Day 4088

Dawn got a bath today. The fact that this was the big event of the day will tell you how exciting today was. None of our dogs have enjoyed getting a bath, but they put up with it. We abandoned bathing dogs at home years ago and always take them to one of those do it yourself dog bath places that have sprung up all over town. We all got wet. Dawn got clean. And she did very well with the other dogs at the facility.

Today was tax preparation day. I think I've got everything ready to send to the accountant, but I'm never sure. Taxes seem to get more complicated every year. My big problem this year was that I keep accidentally putting things in the wrong category in Quickbooks. It took quite a while to look for missing items and move them to the proper class files. At least I'm pretty good about entering transactions in Quickbooks now. Doing a search in a software program is a lot easier than sifting through mountains of receipts in an accordion folder. I was pleased that I actually made money writing for magazines this year. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was a start.

I never did take the Allegra-D that I bought yesterday. I guess all the dire warnings on the box scared me away. Now I've got to go find something else. I should quit reading the fine print on pill bottles. I shouldn't even watch the TV commercials. Just about every pharmaceutical product on the market warns of some sort of horrible side effect. I seldom have an adverse reaction to medication. My problem is that I often have no reaction at all. A lot of pills just don't seem to work on me. It's just as well. I hate to depend on pills and still think that staying active and eating healthy food is the best way to avoid getting sick.

It was so warm today that I not only washed the car, I cleaned the dirty wheels as well. Land Rover wheels seem to get coated with oil and dirt unusually quickly. I hate cleaning them because I have to get down on my knees and scrub all the gunk away. The older I get, the harder it is to get back up off the ground. I'm going to need a cane one of these days. I guess the effort was worth it. The car looks great now. I don't drive much, so I probably won't have to do this again for a month or so. Dawn probably hopes she won't need a bath again for another month or so as well.

I talked to my editor at SpaceFlight Magazine today. He said he'd leave it up to me what to cover next. This is good and bad. I'm not really sure what I want to do next. It will probably just depend on how hard it is to get clearance and the proper credentials. I think that Kennedy Space Center has discovered that severely restricting access makes life a lot easier. Life will probably never go back to the pre-covid days when NASA created special events for social media influencers and it was easy to get a press pass.

Last year at this time I was getting ready to spend several weeks out at McDonald Observatory. Every March they hosted a special series of Spring Break star parties that would often attract up to 500 people a night. When I became an on-site volunteer I kind of thought that I'd be going back to the observatory every March. Not this year. I have no idea when the observatory is going to open up again, but I don't think it is going to be soon. Hard to believe that it's been a full year since the Covid madness started.

I've learned a lot this year. I'm not a people person and do pretty well on my own. I've discovered that it is very hard to do anything in isolation however. Getting invited to view launches at Kennedy Space Center involves a lot of interaction with other people. So does looking through big telescopes out at the observatory. I'd like to resume these activities but I'm not sure that life will ever go back to the way it was before. I'm just sitting her like everyone else, waiting to see what happens next.

Orion is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 4087

I'm still battling seasonal allergies. I went to the pharmacy this morning for a different kind of allergy medicine. I'd been taking Allegra, but a friend told me that I really needed Allegra-D. What's the difference, I thought. The first kind is available over the counter and the second kind you have to ask the pharmacist for after showing him your driver's license and registering with the DEA. What's the big deal with adding a decongestant to this allergy medicine, I asked the pharmacist? Well, you can use this stuff to make meth, he told me. I guess I've led a sheltered life. This was news to me. Allegra-D was also more expensive than the regular Allegra. We'll see if it works. If this stuff can stop my runny nose, it's worth it.

My feet hurt and my nose is running like a faucet, but I can't even feel my second Covid shot. I've had no reaction to the vaccine at all. This is pretty typical. I don't think I've had much of a reaction to any vaccine I've taken. One thing Janet and I both noticed was that that there didn't seem to be much vaccine in the syringe. The needle was very small and the injection just seemed to take a second or two. This was quite different from the Shingles vaccine we'd taken earlier in the year. The Shingles vaccine syringe was quite large and the injection seemed to take forever. At any rate, I hope this stuff works. I've already written my editor at SpaceFlight Magazine and told him I'm ready to travel again.

Our weather continues to be unseasonably warm. I was able to wear a t-shirt on my long walk again and was actually hot by the time I returned home. Dawn enjoyed her shorter walk but she's started eating grass again. Why do dogs like to eat grass? All our dogs have eaten grass at one point or another. Does this mean they are deficient in some nutrient or do they just like the taste? Dawn will only eat a particular type of grass, but there seems to be a lot of it in the park.

I watched the SN10 Starship test flight this afternoon on the Boca Chica live feed. This time the rocket seemed to work perfectly and was able to make a soft landing on the pad. After sitting on the pad for about five minutes, it inexplicably blew up. What was that all about? Was this something Space X did on purpose to test the flight termination device? Did the rocket make a hard landing and damage an engine? Was it cheaper to blow the rocket up than to disassemble it later? Nobody seems to know, but there is a lot of wild speculation. People who like Space X say the test was 99.9% successful. People who don't like Space X say the test was a failure and that the Starship design is flawed. Why am I not surprised that people can't seem to agree on anything.

I just read the fine print on the Allegra-D box. It says not to take the stuff if you have high blood pressure, diabetes, an enlarged prostate, or have difficulty swallowing. Wouldn't it have been easier to just say not to take the pill if you were old? There is also a warning not to take the pills with fruit juice. Hmm. I wonder if my morning smoothie counts as fruit juice?  Maybe I ought to talk to my doctor before taking this stuff. I've never run into a pill that my doctor didn't like, but there's a first time for everything.

I've really got to get started working on my taxes tomorrow. I've run out of excuses and I'm running out of time. I guess it's either the taxes or raking leaves. I'm running out of excuses to finish with the leaves as well. No wonder I'm so eager to leave town and go to a rocket launch.

Maggie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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