Day 4739

It was clear and cold this morning. I made sure to dress warmly this time for our early walk with Dawn. Even Dawn wore a sweater today. There aren't nearly as many people out on cold mornings but we did encounter a few hardy souls. I was just glad to see the sun again.

The leaks have finally stopped at the house. I put the buckets aways again and tried not to look up at the ugly stained ceiling. I still haven't found anyone who can fix everything but it's not for lack of trying. The world has changed and the suppliers I have relied on for years are no longer around. I'm not a big fan of online resources. Recommendations from friends are much better. Of course you have to have friends with similar problems for that to work.

I think I continue taking my long walk every day because it's a great way to kill time. I'm usually out for over two hours and that's two hours that would be totally wasted if I was sitting around the house. These walks are hard on my feet but are probably great for my heart. I've been doing this for so long that people wave at me as I go by. I don't know who they are, but I suppose I've become a fixture in the neighborhood. We've lived here for thirty years and I've always walked in the park. Spot, Petey, Greta, Dot, Dash, and now Dawn have all gotten daily walks in the park. People often stop me to ask about the dogs but often I find that they are thinking about the wrong dog. I guess if you don't own one, all Dalmatians look alike.

I still wonder where the eagles go when they are not near their nest. Sometimes I will go weeks without seeing them, but I know they are around here somewhere. I don't know where the White Pelicans go when they aren't at Sunset Bay either. It's hard to hide a hundred pelicans. The only birds I see consistently are the five domestic geese and three Muscovy ducks that live near Sunset Bay.

I paid a few more December bills today but that was about it. I wonder if something has happened to the price of natural gas? Our gas bill went up dramatically this month. It has been colder than usual but there have been plenty of cold months in the past where our bill was much lower. I guess this is to be expected. The prices for everything are becoming ridiculous.

It's hard to believe that it's already the middle of December. Where has this year gone? I did get to see Artemis launch and spent several days out at McDonald Observatory last Spring, but all in all it's been an uneventful year. I kind of miss working. A steady stream of writing jobs provided a structure to my life that is missing these days. There just isn't that much that interests me.

I've taken this weeks trash out to the curb and am already wondering what I'm going to do tomorrow. I keep thinking about restarting my Friday breakfast restaurant tradition but I'm not as hungry as I used to be. Some of my favorite restaurants have closed too. Maybe I'll get in the car and try something new one of these days, but for now a bowl of shredded wheat and fruit is just fine.

Jasper is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 4410

I saw both eagles together for the first time today. They were perched high in a tree that was very close to the trail. Of course I didn't have my camera with me. I did have my phone though, so I got as close to the tree as I could and took a fairly terrible picture. One of the eagles flew away as I approached the tree, but you can still see the other if you look carefully. The eagle that flew away had something long and thin in its talons. Maybe it was building material for the nest, or perhaps it was a snake. I'm pretty sure that eagles would eat a snake. They appear to eat just about anything. I know they like fish. That's why they hang out at the lake. Several of the birders have seen them catch fish at Sunset Bay. 

The fact that the eagles were so close to the trail this afternoon makes me want to figure out how to carry a camera with me. I'm bound to see these eagles again. I do have a light weight pocket camera with a telephoto lens that collapses into the camera body when the camera is off. It's not an ideal solution, but it would be a lot better than a phone with no telephoto lens at all. Today's picture is probably the worst that I have ever uploaded to the blog. Hey, maybe it will inspire me to do better.

It was bitterly cold this morning and didn't really warm up much throughout the day. We waited until later to take Dawn on her morning walk, but the wait didn't help much. It was still 25 degrees. I didn't attempt my long walk until after lunch in hopes that things would warm up. Nope. The temperature never got above freezing. The wind wasn't terrible today, but there was enough of a wind chill to make me feel like an arctic explorer again. I didn't get 20,000 steps today, but who's counting. At least my feet didn't hurt much today. It was a pretty good walk and I did see the eagles.

I made some progress with the star tracker this morning. While I was waiting for the temperature to warm up, I upgraded the app on my phone and downloaded the new firmware to the Polaris tracker. The two upgrades made some things better and other things worse. This is still a work in progress. For the first time I was able to calibrate the unit accurately so that when I asked it to go to a star or planet, it was at least pointing in the general direction. The tracking seems to work smoothly now. It's hard to tell how accurate the tracking is since I'm doing all this during the day inside my office. I have Stellarium on my computer and I use this powerful planetarium software to confirm that the Polaris is pointing in the right direction. The tracker actually seems to work as promised. At least it works for a while. Inevitably the Polaris will crash if I use it long enough. Once it starts crashing, I have trouble getting it to work again. As I said, this is still a work in progress.

I'm really glad the gas company was able to get the leak fixed yesterday. It would have been dangerously cold last night without the furnace running. This cold weather makes me wonder if we're going to have another power generation fiasco like we did last winter. There has been a lot of talk, but I don't think the state has actually done much to ensure that an extended freeze won't curtail natural gas deliveries to power plants again. Last winter was a huge mess and some people were without power for days.

It was very cold when I took the trash out to the curb this evening. The freezing weather made me think of one of my favorite stories from childhood. If you've never read "A Pail of Air" by Fritz Lieber you ought to look it up. The story was published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in December 1951 and I still remember it after all these years. It is a young boy's recollection of living on a world that was pulled out of the solar system by a passing dark star and is now lost in deep space with a frozen atmosphere and a small handful of people who survive by melting the frozen oxygen over a constantly burning fire in a small room insulated by many layers of blankets. Not sure how plausible this scenario is, but it made an impression on me.

April is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1163

It was not an auspicious day. The furnace went out during the night and I woke up cold. Yes, it was the brand new furnace. When I fixed my breakfast, I noticed that the milk had gone sour in the fridge. We just picked up the carton this weekend. It definitely shouldn't have gone bad this soon. Then there was the weather. A cold front came through last night and the temperature was somewhere between thirty and forty. This wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't raining.

When I got the dogs cleaned up after a damp morning walk, I prepared myself for a day of barking and called the furnace repairman. Marty was as perplexed by the malfunctioning new furnace as I was. At least he was able to replicate the problem. After fiddling around for a while, he got the furnace working again and told me he thought the natural gas coming in from the gas main was dirty. Evidently the flame sensor was covered with dirty gunk, which usually doesn't begin to occur until a furnace has been running for several years. I guess it wouldn't really surprise me to learn that our gas was dirty. We've already discovered that our tap water isn't always clean.

Dot and Dash wore themselves out barking at the furnace repairman and napped all afternoon to recuperate. I wrote a couple of articles while the dogs slept. I didn't even bother to go up on the roof today, because the rain never really stopped.

There's a video production seminar I'd like to go to tomorrow, but I'm still a little leery about driving very far in the car. The gas may be flowing normally in the house again, but I'm not so sure about the gas in the car. I still haven't figured out what caused that vapor lock that made me stall out the other day. Maybe the gas in my car is dirty too. I usually buy gas at Sam's Club and lord knows where they get it from. It's probably not as good as everybody else's gas, but it sure is cheaper.

No dog training class tonight. It's much too cold and wet outside to tramp around in a field doing obedience exercises. I think Dot and Dash are happy for the reprieve. With the house nice and toasty  again, they are both sacked out on the bed. The only command I'm going to give them tonight is to ask them to move over a bit when I join them a little later.

Odie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day