Day 4007

Today was dismal. I woke up to the sounds of thunder and rain pounding on the roof. The temperature was only 39 degrees. Clearly we weren't going on a walk with Dawn this morning. This wasn't a case of waiting an hour for the skies to clear. It looked like it was going to be an all day rain. Dawn didn't want to go outside anyway. We couldn't even get her to go out in the back yard and pee.

I turned on the pumps, which actually worked for a change, and we ate breakfast. There were all sorts of things I could have done today, but it was hard to get motivated. I could have gotten more familiar with my new camera. I could have installed the new electrical wiring monitoring device. I could have explored a new article idea I have for Sky & Telescope. I did none of these things. I decide to stop a toilet from running instead.

I should have known from the start that this would be a thankless experience. I can no longer get the parts I need for the aging French toilet and have been forced to clean and repair the existing parts in the flush mechanism instead. Unlike American toilets that use a simple float mechanism to stop the flow of water when the tank is full, this Rube Goldberg device uses a complex system of tiny rubber membranes to accomplish the same thing. When the membranes being to leak, the toilet runs. I've cleaned and reassembled these part so many times, but each time it gets a little harder to achieve a perfect seal. I think I made things a little better today, but I still hear an annoying drip, drip, drip sound. I get so tired of fixing broken things, but there is really no alternative.

The rain started to subside around mid-afternoon and I was getting cabin fever, so I decided to take a walk. I dressed warmly because it was still very cold. I should have worn a raincoat. Although the weather radar showed that the rain was moving away from us, there was still a fine, wind driven mist down by the lake. Even though it wasn't raining hard, it didn't take long to get wet. I just kept walking. I was wearing two warm coats and the inner coat didn't appear to be getting wet. Needless to say, I didn't encounter many other people on my walk. It was cold and nasty outside but I enjoyed the solitude. Long, quiet walks are a good time to think. By the time I returned home I had walked over five miles. 

I've got an idea for a second Sky & Telescope article and I'm going to start writing an initial draft tomorrow. What have I got to lose? If the rain clears up, I'll definitely have to go up on the roof. We got a lot of rain today and even with the pumps running most of the day, there will still be a lot of standing water. I might write my one contact at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as well to see if I can get myself invited to the Perseverance rover landing in February.

It was a miserable day, but oddly a cold walk in the rain helped to get me motivated. Who knows how long this will last. I might not even want to get out of bed in the morning. I noticed today that some of my very old blog posts have reappeared on Facebook. When were these posts reinstated and why is everything earlier than 2015 OK now? The newer blog posts are still gone. I've given up trying to figure Facebook out. My blog should never have been banned for violating community standards in the first place. Oh, well. I think robot algorithms control the whole thing anyway. 

Cookie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3686

It's easy to spend the entire afternoon with the Dalmatians. They enjoy the attention and we enjoy having the opportunity to get to know them better. Everyone has their own personality. Some like to race around and chase after red rubber Kongs. Others like to play with soft plush toys. Sock and Lord like to stay together, while Charlie and Hank seem to do better on their own. Dawn always gives us one of those big Dalmatian smiles when we arrive. She isn't very playful but is probably the most relaxed of the bunch. She was content to just sit quietly with us today.

Something bit me last night. I woke up with a big welt on my back and have no idea how it got there. It's not the season for mosquitos and chiggers, so maybe it was a spider. There are tons of spiders in our yard, but luckily most of them are outside. There definitely shouldn't be spiders in the bed, but you never know. I'd probably hate to know how many critters come out of the woodwork after the lights go out.

Tax documents are starting to arrive in the mail. Jeez. Is it already that time of the year again? Time passes so quickly now. I feel like I just finished with last year's taxes. It doesn't seem fair that Social Security is taxed. This doesn't really feel like income. It doesn't seem like those mandatory IRA distributions should be taxed as income either. Oh, well. Those are the rules. I just collect all the documents and give them to my accountant.

Since we're spending more time with the dogs now. I'm getting a really late start on my Monday walk. I started well before sunset, but arrived home in the dark again. As the sky grew darker I looked for familiar stars. All I really saw was Venus next to a thin crescent moon. I should have been able to see Mercury on the Western horizon about thirty minutes after sunset, but there were too many clouds. It's too bad I'm a little nervous about being in the park after dark. You get a lot better view of the sky away from all the city lights.

The toilet in the bathroom is running again so I spent some time cleaning the complex mechanical parts. Plumbers won't even fix this weird French toilet anymore. They just tell me to get a Toto. I was convinced that the toilet would work perfectly after I put everything back together. Cleaning the little hydraulic parts inside the tank usually works. This time it didn't. The toilet still runs. All of today's efforts were for nothing.

One of these days I'm going to have to try to clean the large format printer again. This probably won't work either. I have waited too long. I just got tired of spending hundreds of dollars on ink cartridges when I didn't really have anything to print. Epson is really just an ink company. The printer is just there to make you buy ink. I have no desire to make large Giclée prints anymore. A rational person would just throw this printer away. I never claimed to be a rational person though.

I hope this coronavirus scare doesn't get worse. I'm going to get nervous about airports soon if they don't stop flights to and from China. Right now there are still daily flights to and from major Chinese cities. I guess I could drive to Florida for the Solar Orbiter launch, but it would take a full scale plague to make me drive that far. Lets hope it doesn't come to that.

Sophie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3370

I'm glad I saw Apollo 11. The film got mixed reviews, but I think that anyone who is old enough to remember the event will agree with me. This wasn't just a movie, it was a time machine. The 65mm footage of the launch itself was spectacular, but what struck me the most were all the little details that brought the sixties back to life. Everybody smoked back then. It was amazing to see how many of the engineers and technicians at mission control were smoking cigarettes and pipes. Each of the flight controllers had a black rotary dial land line phone next to their console. Reporters were calling in their stories using pay phones. Some were typing on small portable manual typewriters. The men had crew cuts and a surprising number of women had beehive hairdos. This is exactly the way it was. It's funny how modern I thought the world was when I was in college. Back then I couldn't have imagined the world we live in today.

You can forget a lot in fifty years. As I was exiting the theater, a couple of older looking guys were commenting on the film. "How old were you when we went to the moon," one guy asked. "I was 8," his friend replied. "I was 6," the other guy said. Good grief. I must be really old. I was in college when the launch happened. The guys ahead of me at the theater looked old enough to be retired and I was at least ten years older than them. I not only remember Alan Shepard and John Glenn's first flights, I remember Ham the monkey. I was pretty young at the time, but I even remember Sputnik 1 in 1957.

When I went to the theater this afternoon I realized I was totally out of the loop. The guy at the ticket counter asked me to pick a seat on a touch screen. "I can't just go inside and sit where I want," I said. "No," said the attendant. "You have to pick a seat first." I guess even going to the movies is done on your phone now. You can get your ticket and pick a seat in advance. That explained why some of the best seats were already taken, even though the theater was almost empty when I went inside. I was so confused that I ended up sitting in the wrong row. "But it says Row G right on my ticket," I said to the guy next to me. "No, this is a G-Rated film," he explained to me. "Your seat is over there."

Later today, I watched another short film on my computer called Seattle is Dying. What a contrast. Apollo 11 was an incredibly optimistic story about one of the greatest achievements in human history.    Seattle is Dying is basically a cautionary tale about how civilization is literally crumbling under our feet. I guess that's the difference between 1969 and 2019. I used to live in Seattle. It was a great place in the early 70's. Seattle used to be called the Emerald City because it was so beautiful. The city now has one of the highest crime rates in the country. Drug abuse and homelessness are out of control. Parts of the city look like a third world country. Citizens don't feel safe anymore. You wonder how things deteriorated so quickly. It's sad. No wonder I would prefer to live in 1969.

It was nice to have a break from the usual Sunday chores today. I didn't really miss going to the gym. I'll catch up on chores tomorrow. The only useful thing I did today was make some temporary repairs to the balky French toilet. I've discovered that there's a weird little rubber piston in the flush mechanism that causes the toilet to run if it gets dirty. Periodically, I take the piston assembly apart and clean all the parts with alcohol. This usually fixes things for a few months.

Dash had a good day. He was still as slow as molasses, but he really enjoyed his outings in the park. The weather was beautiful and there were lots of things to smell. I wish I could do a better job of keeping him from stumbling. I do the best I can and we're still walking, so I guess that's all that counts. I evidently didn't do a great job of cleaning him up last night when he pooped either. He still had a brown tail when I woke up this morning.

I promised myself that I'll get started on my taxes tomorrow. I don't always keep my promises though.

Allie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3011

I was pleased to discover a repair manual for my French toilet that I'd never seen before. Unbeknownst to me, the float is adjustable. Rotate the float clockwise in the assembly to lower the water level in the tank. Rotate it counterclockwise to raise the water level. Cool. I followed the instructions and the styrofoam float did rotate exactly as advertised. I couldn't move it very far unfortunately, because it kept getting stuck on the side of the flush valve which had somehow frozen in place at a slight angle. In theory, lowering the float should lower the water level, but I wasn't able to lower it enough to make much of a difference. After monkeying around for an hour, I actually made the situation a little worse. No wonder plumbers don't want to touch this thing.

I couldn't decide on a restaurant this morning, so I just picked up some precooked bacon and eggs at the grocery store breakfast bar. It wasn't very good. I should have just cooked breakfast myself at home. At least I didn't have to make a separate trip to get groceries for the weekend. I think I'm just not willing to admit that I've lost my interest in food. Nothing I eat seems to taste very good anymore. I know I need to eat to stay healthy, but there are times when I wish I could exist without food.

Dash doesn't have this problem. He seems to want to eat all the time now. This is certainly better than not eating, but I wish we could strike a balance. I don't want Dash to get fat because his rear legs are so weak. If I'm not in the kitchen feeding him, Dash wants me napping with him in the bedroom. He gets irritated when I spend a lot of time at the computer and then starts knocking things over in the office. I try to give Dash the benefit of the doubt because he's got so much wrong with him, but I think our boy has become a little spoiled.

The printer ink I ordered arrived today and I've been watching it disappear as I run the cleaning cycle to clear the clogged lines. Epson is really just an ink company. They sell you complex printers at artificially low prices knowing that you'll have to buy their ridiculously expensive ink. Half the ink is wasted running these cleaning cycles. Pigment ink makes beautiful prints, but it clogs very easily. You've got to keep the printer running to keep it clean. Basically, you should never buy one of these large printers unless you plan to print something every day. If I hadn't become a slave to my machines, I would have ditched this cantankerous printer a long time ago. A big ink jet printer isn't nearly as essential as a toilet.

I finally got Dash to take an afternoon walk, but it wasn't easy. He doesn't like to walk down the alley in the afternoon. I practically had to carry him down the alley today, but once we got to the park, he was just fine. I don't understand this behavior at all. Dash probably thinks the same of me and wonders why I waste so much time trying to maintain old things that any sane person would have thrown away by now.

Ariel is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2979

Part of the greenhouse roof blew off this morning. Jeez. I didn't even think it was a windy day. Apparently, it didn't take much. One minute the roof was fine and the next minute it was on the ground. As if I didn't have enough to fix already. I knew it was going to be a rainy day, so I hurriedly tried to get the roof section back in place. I managed to cover the hole, but a proper repair will have to come later.

The damaged greenhouse wasn't an auspicious way to begin the day, but is was a sign of things to come. We did manage to get Dash walked before the rain began, but while we were fixing breakfast, I noticed that there was a coating of ice on the back wall of the freezer again. It was time to defrost the evaporator coil. I had been overly optimistic. I was hoping that the refrigerator would operate normally for a few more weeks because things have been going well this month. Apparently, the coil freezes faster when the humidity is high. When I disassembled the freezer, I found that the coil was frozen solid. This process only took half as long as it did when the humidity was lower.

All bets are off. When the refrigerator was working well in January, I thought I knew exactly the part I needed to get things running reliably again. Now that the coil is freezing rapidly, I don't have a clue. I'm ready to give up. Maybe I'll go out and buy the new refrigerator I don't really want tomorrow.

I can't get the toilet to stop running either. It doesn't seem that cleaning the parts helped at all. Plumbers tell me that I should give up and buy a Toto toilet. Of course, it was a plumber who told me to buy the ridiculously complicated toilet I have now. Am I asking for trouble to go from a French toilet to a Japanese toilet? I should have just kept the old toilet that came with the house. It used a ton of water, but it was virtually indestructible.

Dash's eating habits are driving me crazy. At the end of the day he's usually eaten enough to satisfy his nutritional needs, but he doesn't eat consistently anymore. He'll eat a little and then turn up his nose at the rest. I'll have to put the food back in the refrigerator and try something else. Often he'll like something in the afternoon that he hated in the morning. This reluctance to eat seems to have something to do with his sense of smell. He carefully smells his food and even his water bowl before he eats or drinks. He didn't used to do this. If it doesn't smell exactly right, he won't touch it. Dash spends a lot more time smelling thing on his walks now too. It is as if he has developed a hyper sensitive nose. I know dogs can smell things a lot better than we can, but this is getting ridiculous.

I hope the weather forecast is wrong. It's going to be a very long week if it doesn't quit raining. There is no point to even examining the roof now. I know it is covered with standing water. I've just got to hope that the elastomer coating holds up. I've learned the hard way that the coating is very fragile when it's wet. I can do more damage by tramping around on the wet roof than the rain can.

It's hard not to get discouraged. This is not what I imagined retirement would be like at all.

Spot is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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