Day 1171

I kept myself busy writing for most of the day. Writing would be a very pleasant occupation if there were more money in it. Writing used to be a lot more lucrative for me. Truthfully, nobody ever paid all that much for the writing itself, but there was usually travel involved, plus lots of needless meetings that could be billed out as well. That all changed after the dot.com crash. Most of the self-important middle managers who scheduled all the needless meetings got fired and all that was left were the words on the page. That's the way it remains today. Microsoft Word files travel back and forth electronically and eventually a check arrives in the mail.

Although most of the glamor is gone, writing is still a very pleasant way to spend the day. It certainly beats dressing up in a suit and making Powerpoint presentations to an audience of vultures eager to steal anything that resembles an idea, so they can claim it as their own.

As I was eating breakfast this morning, I watched the pope fly away in a helicopter to begin a monastic life of quiet contemplation. I wouldn't mind living a life of quiet contemplation. Especially if I were living in a beautiful castle overlooking the sea, surrounded by carefully manicured formal gardens, and waited on by two full time secretaries and four domestic servants. Not a bad life at all.

The pope probably doesn't have Dalmatians though. Dalmatians have a certain beauty all their own.  I amused myself today watching Dot and Dash try to find the possum they saw in the yard last night. The possum was long gone the minute the dogs started barking at it, but that didn't deter them one bit. When they weren't possum hunting, they occupied themselves lounging on the new velour blankets Janet got them this week. They both love soft things. I guess it makes sense, since they have a pretty soft life.

One of my favorite breakfast restaurants closed its doors for the last time this week. It was sad to see the place go out of business. I knew the owner and she had poured her life into building a great little neighborhood eatery. The food was fantastic, but I guess there just weren't enough customers to make a go of things. The restaurant business is hard. It's probably even harder than writing for a living.

No wildflower pictures today. Just houseplants. I've always been fond of orchids.

Connor is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 513

I spent most of the day writing html code. Now that I've spent the past several months doing a variety of different things back-to-back, I realize that I don't really like writing html code. I'd really prefer to spend my time video editing and writing. Writing and video editing generally seem to pay better than designing web sites too. All this makes me wonder why I'm still spending so much of my time designing and maintaining web sites. Probably because people are still asking me to build them. Today's coding isn't going to make me rich, but I did make good progress finishing what I've started. If I keep on working this evening, I may even have something to present tomorrow.

I just noticed that blogger.com, where this blog is hosted, has been down most of the day. What's up with that? I've seen service disruptions of an hour or so from time-to-time, but never anything this long. Blogger has been down over 24 hours. I've never missed a daily post in the entire history of this blog, but this may be out of my control. I guess the only thing I can do is write today's post in a word processor and then hope that blogger comes online again before midnight. I don't know why all this bothers me, but it does. Surely a big company like Google must have a backup plan. At least they could do things like the power companies do when they have a rolling power outage. Instead of shutting the entire domain down and taking hundreds of thousands of blogs down with them, couldn't they just take a couple of hundred down at a time while they isolate the problem? I bet there are a lot of frustrated people right now.

There's plenty of other stuff for me to do however. Maybe blogger will be back up again after I take the trash out to the street. Maybe it will be up again after I vacuum the carpets. Maybe it will be up after I balance my checkbook. I'm not going to lose any sleep over this though. It's out of my control. I learned a long time ago not to worry about things that were out of my control. Oh well, if Blogger is still down at midnight, I'll just backdate today's post when it eventually comes back online.

The park looks exceptionally green and beautiful right now. It's the perfect time to take Spring wildflower pictures. Maybe I'll do this tomorrow if I get my new website finished in time. Last year the wildflowers looked kind of spotty, but we've had lots of rain lately and they look fabulous this year. All I need is a cloudy bright day without much wind. Wait a minute….today was a cloudy bright day without much wind. Why didn't I do all this stuff today?

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day