If I hold something up and she makes a face, it goes in the throw away pile.

Spring cleaning is kind of like peeling an onion. There are usually layers upon layers of mess, and once you have dealt with the top layer, it just reveals something else waiting underneath. When I removed the filing cabinets today, they must have been in a damp corner, because there was a layer of mildew on the wall behind them. I then had to set up a portable heater to dry out the wall and still haven't finished scrubbing everything down with bleach. I found an old Macintosh laptop when I was cleaning things out this afternoon. I plugged it in and got nothing. Dead as a doornail. When I removed the battery, it was date-stamped 1999. I don't know it it's even worth the effort to try and find a working 1999 Apple laptop battery. Probably not. Even if I managed to get the computer working again, I'm sure it is so slow that I would find it useless.

Dot and Dash had a great time at the dog park today. They both seemed a bit alarmed when we began to take an alternate route to the park. Both dogs started barking like crazy in the back seat. I'm sure they were saying something like "Turn around immediately, this isn't the right way." To quiet things down in the car, we returned to the old route. As soon as the dogs recognized their surroundings and knew where they were going, they both settled down again and were good for the rest of the journey.

I have a feeling that next week is going to be busy. It's time to get the car safety inspected again, and before I can do that, I need to get a new catalytic converter. I have a feeling that the old clattering converter would be a dead giveaway that my emission system isn't up to par. I've grown to hate state safety inspections over the years. They continue to grow more and more complicated. I think I should be exempt anyway, since I don't drive very much. In our state, humans aren't even involved with the safety inspection. It's all in the hands of a computer. They hook your car up to some sensors and the results get sent straight to Austin. In the old days, I could talk my way out of minor infractions. There's no one to talk to anymore though. This automated life really doesn't suit me. It probably won't be long before I have to give a DNA sample just to get my prescriptions filled.

Allie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day