Day 4845

I give up on this weather. When I left for my long walk this morning it was warm and the sky was partly cloudy. I could see blue sky. Everything was fine for the first couple of miles and then out of nowhere I heard thunder and some really dark clouds appeared. The clouds were moving pretty fast, but I was hoping that I could make it home before any rain arrived. No such luck. Right after one particularly loud thunder clap, the skies opened up and I got drenched. I was nowhere near a shelter so I got soaked to the bone. The temperature dropped ten degrees almost instantly and I was shivering. Eventually I made it home without being struck by lightning and immediately threw all my clothes in the washer. It was easier to just wash them than attempt to dry them out. I was so wet that it felt like I'd just taken a long, cold shower.

Ten minutes later the rain was gone and the sky was clear and blue again. Very strange. It was really a tiny little thunderstorm, but it was intense. Janet said that she got soaked while she was out grocery shopping too. Later I realized that there had been severe tornados in Arkansas and Tennessee while I was getting wet. I think there were tornados in Iowa and Illinois as well. What happened here was just a minor afterthought in a nationwide bad weather day. Once again Dallas got lucky. I'm still going to be glad when this rainy season is over though. Enough is enough.

Dawn got her early morning walk before the bad weather arrived and she didn't seem particular bothered by all the thunder and lightning. Dawn is scared of just about everything, but she isn't bothered by storms. Oddly, she is terrified of cats. There is an alley cat that has been hanging out near our yard and she won't go outside if the cat is nearby. Dawn can smell a cat long before Janet and I see it. There was a cat on a little trail leading to the park this morning and Dawn wouldn't move until we convinced the cat to move out of the way.

Needless to say, I didn't mow the lawn today. I'd been planning to pay some bills and pick up a prescription at the pharmacy, but I didn't do that either. In my own mind it was a very slow day. A date has been set for several of the launches I want to attend in April, but I haven't received any notification about credentialing yet. Hopefully they won't wait until the last minute to let me know. It's very hard to work out travel details when you only have a few days notice. I guess it wouldn't be the end of the world if I didn't get accepted for these launches, but I would like to go.

I keep getting notices that the operating system on my computers is no longer being supported. Why? I like my computer the way it is now. I have one of the last versions of Adobe Studio and Microsoft Office with a full set of install discs. Everything is subscription based now. I refuse to pay a monthly fee for things I don't use frequently. So what if my computers are basically still living in 2011. It was a good year. Everything I have installed on the desktop and laptop still works and I have no desire to upgrade. I have no desire to get a new car either. The last thing I want is a car where the engine stops every time you pull up to a stop light.

It's hard to believe it will be April tomorrow. Where has this year gone? They say not to believe anything you hear on April Fools Day, but sadly that's true for just about any day these days. 

Smiley is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2124

Sometimes you can't win. If you're a photographer, you've probably heard of ImageBrief. It's actually a pretty cool idea. Members get an e-mail every day with a list of images that buyers are looking for. If you happen to already have an image that meets the description and like what the client is willing to pay, you can submit the image in your files for approval. Usually, I have nothing to submit, because I don't happen to have pictures of Norwegian children playing on a beach in Vietnam, or small green frogs sitting on top of a mushroom. Art directors can be quite specific. Today, I saw that someone was looking for multiple images taken inside an aircraft maintenance facility. Perfect! As luck would have it, I was once asked to take hundreds of pictures of a large aircraft maintenance facility. This was kind of an odd subject, so I thought I wouldn't have much competition. I looked on the shelf where I used to keep my outtakes, all neatly arranged in ring binders. Of course they weren't there. The pictures hadn't been there for years. All the clear plastic pages filled with Kodachrome slides were in the storage warehouse somewhere. You'd think it would be an easy task to run down to my storage space and get these images. Nope. There are tons of ring binders, filled with old ad copy, financial records, letters, photos, and assorted other stuff, all boxed away in unmarked banker's boxes. I have absolutely no idea where the photos from the aircraft maintenance assignment are.

Even if I managed to find the photos, what would I do then? Also somewhere in the storage warehouse is a very nice old 4000 DPI Canon film scanner that hooked up to your computer using a SCSI cable. SCSI was great back in the 1990's, but Apple hasn't supported this outdated interface in decades. Maybe Kinkos could convert the images, but I didn't have time anyway. The submission deadline was seven hours away. Oh, well. This was definitely a missed opportunity. The pay was good and I had some great pictures. I just couldn't find them. So far, the only pictures I've actually submitted to ImageBrief were when someone was looking for pictures of dogs in costumes. I guess they didn't like the costumes Dot and Dash were wearing.

My breakfast restaurant has hired a new server and for the second week in a row the guy has tried to clear my plate away while I was up at the coffee bar getting my second cup of coffee. Each time I said "Hey, don't clear my plate away. I'm not finished yet." You'd think the guy would know by now that I always go over and ask the barista for a second cup of coffee midway through my meal and then get a third refill in a to-go cup just before I leave. The guy apologized profusely, but he's not very observant.

The software I currently use to create mobile friendly websites just announced a major upgrade that will allow developers like me to create sophisticated content management systems. This new CMS capability is of course a lot more expensive than what I'm currently using. If I were creating complex blogs, online catalogs, or an online version of The New York Times, this fancy new product would be very valuable. Most of the websites I create are pretty simple though and I'm afraid that the software I'm just starting to become comfortable with will soon be discontinued. Nothing is permanent these days and almost all cool new software products are subscription based. I hate the Creative Cloud and all these subscriptions, which explains why I'm still using a very old version of Photoshop.

For some unexplained reason, Dot pooped all over the house around 1:30 PM. I wasn't expecting this, because she had done her business normally on her morning walk. When she does this, I'm usually safe until at least 4 in the afternoon. Life is full of surprises. I cleaned up the mess and did a load of laundry while I was updating a website the old fashioned way using an ancient version of Dreamweaver. I'll admit it. I'm a dinosaur, but at least I was a T-Rex back in the day.

Maverick is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2052

I renewed my storage warehouse lease for another year. I always rent the storage unit for a year at a time, because I get thirteen months for the price of twelve this way. I've had the storage space for so long that I think I've received an entire year in free rent by now. When I first got the storage space, it was just a convenient place to store amplifiers and guitars between gigs and bulky lighting equipment between photo shoots. Now, it has become a repository of memories. The remains from just about everything I've ever enjoyed doing in my life is sitting on a shelf somewhere. There are wind surfing boards, electric trains, framed pictures from old gallery shows, obsolete computers, old guitar amps, and much more. I wish I didn't need a storage warehouse at all, but I get very attached to things. Even broken things are hard for me to throw away.

The latest thing I'm trying to resurrect is the old Sony laptop I told you about yesterday. I asked the guy in the repair shop at Fry's if he could install a new hard drive for this 1997 machine and he told that I could get a brand new laptop for less than the cost of repairs. When I explained that I didn't actually need the computer and that it was just something I wanted to fix, he gave me a blank look like he didn't understand. Maybe the guy had a point. Why would anyone want a computer that only ran Windows 98 and had a hard drive that with less capacity than the memory sticks I use with my cameras. I did a little research on Google and discovered that nobody even makes IDE hard drives any more. All the replacement hard drives are SATA. I found a website that showed how to disassemble the computer, but it looked a little tricky. The article with the hard drive upgrade instructions was dated 2008 and the author considered this particular computer to be ancient even back then. It might be harder than I thought to bring this thing back to life. Jeez, if it's this hard to bring a modern looking little Sony laptop back to life, I wonder how hard it would be to get my old Osborne-1 running again?

Dot had kind of a rough day today. She was a bit shaky on her morning walk and walked with a limp around the house. I still can't figure out what makes some days good and other days bad. I may be wrong, but I think it has a lot to do with how she sleeps at night. If she goes to sleep with her bad leg tucked under her, she always seems to have a limp the next day. I always try to make sure she is sleeping on her side with the bad leg on top, but it doesn't really help. She always wakes up two or three times a night to circle around and reposition herself. Usually when I wake up the next morning, she has managed to get the bad leg tucked up under her.

I managed to find a replacement the tiny watch part I destroyed yesterday. The little screw cost me $5.00 but I considered that a bargain. I'll try to be more careful when I try to reassemble the watch this time. I received another writing assignment toward the end of the day, so maybe doing this new article will keep me busy enough so I won't be tempted to fix anything else this week. I've broken enough things for one week.

Tink is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day