Day 4829

It was a busy day. Dawn is getting her sunrise walks again and appears to be back to normal. Now that we're on Daylight Savings Time we're actually seeing the sunrise again. Dawn continues to seem steadier on her feet than I am. I think she's made a remarkable recovery. She finished her pain medication today, so hopefully she'll feel just as good tomorrow.

My e-mail is working again. Yay. The guy I talked to last night accomplished nothing, but I got lucky this morning and ended up talking with a different tech support person who actually knew what he was doing. This guy was a software engineer and not some call center flunky. He diagnosed my problem and had everything working again in less than five minutes. Sadly, I'll probably never talk to this guy again. One of the worst things about modern tech support is that you never end up talking to the same person twice. You are just randomly assigned to the next available agent. Some of these people know what they're doing, but the majority don't. I can't believe how many hours I spent talking to the first two tech support representatives yesterday and neither of them accomplished anything.

I made surprisingly good time on my long walk today. I managed to get over 21,000 steps and doubled my normal Apple watch move goal. It's a mystery how I had so much energy since I woke up tired. I'll have to admit that it was a nice day for walking. It felt brisk outside but it wasn't too cold. I just wore a light jacket and felt fine. I noticed that another of the resident geese was missing today. Where are these geese going? There were ten about three months ago and now there are only four. Is someone capturing these geese and taking them home to eat? Are they dying of natural causes? Or are visitors killing them by feeding them unhealthy food? The are signs all over the park explicitly telling people not to feed the ducks and geese bread. Nobody listens. Almost every day I see people feeding the ducks bread. Sometimes they are feeding them right next to a sign telling them not to. Bread is one of the worst things you can feed waterfowl. If you insist on feeding ducks and geese, feed them cracked corn or frozen peas. Ducks will eagerly eat the bread but it is very bad for them.

It's tax season again and Janet and I both have to print out a lot of forms. Janet uses an iPad for almost everything and our existing printers are all to old to print from phones and iPads. I went out this afternoon and bought her a modern printer that supports Apple Airprint. Printers are amazingly cheap these days. This printer was very nice and cost less than what I typically pay for printer ink. The printer was a lot harder to configure than I thought, but it's working now and has made both our lives easier. Janet can print anything she wants directly from her iPad and phone. I continue to print the old fashioned way, with an Ethernet cable attached to my printer.

I got a lot done today, but the one thing I didn't have time for was searching for the remaining leaking spots on the roof. That's a shame because it's supposed to start raining again tomorrow morning. I really can't catch a break with this roof. There's been so much rain this Spring that it's rare for the roof to get dry enough for me to apply the remaining Armor Flex coating. I'm almost certain that the roof will start leaking again, but I hope the area in the living room that I cleaned up the other day stays dry. Cleaning that area was a lot of work.

The friend who has my train collection sold a few more trains today. At this rate I may be able to liquidate the collection in another ten years. This buyer lives in India. Go figure. I'm surprised at how many buyers are outside the country. Some of my guitars went to a band in the UK. Several trains have gone to Europeans. The auction house never disclosed who bought my art, but I suspect that most of them were European too.

I hope it doesn't rain tomorrow. Dawn is really enjoying her walks now and I'm enjoying having a dry ceiling again. Oh, well. Eventually the rainy season will be over and we'll have a new roof. Until then, I've got the buckets ready.

Carmine is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 608

Do you ever feel that you're spending too much time re-learning things you already know? I do. I wanted to make a few high quality Giclée prints on my new printer this afternoon and discovered that even though the Epson 4880 looked exactly like my old Epson 4000 printer, it was a different beast entirely. The ink was different. The ICC profiles were different. Even the paper path seemed slightly different. Consequently, I wasted some expensive watercolor paper trying to duplicate something I used to be able to do in my sleep. Like it or not, I'm going to have to go back to square one and recalibrate everything. I had the same problem when I switched from Photoshop 7.0 to CS5. Even though CS5 was a big improvement, it was also a big irritation, since a lot of the techniques I had perfected over the years simply didn't work anymore. Sometimes I wish people would simply stop improving things. It's going to take me the rest of my life to master all the features of stuff I already have.

As irritating as new things can be, I still can't resist something new. Today I joined Instagram. I have no idea who actually follows you on Instagram or why, but I do like the little square images the app produces. I took a few Instagram pictures today with my iPhone and was instantly transported back to the days when I shot a lot of stuff using Hasselblad and Bronica cameras. I've always liked the 2 1/4” x 2 1/4” square image format. Somehow I find it easier to compose things inside a square frame. This is probably just one more indication of how rigid and inflexible I've become. Just to prove that I'm really an easy going, flexible guy, I cropped one of my first Instagram pictures back into a rectangle for the blog.

It's time to give Dash another antigen shot. His skin is starting to look really good again, but maybe I ought to start giving the injections myself. These injections are supposed to be given subcutaneously, but the past several times the techs have given the injection in muscle and caused a nasty welt. I wish staying healthy wasn't so complicated. Dash appears to be getting better, but I seem to be getting worse. I'm increasingly convinced that I've got a pretty bad case of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. The last time I went to the doctor, I had them X-Ray my hands, since I thought that I might have sprained or broken my wrist. The X-Rays looked fine though and the only other thing I can think of that would cause this kind of pain is Carpal Tunnel. I really don't want the surgery if I can avoid it. I had a friend who had the surgery and his hands are worse now than they were before. I saw some special far infrared therapy gloves on the Internet that are supposed to help. Maybe I'll buy a pair. Gloves certainly sound easier than surgery.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 556

I finally got around to looking at the animal pictures I took yesterday. Some of them turned out pretty nice. Usually, when you do something like this, you'll get about one good picture out of every twenty you shoot. The animals are constantly moving and the costumes don't tend to stay on very long. In this case, Apple, the cat, didn't particularly like her Carmen Miranda hat. The little Chihuahua was up for anything though. He looked quite dashing in his new outfit and actually seemed to enjoy wearing it.

Like most animal photos I do, this one will end up as a poster that will ultimately be used to market a future animal rescue event. I keep thinking that pictures like these would make nice greeting cards too, but maybe not. I've still got a lot of unsold greeting cards sitting in the storage warehouse that were left over from the last time I thought greeting cards were a good idea.

So far my new printer hasn't clogged once. This is probably just because it is still new, but I'm hoping that this new reliability is the result of a design improvement and that the infernal thing will never clog. Making large prints is a whole lot easier when you don't have to spend an entire afternoon trying to coax a single good print out of the printer.

A new Dalmatian joined the others today up at the Dalmatian Rescue kennels. Janet and I will go visit the dog tomorrow, so I can take pictures and get him up on the website. The rescue group has done such a good job of finding homes for our dogs this year that there are usually only a few up at the kennel at any given time. This is so much better than the days when we were trying to find homes for 25 dogs at a time. Now, the rescue organizations that really have problems are to ones who are trying to find homes for those cute little toy breeds that will fit in your purse. That's what people want these days. Unfortunately, that's also what these same people take to the animal shelter six months later. The same thing happened with Dalmatians when the Disney 101 Dalmatians movies were popular. I'm glad those days are over.

Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 536

We took Dot and Dash shopping for new collars today. They love going into any type of store, but dog stores are just about the only places that will tolerate them. Dot, being a typical girl, couldn't find anything pretty enough, but Dash came home with a spiffy new collar. This was no ordinary collar, mind you. This one was beaded and hand-made in Kenya by the Maasai.

After the shopping excursion, Janet and I went to meet the three new Dalmatians who just entered the Dalmatian Rescue program. One of the new dogs was Scooby, who I rescued earlier in the week. The other two, who were rescued by Ann and Pat, were named Shelby and Maverick. I remember naming a dog Ranger last year when the Texas Rangers were playing in the World Series. I have a feeling that Maverick's name might have something do do with how well the Dallas Mavericks are doing this year in the NBA playoffs. All three of these new dogs are fabulous and by some stroke of good luck, none of them have heartworms.

A fire engine went by with its siren wailing while I was taking the dogs on their evening walk. All the sudden I heard a cacophony of howling in a nearby patch of brush. I instantly knew what I was listening to. The neighborhood coyotes have had pups. May is typically when coyotes have their litters. I have heard this frenzied howling before. I turned the dogs around and we started walking the other way. Better safe than sorry. Dash just isn't predictable around coyotes. He usually starts barking and growling at them, which is not good. I definitely don't want to provoke a mother coyote while she is protecting her den.

I've come up with a plan to keep my new large-format printer from clogging all the time like the old printer did. I'm going to start using it as my everyday printer. It's a bit of overkill to use this huge printer to print Microsoft Word documents, but it might actually save money. I can't even begin to guess how much expensive ink I've wasted in cleaning cycles trying to unclog the old printer. Maybe this plan will work better than my plan to get rid of the bees. It's time to call a professional beekeeper to come remove them. I had a dream about the bees last night. Well, it was more of a nightmare actually. The bees had gotten inside the house and were attacking us.

Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 531 - Memorial Day

Holidays aren't a good time for dogs to go stray. We found out yesterday that there is a Dalmatian at the City of Garland animal shelter, but it was a bit complicated to figure out how to pick him up before his time expires. We always try to get these dogs as quickly as we can, because the shelters put them down quickly too. A lot of time you only have a 72 hour window of time to save the dog. At any rate, the shelter was closed today for the Memorial Day holiday. The vets where we take the rescue dogs were closed as well. Even if we could find a vet who would give the dog its shots, all the boarding kennels were full for the holidays as well.

Janet and Pat sent out lots of e-mails and finally managed to contact someone who could get directly in touch with the shelter. The dog was tagged for rescue and I will go to the shelter as soon as it opens tomorrow morning to pick him up. Hopefully this will be a healthy dog who doesn't have heartworms or Ehrlichia, but you never know until the vet looks him over.

I installed the printer drivers in my new printer today and tried to get it up and running. Easier said than done. These printers are meant to connect to your network using a Cat-5 Ethernet cable. I don't use a wired office network anymore though and the printer is located too far away from the computer to connect it using USB. I went to Fry's and bought a wireless print server. I couldn't get it to work though, because the installation CD was only for Windows computers. Never mind that it said right on the box that the thing was compatible with Macintosh. Who knows. Maybe the print server will work with my Mac. I don't think it is going to be easy though. When I went on the web and looked up a list of compatible printers for my little print server, the results came back in Japanese.

My back hasn't gotten any better. When I went to Fry's this afternoon, I shuffled around like an old man pushing a walker. I probably need to go to the doctor tomorrow. I don't know if that's going to prove anything however. The last time this happened, my doctor just gave me a list of exercises to do to build up my lower back muscles. I forget why he wouldn't give me meds, but I think the logic was that I needed to feel the pain so I wouldn't go do something else stupid and make the problem even worse.

Tomorrow it's back to work. It's not like I actually stopped working or anything. It's just a figure of speech.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 528

The new printer arrived early today. I was hoping that it wouldn't be delivered until sometime next week, because I haven't managed to get rid of the old printer yet. Now, my office is awash in large, bulky wide-format printers. I hardly have a place to sit down. I think this is probably the last large printer I will ever buy. Everything is moving to the web. It's so easy to have a service bureau print high quality large posters from a PDF file these days that there is little incentive to print things yourself. Maybe I'll have another gallery show someday and need to make museum quality prints, but probably not. It's simply gotten too expensive to have a large show framed.

The dentist that I shot the Lumineers video for recently decided to edit it himself. He e-mailed me today with a link to his first rough-cut and it was actually pretty good. This is happening to me more and more. People are deciding that they like to do the things I do for a living, just for fun. They do their own photography. They design their own websites. Now it seems that they're even editing their own videos. When folks do ask me to do something, they inevitably want it really cheap, since they think I'm just having fun like they are. I don't know where this is all going to end, but it doesn't look good. Luckily people still don't seem to do a lot of their own writing. Writing still seems to be a bit of a lost art.

There are some mighty tough bees on the side of my house. Despite the massive amount of Demon WP that I sprayed on the hive the other day, there is still a determined group of bees buzzing around trying to rebuild it. Maybe the queen is still alive in the center of things. I still can't get close enough to find out.

There's a Dr. Who marathon on the BBC channel tomorrow. Maybe I'll watch old Dr. Who episodes while I clean up my office. I had to clear out a pathway through the clutter today anyway, just so I could move the new printer into place. Since I've already started this loathsome task anyway, I might as well just keep cleaning tomorrow.

When I went to Central Market tonight to pick up dinner, I noticed that you got 20% off your bill if your final total was more than $20. Spending $20 at Central Market is a piece of cake, so I was sure I'd get the discount. My final bill: $19.98.

Dalmatian of the Day

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