Day 2667

AT&T has spent a lot of money laying fiber optic cable in our neighborhood. Now they want people to start using it. I have been inundated with marketing messages urging me to switch to this new service. They seem to be using a carrot and stick approach. The carrot is the promise of super fast download speeds. The stick is the threat that I'm going to have to switch to fiber anyway, because my present service is going away in a few years. I never trust anything the cable companies say, because I've been disappointed too many times. On the other hand, it would be nice to have super fast Internet service. I did some research today and discovered that fiber to the home is still a work in progress. Some customers complained that the router the phone company supplied couldn't handle the increased speed. Other customers complained that their WiFi network had actually slowed down after switching to fiber. There were happy customers too, but not as many as I would have expected. If I'm going to be paying twice as much to connect to the Internet, the service had better be really good.

I waste a lot of time investigating things that aren't quite ready for prime time. I'd love to live off the grid, but solar panels are still horrendously expensive if you want to power an entire house. They don't work very well in shady areas either. Electric cars turn out to be very impractical if you don't want to spend a lot of time sitting around at charging stations. Don't even think about recharging your Tesla with an extension cord in your garage. 4K cameras often crop part of the image to get the increased resolution they promise. Batteries in your laptop never last ten hours. I get sucked in by promises again and again, but I'm learning to be more skeptical. I don't think I'll switch to fiber optic Internet service yet.

Dot still sleeps as much as she always has, but she's thrown me a curve this week. Lately, she seems to be active in the morning and sleeps in the afternoon. This is exactingly the opposite of what was happening last month. I thought she was sleeping while I was eating breakfast this morning, but I was startled by some plaintive barking coming from the back of the house. Somehow, she had gotten up by herself, walked to the bathroom, and fallen on the tile floor. Dot is just like the people in those "I've fallen and I can't get up" commercials. I'm continually retrieving her from places where she has gotten stuck.

The refrigerator was looking empty today, so I went out and picked up a bowl of noodle soup for dinner. I've become fond of Pho and Ramen dishes. The only problem with these Asian noodle dishes is that they are terribly salty. I've been on a low salt diet for years and one of my pet peeves is that chefs love salt. Whenever I eat out, I feel like I'm consuming way too much salt. It must be possible to make a tasty, flavorful Ramen without salt, but I haven't found it yet. Dinner was delicious, but I'll have to eat something bland tomorrow. I feel like I got my weekly dose of salt in one meal.

I'm not sure what to do about breakfast tomorrow morning. Last Friday was a disaster. I had to race home before I'd even taken a bite because I looked at the baby monitor and noticed that Dot had tried to get up and gotten herself in trouble. I felt a lot more comfortable leaving the house when I was confident that Dot would sleep for at least three hours after her morning walk. Now, all bets are off. I have no idea how active she's going to be tomorrow morning.

Valli is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 2473

The trouble with credit cards is that a month or so after you buy something, you actually have to pay for it. I feel poor today, because in addition to the usual charges for gasoline, groceries, prescription medicine, and miscellaneous junk I thought I needed at Home Depot, there was the humongous yearly rent for my storage warehouse on the latest credit card bill. So why didn't I write a check for the rent when it was due? Well, it was just easier to postpone the pain until next month. It can be confusing paying for things that you've already forgotten about buying using money that you've already forgotten about earning. I delay paying my bills as long as I can and my clients delay paying me as long as they can. The net result is that there is no cause and effect anymore. It just feels like I'm broke all the time.

I watched a crew pouring concrete in the park while I was walking Dash this morning. I've been watching this sidewalk being constructed for three months now. The crew would grade a path with a bulldozer and then put wooden forms and re-bar in place so the concrete could be poured. They did this three separate times this Summer until they were apparently satisfied with their work this morning. I asked one of the guys whey they kept tearing up their work and starting over? They said their previous efforts weren't up to code because the grade was too steep. This was a bike path, mind you. The city could have saved a ton of money if they just let the cyclists pedal a little harder. The city probably had some rule that said that no bike path could have more than a ten percent grade. If someone created a path with a twelve percent grade, they had to start over. It all seems silly to me.

I finished writing my latest article and once again had difficulty sending it to my client. It appears that their IT department wasn't able to Whitelist me after all. I keep getting identified as a spammer, even though I've never sent spam in my life. These difficulties make me wish I had my old private ISP back. I never used to have these problems until I moved to a large ISP with thousands of servers. My little local ISP stayed under the radar until the owner retired and shut down the company, forcing me to go somewhere else. Once again, the old days were better.

My bananas were still green this morning, so I went to the store and got some ripe ones. I never realized that bananas were so cheap, since Janet usually picks them up. I got a pound of bananas for fifty cents. On the way home I stopped to pick up some Chinese take-out for dinner and they said they were out of the Thai noodle dish I had ordered online. I'm easy. I just asked what they had that was real spicy and substituted something else. Anything to avoid cooking is fine by me.

Dot seemed to enjoy not having to go to physical therapy. Her limp is a little better, but she is still pretty shaky. For the second day in a row, she made a mess and pooped all over her special harness. We have a spare harness now for these occasions. I felt like taking her outside and cleaning her with the garden hose, but she hates this, so I cleaned her up with warm wet towels instead. Dot is as sweet as she can be, but she wears me out.

Tomorrow is the first day of Fall. It certainly doesn't feel like Fall yet. It has been unseasonably hot all week. I can tell the seasons are changing though, because the days are getting shorter. I saw Orion in the pre-dawn sky as we walked Dot and Dash around the block this morning. Pretty soon it will be even darker. I won't miss the hot weather as Winter approaches, but I will miss the sunlight. I do better with lots of sunlight.

Rowe is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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