Day 4846 - April Fools Day

Another normal Saturday. We got up about thirty minutes later than we do on weekdays and gave Dawn her morning walk. Dawn is never in a hurry on these walks and loves smelling things. The walk gives me a chance to wake up. I always get to bed late and would welcome a chance to sleep later in the morning. Dawn has her own agenda though. Thankfully, the weather was nice today. I really think Winter is over now. It won't be long before I'm complaining about how hot it is.

I had trouble telling the April Fools posts from the regular posts on Facebook today. The world is so strange these days that almost anything seems plausible. Almost every day I run across something that seems impossibly strange, yet turns out to be true. I guess it doesn't hurt to be skeptical, but life would be a lot easier if you could actually believe what you hear.

My grocery list was small today, but it still took a long time to find everything. The city has definitely changed. The roads never used to be this crowded on weekends. The stores are well stocked, but there doesn't seem to be as much variety. I dutifully pushed my cart around, picked up what I needed, and returned home. I find no joy in shopping anymore, although I did find some Maryland Crab Cakes on sale. I love crab cakes..

I thought about going to the gym this afternoon, but once again it was a lot easier to just walk in the park. The nice weather brought out lots of visitors. I'm still surprised that so many people walk faster than me. I don't think I'm walking slow, but almost everybody passes me. Moms pushing strollers pass me. Old people pass me. Entire families pass me. I'm not really concerned. At least I'm still moving. According to my Fitbit, I'm actually burning quite a few calories.

The new printer keeps getting disconnected from the WiFi network. It probably needs to be moved to a better location, but where would that be? There are no empty spaces left in the house. It wasn't hard to get the printer working again. I just did what I always do. I turned the machine off and then turned it on again.  This seems to fix just about anything.

Dawn seems fine now, although we are still giving her a small amount of Rimadyl. She still seems to favor one paw occasionally, but maybe I'm imagining things. If we can just keep her from jumping on and off the bed I think we'll be OK. We've had so many things go wrong with dogs over the years that it's understandable to worry. They're always getting into trouble.

There's more rain in the forecast tomorrow. I hope that Dawn still gets her Sunday outing, but that depends on the weather. None of us particularly enjoy getting wet.

Haley is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1446

It's hard for me to remember what day it is on holiday weekends. Since I did most of my regular weekend chores yesterday, there was little for me to do today. With Thanksgiving out of the way, it was time to go looking for the Christmas decorations at the storage warehouse. I'm always amazed at how neat and tidy the warehouse looks in comparison to our house. I wish my office looked as nice as my storage warehouse. Maybe it would if everything in the office remained untouched for months at a time.

It's an unfortunate fact of life that doing things almost inevitably creates a mess. Doing things with dogs creates an even bigger mess.  I don't help matters by being such a pack rat either. Almost everything in my tidy storage warehouse came out of my messy office. It's hard to believe that I have removed so much stuff from the office and it still looks full.

The weather was so warm today that I decided to wash the car. I like washing the car. It is a simple task with tangible results. Getting my large format printer working again is a much more difficult task. I've been using the supplies that UPS finally delivered with mixed results. I think I'll eventually be able to clear the clogged lines, but it is almost certain that I will use up all my ink in the process. I'm beginning to wonder if there's a point to this madness. I feel the same way about the watches I've collected. At some point in the distant past they all worked. Now, the batteries in the watches with quartz movements are all dead and many of the mechanical watches need cleaning. I took three of these watches to my watchmaker over two years ago for service. They still aren't done. These watches are still making better progress than the repairs on my Citroën Maserati. That car has been in the shop for over nine years.

My possessions are literally screaming at me to simplify my life. I won't live long enough to replace all the dead batteries,  re-solder all the loose wires, and clean all the gunk out of various dirty fuel lines. Mechanical things make me happy, but why do they always break? Oddly, things seem to deteriorate whether you use them of not. Batteries corrode and leak inside of old tape recorders. Gas goes bad and won't even ignite after several seasons of sitting in the fuel tank of an unused rototiller. Radiator hoses crack and break even if the car they're connected to is sitting on blocks inside a garage.

What's a boy to do? I don't need to be reminded that it's all ashes to ashes and dust to dust in the end. My own body has been telling me that for years. All is not lost though. There's actually a smile on my face right now. As I was writing this somewhat gloomy missive, I received a message on the printer display panel that the lines are clear. The printer lives!

Belle is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1441

Dash ate crap in the park again this morning and came home with a belly ache. Every time I sat down at the computer to work, he started pacing and whining. I would open the back door to let him outside and he'd either refuse to go out the door because it was cold, or race around the yard and return a few minutes later without doing anything. After about three hours of this, he went outside, threw up, and then was fine for the rest of the day. It would be nice if dogs would learn that history tends to repeat itself and that it's not a good idea to eat stinky things in the park. I guess that's too much to ask though. Most people I know haven't learned that history tends to repeat itself either.

Last night, I thought I'd come up with a brilliant plan to unclog my large format printer. When I called my Epson dealer this morning to order the necessary supplies, I was told that if I followed this plan, I'd void my warranty.

So, what was Epson's alternative? They said I should buy a complete new set of eight ink cartridges at $77 each and run a power clean cycle. This, of course, would use up almost all of the ink I had just purchased. If this didn't work, I was to buy even more ink and run the power clean cycle again. I hate this printer. It's just a complicated machine designed to sell expensive pigment ink while it's simultaneously driving me crazy.

With the exception of two damp and chilly dog walks, I didn't leave the house today. There wasn't much point in going anywhere. I had plenty of work to do and I didn't really feel like driving in the rain anyway. While I tended to Dash's belly ache, I also completed a major update to one of the websites I manage and wrote a couple of new articles. Most of this work is boring, but it pays the bills. If someone gave me something truly interesting to work on, I'd probably do it for free. There's not much likelihood that this is going to happen though. People keep the interesting things for themselves. Occasionally, someone unfamiliar with advertising will ask me what I do for a living. "My job is just like a prostitute," I tell them. "The only difference is that people rent my mind instead of my body."

It wasn't all bad today. The temperature was much warmer than yesterday. When I went up on the roof, there was no ice. There was a lot of water, but I'm used to water.

Dot is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1424

There's got to be some correlation between how much sunlight I receive and how much work I get done. It didn't rain today, but the sky was so dark and overcast that the streetlights stayed on all day. I didn't get much done at all. If the sun was shining, lord knows what I might have accomplished.

I got a utility bill in the mail for a service I canceled six months ago. This has happened before. More and more companies sign you up for automatic renewal by default and it's becoming next to impossible to actually cancel your service. Services you signed up for on the Internet are the worst. They all seems to have some sort of automatic renewal enabled. Service is so terrible these days that I seldom want to renew anything. It's frustrating.

I did have a nice breakfast, but you probably know that already. It's Friday, isn't it? I almost posted a picture of my eggs, until I remembered that this is what I did last Friday. Hey, if I can't inject some variety in my life, at least I need to create the illusion of variety. That's why you get an out-of-focus picture of my grey, gloomy day instead.

I actually had time to go to the gym this afternoon, but I was still sore from yesterday's workout. I did a load of laundry and tried to unclog my printer instead. The printer was quite clogged this time, so I did a Google search to see what other people were doing. The best advice I could find was to unlock the 4880 print head and squirt some distilled water on the capping station. We'll give that a try. I wonder what people did before there was a YouTube answer for every question in the universe. Where do people find the time to make all these YouTube instructional videos? I haven't had a question in a long time where I couldn't immediately find the answer on YouTube or Wikipedia. The answer might not have been correct, but does it even matter these days?

We get to try out our "put the spots on the Dalmatian" game at a rescue event this weekend. Janet and I haven't actually cut out the spots for the children to apply yet, but I guess that's what we will do tomorrow evening. There isn't much to watch on TV anyway.

Spot is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1095

I think life is a lot like raking leaves. You rake the leaves, and then the next day, a whole new pile of leaves has taken their place.You repeat the process over and over again, but it seems to take forever before the leaves actually disappear. When the leaves are finally gone, you wonder if all the raking was actually worth the effort. Usually, it was always an exceptionally windy day, not your raking efforts, that cleared the last of the leaves away. Maybe it's just me, but I think many of us spend way too much time doing the same mind numbing things over and over again. What constitutes work for most of us is just a long series of repetitive chores. Then we come home and do laundry, make the bed, and vacuum over and over again. It's all a lot like raking leaves.

Breakfast was delicious this morning. I think the bed of pulled pork under my eggs might have been a bit off a bit though.  I've had a stomach ache for most of the day. I sure hope I haven't gotten food poisoning like Janet did last week. Food poisoning is no fun. On the plus side, it's the fastest way of losing weight I know of. The last time I got food poisoning, I lost ten pounds in less than a week.

There are too many printers in the house now. Now that Janet's printer is fixed, I'm having a hard time finding a place to put it. This printer was purchased primarily for use at Dalmatian Rescue events. Unfortunately, that's why it got hopelessly clogged in the first place. The printer just wasn't used enough. Now, I've got to add it to the queue of ink jet printers I'm already trying to keep unclogged. The ironic thing is none of my clients even want me to print anything anymore. A PDF file is just fine with them.

The school shooting today in Connecticut was incredibly sad. How can we keep these type of things from happening? There's going to be a lot of talk about gun control in the days ahead. I would be the first to agree that there are a ton of people who should never be allowed anywhere near a gun. How do you identify these people though? Again and again, when these mass shootings occur, I see interviews on TV where neighbors and close friends say the shooter seemed completely normal to them. Maybe we could start by banning gun ownership for anyone under 40. There aren't a lot of old serial killers and mass murderers. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think something has fundamentally changed in society. It's a colder, more depersonalized world. There were plenty of guns when I was growing up, but these type of events were completely unheard of. All I know is that when I was a teenager, I wasn't playing Assassin's Creed, Halo, or Call of Duty eight hours a day. I was reading a new library book once a week. My parents always knew what I was doing too. Maybe it's as simple as that.

Lance is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1084

Today was all about repairing things. I managed to find a place to take both the Epson printer and the Norman strobes for repairs. Even though both places were factory authorized service centers, they were quite small and seemed to be on the verge of going out of business. To me, this was just another sad statement about our throwaway society. People don't find value in fixing things anymore, and as a result good repair people are having a harder and harder time making a living. When I drove the Epson printer over to the repair facility, I had a hard time even finding it. The small building was so nondescript that it was almost invisible. An older man and his wife ran the place and did all the work themselves. They seemed very knowledgeable and their business had received rave reviews on the Internet. You'd think their business would be doing great with so many people having printer problems. Unfortunately, it is usually cheaper to buy a new printer than to repair an old one. Most broken printers just get tossed.

The Norman repair shop was a different story. The man I remembered from my studio days had retired to Mississippi and sold his business to another younger repairman. I talked to this new guy on the phone today and he was a treasure trove of knowledge with over forty years of experience repairing studio photo strobe lights. Unfortunately, changes in the photography business had forced him to move to a succession of smaller locations, ending with a small shop in his home where he works now. He no longer sells parts, because his customers can buy them directly for less at big warehouse photo emporiums like B&H in New York. Eddie can still fix my power pack though. These old Norman power packs were built like tanks. One more refurbishment and the thing ought to outlast me.

I just don't understand a throwaway society. Fixing things is good. When you fix something, you develop a better understanding for how it works and what you can do with it. It's hard to respect something you just throw away every few years. I believe that tools and automobiles and clothing and even relationships need to be fixed when they are broken. Fixing things builds character. Not many people think this way unfortunately. Disposable is just easier. Use it. Toss it. Get something better. That's the way people think now. It's sad. I can't even get the case off most things I buy these days.

I fix things too. Most of the website maintenance work I do involves changing and modifying websites to meet new needs and requirements. There are no templates. I do all the coding by hand. It all works pretty well until my clients happen to see a GoDaddy ad on TV that promises them a brand new website for only $9.95 a month. I can really appreciate the difficulties the Epson repairman and the Norman repairman are having. I'm having the same problems myself.

Spot is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1083

I burned up one of my power supplies this afternoon. It happens. We had such a steady stream of dogs to photograph at today's Santa Paws event that I must not have allowed enough time between shots for the heat to dissipate. I turned the power supply off and switched to a back up unit as soon as I smelled burning insulation, but it was probably too late. The trusty old Norman power pack will be making a trip to the Flash Clinic next week. I hate that I think this way, but my first thought as I smelled the burning insulation was "Gee, I wonder if that guy who owns the Flash Clinic is even still alive." Back when I used to shoot fashion, he used to service my equipment frequently. It's been a while!

Equipment failure notwithstanding, we had a good day. Our team was able to handle a large volume of customers, while keeping everyone happy. The Santa Paws events have been very successful for us. Nobody got bit today and the set survived several dogs that looked like small horses. One nervous woman told us she chose us for pictures this year because the last Santa dropped her dog. Santa told the woman that her pup was safe with him. From the looks of the pampered pooch, I had a pretty good idea what happened last year. I have a feeling that Santa dropped the dog after it bit him and then peed on his lap. As I've mentioned before, I have the easy job. Santa gets all the abuse.

Our own dogs did well in front of the camera and Janet seemed happy with the results. I'm not sure that Dot and Dash were very happy though. They would have much rather gone to the dog park today than spend the day in a boarding kennel waiting for their turn with the bearded one. Maybe now they won't be quite so eager to go with us on these photo events. I think they finally realize that it's much more pleasant to stay home and sleep on the bed while we are away at these fundraisers.

I'm going to be busy next week. In addition to taking the power pack to the Flash Clinic for repairs, I've also got to find someone to repair Janet's printer. Lot's of luck with that. Nobody likes to repair Epson printers. They are difficult to work on because the print heads can't be easily removed or cleaned. Epson prints always look better than prints coming out of other photo printers until the day the printer begins to malfunction. Then it's all over. These things are so difficult to repair that it's often cheaper to just toss the broken printer in the trash and buy a new one.  Oh, I've got to get the broken guitar amp boxed up and returned to the music store as well.  I think the replacement amp is already on its way.

I've already got some website revisions on tap for Monday, but I hope it's not going to be a really busy week. I need a little rest. I feel like I've put in a full week's work already just in the past two days

Greta is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1082

Three down two to go. Today's Santa Paws event was a marathon. We had more appointments per hour than we'd ever done before. I photographed big dogs, little dogs, puppies, seniors, well behaved dogs, stubborn dogs, shy dogs, and some dogs that didn't look like dogs at all. All these dogs probably thought they looked ridiculous dolled up with a bright red bow. Their owners seemed to like the pictures though. Some of them were returning for the fourth year in a row.

Today went well. Even though we photographed dozens of dogs, none of them knocked over the set or peed on the backdrop. With only two more events to go, I'm optimistic that we can make it through the holiday season without a major mishap. The real test will come tomorrow, when Dot and Dash get their pictures taken.

It's hard to believe that it's December already. The temperature was in the mid-80's this afternoon. If it wasn't for the Christmas tree lots on every corner, you could have sworn it was Summer. I was too tired to take advantage of the warm weather and get some yard work done. I'm sure the yard will wait.

More printer problems today.  One of Janet's printers has a clogged line and the black ink won't print. If someone would just invent a printer that never ever clogged, I think they should get the Nobel Prize. We don't use our printers all that much and inevitably the tiny lines that carry ink from the cartridges to the print head get clogged. You would think that Epson could make these lines something that the user could replace, since they get clogged so often. Nope! I've asked Epson how to solve these clogging problems many times and the only answer I get is that I ought to use the printer more often.

I hope Dot and Dash don't wake me up in the middle of the night like they usually do. We've got another one of these photo events tomorrow and it would be nice not to fall asleep with my finger on the shutter button. I need to remember to recharge all the batteries tonight, including my own.

Jada is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1059

It's amazing how often little things end up consuming large amounts of my time. I wanted to get November invoices out today. Everything was ready to take to the post office, but I couldn't get the envelopes to print. Printing envelopes used to be a piece of cake with older printers, but now I have one of those "multifunction" printers and one of the functions that Epson seems to have left out was envelopes. I can't just slide the envelopes into a little slot anymore. I have to take out the paper tray and reconfigure it for envelope sized pieces of paper. If I'm off on the dimensions by even a tiny amount, the envelopes get stuck and I practically have to take the printer apart to clear the paper jam.

Some of you might ask why I don''t just use the large format printer I'm always talking about instead. Nope. That won't work either. The large printer won't even accept something as small as an envelope in the paper tray. Although I could have hand addressed all the envelopes much quicker, I persevered and finally got the multifunction printer to work. As I drove to the post office with the envelopes, I kept thinking that this was a lot of work for the small amount that I actually billed out this month.

I wonder if any of my Entrecard friends are noticing that their blog traffic continues to slowly drop long after the demise of the Entrecard network. That's what seems to be happening with me. For the first time in years, my blog traffic is actually lower than my company website traffic. If you're a regular reader who has never signed up to become a regular blog follower, humor me and sign up now. It won't change anything, but it will make me feel better.

I got an e-mail today with an ad for a low cost film scanner that records directly to an SD card. No computer required. I have a fantastic old Canon scanner, but I haven't been able to use it for years, since it hooks up using a SCSI cable. Jeez, how long has it been since you've used a computer with SCSI peripherals?  I don't even own one anymore. At any rate, I may get this new little film scanner. I've still got thousands of 35mm negatives that I've never digitized yet. Maybe when I can't think of any new ideas, I'll at least be able to retrieve some really good old ones. I continue to think that I shot some of my very best photos in the 1970's. I can't remember what they were though. It would be interesting to scan these old negatives and see if they can hold their own with the stuff I'm doing today.  We'll see.

Spot is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1016

I promised Janet I'd print something for her today. Somehow, to make a single 8x10 print, I ended up running an hour-long cleaning cycle, replacing three $55 ink cartridges and putting in a new maintenance tank. When I finally got the image printed, I found out it was the wrong size.

Most of the rest of the day was spent writing. Writing is a fairly peaceful activity. When I'm writing a longer piece, I usually compose all the headlines and sub-heads first and then use these as an outline to fill in the text. I never try to do anything in a single draft. The first draft is just to get something down on paper. The second is to correct major contextual errors and logical flaws. All the other drafts are just nit-picking to refine sentence structure and bring things in at the required work count. I enjoy this part of the process. The inevitable revisions that come after the piece is submitted aren't nearly as much fun.

My eyes were watering so badly from Fall allergies that I could hardly tell what the dogs were doing at training class this evening. Once the Spring allergy season is behind me, I completely forget that there is also a Fall allergy season. Everything is fine during the Summer, but it is usually way too hot to really enjoy the relief from my perpetual sneezing and wheezing. It's a shame that the nicest weather usually coincides with the worst times for seasonal allergies. Maybe allergies just get worse with age, but I don't remember having these problems before I moved to Texas. Colorado air was crisp and clear. Seattle was damp and rainy, but I still didn't suffer from seasonal allergies. The dogs have allergy problems too. They don't sneeze or have watering eyes, but their skin itches. I don't know which is worse. When I see them scratching and rolling on their backs on the carpet, I sympathize. I know exactly what they are going through.

The holiday pet photo season will be here before you know it. I'm gradually replacing faulty equipment and getting ready for this year's events. Since many of the same people come year-after-year with their pets, it's time for a new set as well. The pets are the same, so you've got to do something to make each year's pictures a little different. While I'm shopping for a new backdrop, I should shop for a comfortable chair to sit in as well. Yeah, I know you can't really take pictures sitting in a chair, but it would be nice if you could. These events are murder on my knees.

Suki is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 749

A lot of odds and ends today. I guess odds and ends count for something. I went up to Imaging Spectrum and bought enough ink to finish the half done cleaning cycle I'd started earlier. After I finished cleaning the printer, I made a couple of large prints, just to make sure it worked. These prints immediately went in a folio with a lot of other test prints. Since each of the 4880's eight ink cartridges costs $55 and half the ink gets used up unclogging the printer, these prints wind up being a bit pricey. A few years ago, I was able to justify the cost of maintaining this large printer, because several of my retail clients used me to create window displays for them. Now, just about every form of printing can be done online for far cheaper than it costs me to do the same thing. It's that old "economy of scale" thing.

These days I only use my large printer to make free posters for animal rescue groups. Nothing wrong with that, mind you. I just wish the whole process wasn't so expensive or time consuming. With my printer working again, I went over to my pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions and ended up standing in line forever behind some old people who seemed to have much more complicated needs than my own. I kept thinking that these people in the line might be me someday. I certainly hope not. I take way too many pills as it is.

My German client accepted my European style invoice. My watch client has started feeding me regular jobs again, now that the writing marathon appears to be over. I'm still removing employees from websites at a faster pace than adding them. I guess 2012 has started. I need to set aside some time to get my car safety inspected before the sticker on my windshield expires. Each year this process seems to get a little more difficult. Last year a young technician refused to believe that the Defender was a full time four wheel vehicle and attempted to put it on the dynamometer. That was a big mistake. Luckily I was able to get the kid to stop the test before he ruined my car.

The dogs still seem to think we're on holiday time. I had a devil of a time getting them out of bed this morning. You'd think they'd be eager to go on their morning walk, but lately snoozing under a blanket seems more appealing to them. Staying under the covers seems more appealing to me as well, but I'd never get anything done that way.

Petey is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 469

I'm thinking of replacing my Watch of the Day photos with a Broken Thing of the Day feature. I can't believe how many things have broken recently at our house. Today it was the television. I guess technically, the TV isn't completely broken, since the picture tube still works. The important part; the tuner that picks up the stations, seems to have gone kaput though. I couldn't get the TV to stay on channel 3 this morning so it would sync with the cable box. I finally figured out that the big VCR that the TV was sitting on actually has a tuner built in. I'd just been using the VCR as a table to hold the TV, but surprisingly, it finally proved itself useful after all these years. After a little rerouting of cables, I was able to just use the old Sony television as a monitor and route the VCR tuner signal back to the TV and cable box. Now it takes three separate remotes to actually watch anything: one for the cable box, one for the tuner in the VCR, and a third for the TV itself.

I have a bunch of posters I need to print for upcoming animal rescue events, so it was time to get serious about reviving my ailing Epson 4000. For once, my problems didn't have anything to do with clogged ink lines. This time I just had the wrong ink. The package looked like the correct ink. The cartridge itself looked correct too. The printer knew better though, and refused to accept the cartridge. After a trip to the printer store, I discovered that I had dye ink instead of pigment ink. It's still a mystery to me why Epson even makes dye ink cartridges that fit perfectly in my printer when the printer isn't compatible with them.

I finally got the printer working and printed the posters for the Easter Dalmatian Rescue pet picture event. I still need to print the Wine on the Roof poster with the Gone with the Wind dog and cat, but we haven't been able to pin down the day of the event yet.

I need to show Janet the complicated sequence of events that now needs to take place to turn on the television. Even though I was real pleased with myself for patching something together that actually works, I think her solution is going to be a trip to the store to buy a new television.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day