Day 1206

I had to go get a steroid shot for my Poison Ivy this morning. As luck would have it, the doctor who treated me was one of the same doctors I photographed several weeks ago. Luckily, she liked her picture. It's always awkward to get an injection from someone who hates the photo you took of them. Yeah, I know that I told you guys I don't like steroid and cortisone shots just yesterday. It's just about the only remedy I've been able to find that can clear up a bad case of Poison Ivy though. Hopefully, this will be the only case I get this season. I'm very susceptible to Poison Ivy, and the dogs run through patches of the stuff in the park all the time. I'm doomed.

I completed two difficult retrofits to client websites today. Whenever I get these type of assignments, I feel like blurting out "Why didn't you tell me you wanted this when I first designed the site? It would have been so much easier then." The client is always right though, and all of them are a lot more fond of change than I am. I don't think I've ever changed my own website.

I'll really be glad when this cold, wet weather we've been having this week runs its course. It's a constant chore to keep the water of the roof and the mud off the dogs. My boots are just as muddy as the dogs paws when we return from our walks, so I've got to clean those too. The only saving grace is that we've got brick floors. Brick is the most dog friendly surface you can have. Does your dog track mud in the house? No problem. Does your dog occasionally poop in the house? No problem there either. Even water dripping from a leaky roof does far less damage to a brick floor than it would to wood or carpet. I'm a big fan of brick floors.

Good news! I finally got one of the best architects in Dallas to tell me the name of his favorite roofer. Now we're talking! Maybe there's hope for my roof yet.

Dottie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1176

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit an all time high today. Unfortunately, my own portfolio is still nowhere near its all time high. This seems irrational and even a bit irritating to me. You'd think that my investments would have recovered proportionally with the rest of the market. They probably would have if I had just left them alone. It's hard to leave well enough alone when the whole world is in a panic though. When the big market crash hit toward the end of 2008, I tried my best to stop the bloodbath, just like a lot of other investors. Five years later, the results are in and they aren't pretty. Instead of frantically buying and selling and putting money into gold, I should have just done nothing. During the big financial crash of 1987 that was exactly what I did. I didn't look at my brokerage statements for almost three years, and eventually I recovered virtually everything. It was a lot harder to do this in 2008. All the pundits were predicting Armageddon and nobody knew whether it would take five years or fifteen years for the market to fully recover. I'm a bit chagrined by today's market news. I guess it just proves that the more decisions you make in life, the greater your chances are of being wrong.

I had to sit around and wait for the FedEx guy today, so I actually got quite a bit done. I couldn't leave the house until I had signed for my package and I had no excuses. I redoubled my efforts to annihilate the bugs that have invaded the house. I wrote several articles. I updated several websites. I even got caught up on my invoices. If I had to wait on the FedEx guy every day, who knows what I might accomplish.

What I didn't do today was spend much time outside. There was a fierce wind all day that made it seem much colder than it actually was. The dogs ears were flapping in the wind during our walks today and I think Dot and Dash were both happy to return to the house where they could take a snooze on their warm new velour blankets.

Tomorrow, the first of the roofing companies I asked to bid on replacing the roof is coming over to give me an estimate. I kind of dread this whole process, because I've been through it before with contractors. Everybody talks a good game. You get all excited listening to the sales reps explain all the benefits you are going to get and then when the workers show up later with their hammers and saws it is usually a huge disappointment. Contractors typically plan on doing a job as quickly as they can, so they can keep prices reasonable. I'm always envisioning having a group of master craftsmen around for an extended length of time who will do everything according to my specifications. Not very likely! Contractors hate people like me who work out of their house. They'd much rather do their work when the homeowner is away at the office somewhere. At any rate, I'm still hoping I can find a good roofer.

Rory is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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Day 882

I decided that I would sleep better if I just slept on top of the bed like another dog. This way, Dot and Dash couldn't bunch up on either side of me and pin me under the covers like they usually do. Surprisingly, the plan worked quite well last night and I had a lot more room than normal. As an added benefit, I didn't need to make the bed the next morning. I'm sure normalcy will return as soon as Janet gets back, but for now, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. If I get cold? Well, there are dog blankets all over the house. I'll just grab a dog blanket.

There isn't as much to photograph on our daily walks anymore. The Spring wildflowers have all bloomed. The prairie grass is tall and the trees are green, so the animals have better places to hide. Even the light isn't as pretty, since the days are getting longer. The sun is usually up long before I am. I guess I could still walk the dogs at sunset, but they don't have the patience to wait this long. They don't care about photography anyway. I still take my camera though. I can always take pictures of dogs.

I paid a bunch of bills today. Inside every bill was a notice encouraging me to switch to an online payment plan. Everyone seems to want you to pay your bills online these days. I guess the companies make more money if they don't have to send out bills in the mail, but I still prefer paper. It's a lot easier to remember to pay your bills if there is a big stack of them sitting in front of you on your desk. The companies don't want you to have to remember either. They'd rather have you sign up for an automatic payment plan that just sucks money out of your account at predetermined intervals. I don't like this either. I'd rather decide when to pay my bills myself. Preferably when I have money in the bank.

I finished my new website today and make an appointment to present it to my client later in the week. I hope they like it and want to retain me to be their webmaster. Maintaining websites I built years ago has become the bread and butter of my business. Sometimes people don't want me to maintain their site though. They think they can do a better job of things themselves. Often these people call me back a few years later and want me to take over things again. Keeping the website current has turned out to be more trouble than they thought. I got one of those calls today. I looked at the site I had built three years ago and it was a mess. No wonder they wanted me to take it back again.

Facebook is going public soon. I wonder if this would be a good stock to buy? Facebook isn't like Apple or BMW. There is nothing elegant about it. To me, the company is more like Wall Mart. It's a bit irritating, but it is hard to ignore since everyone is already there. Maybe I should pass on Facebook stock. Especially since I'd secretly like to see Zuckerberg fail. Do we really need 28 year old billionaires anyway?

Sadie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 862

I finally got all the new orphans added to the rescue site I've been working on for the past several days. I wanted to get things finished before the backlog of animals became an issue at the board meeting we're having tomorrow. I have a sneaking feeling that when I go to the meeting, I'll discover that there are dozens of other animals that still need to go on the website.

I found enough time this afternoon to disassemble one of the big shelves and move it over to my larger storage space. With the shelf in place, I can now start clearing away some of the clutter that has accumulated on the floor of the new room and hopefully begin to realize some of the benefits of the additional real estate I now have. I need to ask my accountant how long I need to keep financial records and receipts. I didn't realize I had so many records. If I can get rid of some of this obsessive record keeping, I'll have more room for obsolete electronic equipment.

I'm going to have to come up with a new route for our daily dog walks. The poison ivy is everywhere this Spring. There are entire fields of the stuff. Luckily, Dot and Dash haven't walked through a big patch of poison ivy yet, but it will happen sooner or later. As soon as the oil from the plants gets on the dog's fur, I break out in a rash. I don't think there's been a single Summer in the last ten years when I didn't catch a case of poison ivy. You'd think I'd build up an immunity to the stuff after all this time, but I think the opposite has happened. It seems like I've actually become more sensitive to poison ivy lately.

It's finally become warm enough that I don't need to wear a coat to our Wednesday evening dog training class anymore. At first glance this is a good thing, but I no longer have a convenient pocket for the treats I take to reward Dash when he does something good. If I just put the treats in a pants pocket, Dash smells them and spends the entire evening trying to stick his nose in my pocket. I guess I could put the treats in a fanny pack, but I wouldn't be caught dead wearing a fanny pack. I'm certainly not at my sartorial best during dog class, but I do draw the line at fanny packs.

Pogo is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 860

I resumed moving things over to the new storage warehouse today. I finally managed to completely clear off one of the large shelves in the smaller storage unit and was preparing to move the shelf itself when I realized that it wouldn't fit through the door. How could I have forgotten that I had assembled each of these shelves in place to take maximum advantage of the space available? Damn! To get the shelves over to the new location, I will need to completely disassemble each of them and then put them all back together again in the new space. This is turning into a lot more work than I had anticipated. So far, I have only emptied out half the contents of the old space. The new larger space already seems full, since nothing is stacked on tall shelves yet. As I'm starting to rediscover what I've been storing all these years, I'm having second thoughts about the whole endevour. A lot of this stuff is worthless.

Sure, I've discovered some useful stuff. I've discovered some valuable stuff. I've even discovered some very rare stuff. The trouble is that the time for all this stuff has passed. What do you do with a 5 GB hard drive that's the size of a shoe box these days?  What do you do with an electric typewriter, or even worse, a manual one? If I hired somebody to inventory all this stuff and then systematically sell it on eBay it would cost me more than the stuff is worth. On the other hand, if I try to sort through everything myself, I probably won't live long enough to make sense of it all. I'm in over my head here.

When I wasn't lugging stuff from one storage unit to another, I was updating various animal rescue websites.The Dalmatian Rescue updates went quickly, but the other rescue group was another story entirely. I used to get new animals to list from these guys once a week. Now I get one big list once a month. There are so many animals that I typically can't get all the new pages coded before some of the animals get adopted and immediately have to come down again. It's a quixotic task. Nevertheless, I thought today would be a good day to get started, mostly because the rest of my clients are mired in status meetings on Monday's . Tomorrow, I probably won't have time to work on the rescue sites.

I told the real estate agent that I was ready to list the rent property, but evidently there's still a lot that needs to be done before the sign goes out front. When I bought the place, I just looked at it empty and decided I liked it. Today, properties need to be staged. This means that furniture and artwork is brought in to make the place looked lived in, even though it is empty. I can imagine what an empty place would look like with furniture, but apparently a lot of people can't. When the staging furniture is in place, a photographer comes out and takes pictures for the MLS website and the game begins. I told the agent that I was a professional photographer and was once an architect. He still preferred to use his own photographer. Whatever! I'm just going to go with the flow on this one.

Wyatt is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 804

So, I get this letter in the mail today from the Missouri Department of Revenue. It says I haven't paid my taxes for 2007 and 2008. What the Hell? I've never lived in the state of Missouri in my life. I always pay my taxes. I don't have any clients in Missouri either. I have no connection with Missouri whatsoever. Eventually, this will all get sorted out, but I don't look forward to the process. Every time I've had to deal with the government on any level, it has turned into a giant hassle. There is just no easy way to deal with a bureaucracy. My accountant will probably be happy enough if I can't get this mess sorted out at all. I'm confident that he can get to the bottom of things, but it will cost me. Jeez, I hate dealing with government officials. It doesn't matter whether you're trying to get your drivers license renewed or your property taxes reviewed, it's a big hassle.

Sometimes I think my clients have no idea what they're paying me for. I get calls all the time from clients asking me why their internet is slow, or what their e-mail password is. I don't know these things. I don't even want to know these things. Today, I spent quite a while on the phone trying to explain why I didn't have administrative access to a Facebook page I never created in the first place. Somehow these folks thought that because I was their webmaster, I also knew everything about their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Nope! The ironic thing is that the people who called me probably created the Facebook page themselves and just forgot their own user ID and password.

Where is the big job I've been waiting for? Every year there is usually one big job that pays for the whole year. In good years, there are two or three of these lucrative assignments. So far this year? Nada. Zip. Nothing. I'm certainly busy enough, but I feel like I'm being nibbled to death by ants.

I need to find something interesting to do on Mondays. On Tuesdays, I almost always take a dog to the vet. On Wednesdays there's dog training class. Not much on Thursdays, but Fridays have become more interesting just by the simple act of going out for breakfast. I need an equally simple diversion for Monday and Thursday. You may wonder why Saturday and Sunday aren't on my list. That's simple. Any day where I don't have to work is automatically interesting.

Princess is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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