Day 4215

It was a little cooler today. That made it easier to do some things I've been avoiding. I finally got around to mowing the grass. It grows quickly since we've had a wet Spring. I don't like mowing the front yard now, since traffic has gotten heavy on our street. When I've got the mower down by the curb, cars and big trucks will barrel past me at forty miles an hour. This constant traffic makes it hard to get out of the driveway too. Things have changed a lot in thirty years.

I was tired when I finished mowing both the front and back yards, but the weather wasn't bad today so I decided that I'd go ahead and take my long walk after a short nap. Dawn got the best part of the day when we took our sunrise walk early this morning, although the rest of the day was much better than I expected. It was overcast with a pleasant breeze. There was a chance of rain in the forecast, but all we got were a few light sprinkles. Actually the light showers helped keep me cool while I was walking. It felt more like a mist than an actual rain shower.

Mowing the grass and taking a long walk seemed to eat up my entire day. I didn't do much else today. We heard from the vet and Dawn does have bacteria in her urine. The second sample we took to be analyzed looked exactly the same as the first. Janet picked up the antibiotics the vet prescribed and we'll see if we can get her back to normal. At least Dawn still loves her new food. I guess you solve one problem and another one takes its place.

I'm having a hard time staying motivated. My days consist of deciding what to eat and when to walk. I probably won't even try to go back to Kennedy Space Center until Artemis-1 is ready to launch toward the end of the year. Rental cars are almost impossible to find in Florida now and hotels have gotten quite expensive. There are a lot of Starlink launches this Summer, but nothing that really captures my interest. I hope I don't lose the contacts I've worked so hard to build down at the space center, but it is what it is. It's a lot easier to go out to McDonald Observatory when I feel a need to get out of town. It's a lot more peaceful as well. I have no real desire to visit a big city again.

I should be working hard to master PixInsight and the other astrophotography software I was introduced to at the last workshop I attended. I have these application on my computer, but seldom open them. Truthfully, taking pictures of dogs is more fun than taking pictures of stars. I love staring up at the sky on a clear, dark night but I think I enjoy visual astronomy more than astrophotography. Astrophotography is very technical in nature. I think I enjoy the spontaneous side of photography more. I loved shooting fashion back in the day. I'll continue to work on becoming a better astrophotographer though. It's definitely something I haven't mastered yet.

Time passes so quickly now. It will be the middle of July soon and 2021 still just feels like an addendum to 2020. Has anything actually happened this year? It's time to make a grocery list again. I bet the stores will be more crowded tomorrow. I'm not sure where everyone went over the holiday, but they're definitely all back now.

Greta is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 4110

I took a few things to the storage warehouse today and while I was there, I looked for the missing video component. Maybe I moved the thing there and just forgot about it. Nope. I really did throw it away with the empty boxes. Oh, well. Kind of an expensive lesson to learn, but I doubt that I will be making corporate videos again anyway. While I was searching through my storage unit, I found an entire case of yellow tennis balls. Why? I don't play tennis. We must have gotten them for some dog related event in the distant past.

Spring is here. Everything is turning green except for our Asian Jasmine ground cover. It still looks brown and completely dead. I wonder why this stuff fared worse than the rest of the plants? We have a lot of ground cover in the back of the yard because it grows well under our large trees. I have a feeling that the yard is going to look pretty ugly for a while. It's kind of amazing what a week of freezing weather can do.

It was a beautiful day for walking, but my feet didn't get the message. Yesterday, I had a spring in my step and walked briskly. Today I felt like I was carrying a sack of rocks. I got plenty of rest last night, but I just didn't have any energy today. I kept walking and completed five miles, but my time was a lot slower.  Before I started wearing my Fitbit, I wasn't even aware of these changes. I've done this walk so many times now that I can calculate my pace just from the sound of my footsteps. I can pretty accurately guess how many calories I'm burning as well. The trade off is that I don't stop and take pictures as much as I used to.

Dawn likes being outside, but she still won't go outside with me unless I take her out on a leash. As soon as I attach the leash, she hops off the bed and follows me out the back door. I take the leash off as soon as we are in the back yard and she is very comfortable staying out in the yard with me. She wanders around the yard barking at things and will occasionally come over to the chair where I'm sitting to be petted. When we go back inside, she heads straight for the bedroom and waits for Janet to return. It's very strange behavior, but it's starting to feel normal.

The star tracker I ordered has already shipped. This flies in the face of everything I've been reading on the Internet about having to wait months for astronomy equipment. Hopefully, I can learn to use this thing before I go out to the observatory. The trick will be finding any stars to track. You really can't see much of anything here in Dallas.

There was supposed to be a Starship launch today, but it got canceled for some unknown reason. I've known several people who travel down to Boca Chica to watch these launches, but I haven't had the nerve to go myself yet. You could end up waiting for days because Space X schedules change frequently and they are never published ahead of time. There also seems to be a major influx of people crossing the border around Brownsville, so this might not be the best time to visit the area. I'm still amazed that they launch these rockets within a few feet of a Texas state highway and visitors can walk right up to it. This is bound to change soon, but for now it's still the Wild West down in Boca Chica. I really need to plan a visit before the whole compound becomes a restricted area.

I need to plan a lot of things, but I'm finding it extremely difficult to get motivated. It's easier to just get up, fix my smoothie, and repeat the same things I did the previous day. There's always tomorrow, but usually it's just like yesterday.

Bubba is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 4020

I thought I'd go grocery shopping early this morning to let the weather warm up before our second attempt to take Dawn on a normal walk. The store was only open to Plus Card members between 8 and 9 AM. I don't even know what a Plus Card is, but they let me in anyway. It actually was a pretty good time to shop. The store was virtually empty.

After I returned, we had breakfast and then we took Dawn for a walk. Janet and I were both curious to see if Dawn would freeze again. We let her lead the way and things went pretty well for a while. We accidentally crossed one of our old familiar paths and Dawn froze again. She just doesn't want to walk on this road anymore. Luckily, Janet brought some cheese with her and we were able to lure Dawn down to the shoreline where we continued walking. We had to use the cheese again to get Dawn to cross two familiar bridges, but we ended up having a pretty decent walk. We walked through a lot of big open fields and along the edges of wooded areas. As long as there were new and different things to smell, Dawn was fine. At one point Janet got too far ahead and Dawn started walking faster to catch up with her. I can't run anymore. She tried to jump a small ravine and I couldn't keep up with her and fell. I skinned my knee but I didn't let go of the leash. I'm not sure where Dawn would have gone if I did. When we reached the halfway point and turned to return home, I was pretty sure there would be no further problems. Dawn walked on a lot of familiar trails on the return trip and never hesitated at all. Her goal was to get back to the house where she could sit on the bed again.

I was going to clean up the broken glass in the greenhouse today and take it out to the curb for bulky trash day. As luck would have it, the trash trucks came while I was at the grocery store. Why did I think they were going to come on Monday? Oh, well. I cleaned up the glass anyway and put it in a box. Now I just need to remember to set the box out at the curb next month.

It was hard to get motivated today. I didn't feel like starting any new projects or cleaning up the office. I vacuumed the bedrooms, did a load of wash, and that was about it. Maybe yesterday's huge meal made me feel sluggish. All I really wanted to do today was sleep.

We've noticed that there are way more police and fire sirens than there used to be. We hear these sirens every time we walk Dawn. They wake us up when we are sleeping. We hear sirens every few hours now at all times of day and night. I guess this is just part of living in a city these days. It definitely wasn't like this when I first moved to Dallas. It would be nice to live in a place with no sirens and nothing to worry about at night. Lots of luck with that. Such places probably don't exist anymore.

I thought I figured out a way to syndicate the blog to Facebook again, but it didn't work. It's probably not worth the effort to spend much time on this. I've gotten pretty fast at making the JPEG image of my post every night anyway. Syndication services that automatically post the blog to various places used to save me a lot of time. I still syndicate the blog to Twitter, so I never have to visit Twitter myself. I used to do the same thing with Facebook until they banned a lot of the syndication services. I guess I'll continue visiting Facebook for the time being. I like seeing all the dog pictures.

I don't know if Dawn's reluctance to travel down a familiar path is temporary or permanent. It makes life a little difficult though. When we leave the house in the morning we've only got two choices. We can either go left or we can go right.

Dash is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3899

It took me a long time to figure out why today was a special day. One year ago today Janet and I were out at McDonald Observatory. That was kind of special. Nope. That wasn't it. I kept wondering and finally realized that it was Dot's birthday. We used to have big birthday celebrations for Dot and Dash. It all seems so long ago now. I hate it when memories start to fade. It's inevitable though. I guess that's why it's important to replace old traditions with new ones. We'll have to make sure that Dawn has a special birthday celebration this December.

My Apple Watch notified me that I've met my daily move goal for 365 consecutive days. I wondered why I'd missed a day a year ago and then I remembered that we'd spent August 26 last year in the car driving to Fort Davis. I didn't make the same mistake when I returned to the observatory the next March. I took a long walk as soon as I arrived. I've been routinely closing all three activity circles on the watch for months now. I wonder how long this will continue. At some point it seems like I might find something else to do.

The crystal popped off Janet's Apple Watch today. How was that possible? I wonder if this will happen to my watch as well. I did a little research on Google and discovered that this was fairly common. When the battery goes bad, it can swell and push the crystal out. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. I've had swollen lithium batteries make a mess of laptops, a baby monitor, and a little WiFi hotspot. Why can't everyone make their batteries like Tesla? Tesla guarantees the batteries in their cars for ten years. You're lucky to get two years out of anything else.

We got an early start on our walk this morning. I think Dawn might be a little scared of the dark. She seems more comfortable when the sky lightens up a bit. I still enjoy these early walks, but it isn't always easy to get up in the morning. I still need to get more sleep. We were back at the house by the time the sun rose this morning. You'd think this would give me a lot more time to do other things. Usually it doesn't work out that way. I often feel like the day is finished by 9 AM.

I tried to do a few useful things today. I managed to open the sliding glass door enough to squeeze inside and clean the atrium. I've given up on getting this door repaired. Nobody seems to have the skills anymore. I swept some leaves off the porch, cleaned the car, and then called it a day. I should do more, but it's almost impossible to get motivated.

I'm trying to stay motivated about writing. That's getting harder too. I wrote some letters today trying to set up a visit to the Space X Boca Chica facility. I wrote a launch photographer asking for advice on how to reestablish contact with the Air Force. All this is kind of like putting a note in a bottle and throwing it out in the ocean. You've got to do something though.

We'll see what tomorrow brings. It doesn't look like we'll get any rain after all. I'm glad it is gradually getting a little cooler. Maybe we'll survive this summer after all.

Dot is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day