Day 2050

I actually got out of the house today. I took a couple of Janet's watches up to my watchmaker to get the batteries changed. She had stopped by the Omega store in the mall over the weekend and they wanted an insane amount of money to change a battery. The amount was so high that it was almost as if they were telling her, "We just want to sell you overpriced new stuff. When it breaks, we don't ever want to see it again." I told Janet that I knew a guy who was still reasonable and fair. I enjoy talking with the watch repairman. We are both relics from a bygone era. We talk about fast cars, fine watches, and the futility of running a small business in today's world. I don't see the watchmaker much anymore. I can't afford to collect watches anymore. I can't even afford to keep them all running anymore. I was pleased when the watchmaker told me that the new mobile website I'd built for him was actually helping his business. Evidently, people really do use their phones to visit websites these days. Who knew? I just use my phone to check the weather.

I also fixed Janet's running shoes today. She was ready to throw a pair of somewhat new looking Nike's away when I told her that I just glue mine back together. The soles never seem to wear out on running shoes. They just fall apart first. The glue that seems to substitute for any type of legitimate stitching begins to delaminate fairly quickly. I discovered one day that I could just use Superglue to re-attach the soles to the upper portion of these shoes and they were good as new. I just use an old Jorgensen clamp from my Dad's workshop to bind the sole to the shoe while the glue is drying and thirty minutes later they're ready to wear again. After fixing the shoes and getting the watch batteries replaced, I felt like I'd had a reasonably productive day, even though I'd done no design or writing at all.

All the dogs seem to want to do these days is eat. I try to be very quiet when I'm snacking in the kitchen, but they always seem to hear me and come racing out for a treat of their own. This is problematic now, because Dot can't get to the kitchen as fast as Dash anymore and she gets mad. To make the small journey from one end of the house to the other, I need to hook her up in her special harness and support her rear legs in case she starts to fall. This involved procedure kind of takes the fun out of eating a few Fritos in the kitchen. I shouldn't be eating these high cholesterol salty snacks anyway, but I'm kind of like the dogs. What else are you going to do on a hot Summer day?

I discovered a quick and fairly easy way to update the new Dalmatian Rescue website, so that's one more thing I don't have to worry about. I was a bit apprehensive about converting an animal rescue website to a mobile friendly format, because these sites change so frequently. I'm so used to making these periodic updates using Dreamweaver that I wasn't looking forward to changing the complex code required in a responsive site. The whole process wasn't as hard as I thought, so maybe this old dog still has a few tricks left after all.

While I was driving up to the watchmaker's office today I listened to someone on NPR talk about different things you could do to keep memories from fading away as you age. Supposedly, a seventy year old person only retains half as much new information as a child. Makes sense to me. I was like a sponge when I was younger, soaking up an enormous amount of information every day. Now I can barely remember where I put my reading glasses. Luckily, writing seems to be one of the best ways to ward off senility. If there are bonus points for developing an ability to write about nothing at all, I should be good to go for a long time.

Deuce 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 565

I've got to rethink my approach to storing clothes. When I was getting dressed this morning, I realized that I'm wearing the same clothes over and over again. I have all my shirts and pants neatly stacked in the dresser drawers, but whenever I get something to wear, I always just pick something off the top of the stack. After I do the laundry, I put the clean clothes right back on top of the stack again. The clothes in the middle of the stack or the bottom never get worn at all. I pulled one of these stacks out of the dresser this morning and looked at it. It was like one of those core samples that geologists take before they start drilling for oil. It was easy to tell what I liked at different points in time. Some of the shirts near the bottom of the stack still had the store tags attached. They'd never been work at all. I thought briefly about turning all the stacks upside down, so I would start wearing the other clothes, but I'm such a creature of habit that I picked a shirt and pair of pants right off the top again.

The dogs are creatures of habit too. We took them to a brand new dog park today and from the way they acted in the car, you'd think we were taking them to Outer Mongolia. When we finally arrived however, the dogs were happy as could be. There were new smells to explore and new dogs to sniff. Their excitement was short lived unfortunately. It was so hot outside that both dogs were ready to go home again in less than ten minutes. We spent a lot longer getting to the dog park that we actually spent playing in the park.

Janet wanted me to fix one of her watches today, so when I got hers running again, I thought I'd get a few of my own running as well. I used to keep the entire collection wound and running, but eventually I realized that this was a giant waste of time and money. I got about ten watches running again today, including one that said it had to be sent back to the factory for battery replacement. When I opened the thing up, I realized why they put this warning in the instruction book. The watch had two batteries that were buried somewhere near the middle of the watch under a maze of tiny plates held together by even tinier springs and screws. Situations like this are why I don't open up watches as often as I used to. I frequently found myself in over my head and ruined a few perfectly good watches. I got this one fixed and put back together though. It took me half the afternoon, but I was determined not to destroy one of my favorites.

We're still trying to decide whether to walk the dogs in the neighborhood Fourth of July parade. Dot and Dash would be real cute dressed in something patriotic, but it's so hot outside that we're afraid that the pavement would burn their paws. We'll se how the weather is tomorrow.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 550

I knew I was in trouble when I went to the battery store and was greeted by two new guys wearing green shirts instead of the customary red. I've been buying watch batteries at this store for years and had gotten to know the sales guys. They always gave me the jewelers wholesale price on watch batteries, even though I wasn't a jeweler at all. I did buy a lot of batteries though. When these new guys rang up my total, the price was almost three times what I was used to. I told them that I had always gotten a discount, but when they looked on their list of jewelry store accounts, of course they couldn't find me. I really couldn't justify my discount other than the fact that the other guys had always given it to me. I handed the stack of batteries back and told the guys in green that I would just buy them online. As I was walking out the door, one of the guys said, "let me see what I can do." He looked a little book and came up with the jewelers price again. I walked away with twenty five batteries.

This little scenario illustrates why small business is having a tough time these days. Nobody, including myself, wants to pay retail anymore. Can you blame us. There's an app right on my iPhone that lets me compare and find the lowest price on almost anything, anywhere in the world. It's much easier to order something directly from China over the Internet than it is to look for a lower price across town. Don't get me wrong. I love little retail stores. I just don't support them anymore. Times are tough and I want the lowest price on everything. Why would I want to pay $3.25 for a watch battery when I can get the same thing for 95 cents somewhere else.

So, there you have it. A few companies gear up to sell their stuff to the entire world on the thinnest of possible margins and the rest go out of business. The battery store probably won't go out of business. They'll struggle along and make less of a profit by giving customers the discount they want just before they walk out the door forever. The same thing has happens in my own business. I'm still busy, but I'm lucky to make $50 doing exactly the same things that used to bring in $500. To make the same income I used to make, I have to work a lot harder.

I got another new website launched and online today. I only like to work on one design project at a time, but now that this project is almost finished, it means I need to start looking for another website client. This is not as easy as it sounds. I'm not a big, fancy interactive shop like Razorfish, and I don't sell cheap cookie-cutter template sites either. Most of my clients started by doing one of those cheesy "website tonight" type of template sites on GoDaddy and ended up hating it. Then they priced big companies like Razorfish and couldn't come close to affording them. I was the only alternative left.

Now that the bees are finally gone, guess what I spotted today? Carpenter ants! I've started seeing the characteristic little piles of sawdust around the edges of some of the windows. Carpenter ants aren't as bad as termites, but they do eat wood. Looks like I'll be making another trip to the pest control store next week.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day