Day 2856

We tricked Dash into walking this morning. Janet walked with us down the alley and into the park. As soon as Dash started smelling interesting things in the park, he didn't even notice that Janet had turned around and gone back to the house to get ready for work. The rest of our walk was completely normal. It still seems odd that Dash hates to leave the house, but once our yard is out of sight he seems to enjoy himself. I'm probably the same way about vacations. It's like pulling teeth to get me to go on a vacation. I'll come up with every excuse in the book to avoid leaving home. Once the plane has left the runway, I'm fine. The only way to explain this is that I probably have the attention span of a dog. As soon as I'm somewhere new, I completely forget about the old.

The refrigerator part arrived at the repair shop today, but they won't be able to come out and install it until Monday. This means that I'll probably have to take the freezer section apart again and defrost the evaporator coil one more time this weekend. This sucks, but I'm really not surprised at the delay. Now, I have to decide whether to quietly install the new parts I ordered myself before the repairmen arrive, or ask them to install them for me. One way or another, I'm determined to get this refrigerator working again.

Janet's doctor isn't taking new patients anymore, but there are other doctors at the practice. I made an appointment to meet one of them next week. They call this initial visit a "meet and greet." I've had the same primary care physician for a long time now, but it's probably time for a chance. I'm definitely not getting any younger. I was so impressed at the quality of care Janet received during her cancer treatment that it seems crazy not to have access to the same type of care myself. I always used to think that Dot and Dash had much better doctors than I did. Maybe this new concierge practice will   put me in the same league with the care that Dash is receiving at the cancer center.

I wish I'd never upgraded my computer to Sierra. All my aging software worked perfectly with Mountain Lion. Now, I run into little snags and hiccups almost every day. The most irritating problem is that Dreamweaver won't save login information for web servers anymore. I have to manually enter user ID and password information every time I upload something. There are a lot of passwords to remember and if I forget them, I can't count on the clients to remember them either. Old Quicktime movies won't play anymore either. I would be tempted to reinstall Mountain Lion, except that it's usually not a good idea to go backwards. I'm sure that since I've changed hard drives when I upgraded the system, it would be almost impossible to return things to exactly the way they were. I also need to remember why I upgraded in the first place. My accounting software wasn't going to be supported anymore. In my line of work, you need Microsoft Word, you need Photoshop, and you need accounting software.

After I took today's mail to the post office, I stopped by a little neighborhood Cuban restaurant and picked up a Cuban Sandwich to go. Everyone seems to make a Cuban Sandwich a little differently. This one was supposed to be very authentic, but how would I know? I'd been curious about this restaurant, since it gets very good reviews. I drive by this place every week and it only took me a year to stop and order something. The sandwich was pretty good.

I can't decide whether to go out for breakfast tomorrow. I guess it will all depend on how much trouble it is to get Dash to take a walk.

Diva is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2818 - 9/11

With each passing year the world seems to pay a little less attention to 9/11. I was surprised to learn that almost 20% of the US population wasn't even born when the twin towers fell. Do these people even understand how much the world changed that day? It's been sixteen years now. I wonder who will remember when another sixteen years has passed.

I will remember, but I doubt that it matters much. My generation is no longer in charge. If you are my age, you may think you are still relevant, but the torch has already been passed. I hope that future generations will eventually develop an appreciation for history. From what I see, they don't care much about history any more. History is important and you can't just re-write the past because some of it might embarrass you. I will always remember when John Kennedy was shot, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and when the twin towers fell. These weren't dry events in a history book for me. I was there.

I wonder how long it will take the media to forget about Hurricane Irma? They've already forgotten about Harvey. It's astonishing what a short attention span we have these days. It's almost like the evening news has become a circus. Every Channel had a reporter in a raincoat standing out in the middle of the hurricane, but nobody is reporting about the wildfires on the West Coast at all. I didn't hear much about that huge earthquake in Mexico either. Maybe this is normal, but it seems strange to me.

I have time to think about such things because all I do these days is make pathetic attempts to repair things around the house. Today I got up on the roof with a pole saw and trimmed a lot of low hanging branches. The next time we get bad weather, some of these branches were sure to fall. I probably saved about $300 by doing the work myself, but I'd much rather be busy writing or designing websites, so I could pay someone else to do these dirty jobs.

I wonder how long it is going to take for Dash's dewclaw to start growing back. Every time I take his cone off, he starts licking his paw. It doesn't help that he always used to lick his paws anyway. It's just a habit, but it's a very bad habit right now. The wound needs to heal and scab over. This will take a while. I hope it doesn't take as long as it took my dog bite wounds to heal. Dash and I will both go crazy if that is the case. For the time being, I've resigned myself to taking his cone on and off a dozen times a day.

I guess I need to resign myself to losing work to millennials. Another website I created is being redesigned by a team of millennials. It hurts my feelings, but I would have done the same thing when I was younger. I wasn't shy about taking work from older creatives back in the day. Oh, well. What goes around comes around and time just keeps on marching on.

Shadow is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day