Day 92 - St. Patrick's Day

It was definitely a green day. Sure, it's St. Patrick's Day, but I've been noticing something else as well. Spring has arrived. Little green buds are appearing on the oak trees in our backyard. The photinia bushes are starting to grow again. I even saw a daffodil. I like this time of year. It's not too hot and not too cold. I wish this mild weather would last longer in Texas, but I've learned to enjoy it while it's here. I really need to set aside some time to photograph the wildflowers when they come into bloom a few weeks from now. They ought to be spectacular this year after the exceptionally wet Winter we've had.

The dogs certainly enjoy this time of year. I try to keep them away from the nesting ducks, but there are plenty of other new smells and interesting critters to keep them occupied.  I think all the dogs at obedience class this evening knew that Spring was in the air. They just weren't that interested in the training exercises. Even some of the very best dogs were off their game tonight.

Suddenly after months of no activity at all, two people want to lease my rent property and another wants to buy it. I'm not sure what I want to do. I don't really enjoy being a landlord anymore, but it might be better to wait until property values improve a bit before selling the place. Probably anything is better than just letting the house sit vacant for another year though. I'm sure I'll find out what my leasing agent thinks about all this right around when I'm sitting down to enjoy my pancakes tomorrow morning.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 91

My financial adviser had some new ideas for me today. To tell you the truth, not a one of them made any sense. When I first started earning enough money to consider investing some of it, I was fairly confident that the money I put away would actually grow. Back then, you could buy a house with some degree of certainty that it would be worth more in five years than you paid for it. If you didn't trust the stock market, you could buy Treasury Bills that earned 11% a year. Even a plain vanilla Certificate of Deposit at your neighborhood bank offered 8% interest.  I used to buy stocks in solid companies and then forgot about them for years at a time, fully expecting both dividends and share prices to increase.

What a difference a financial crisis makes. Today, investing is a minefield. The minute you think bonds are a good bet, countries like Greece go bankrupt. Stocks can drop 10% in a single day on mere rumors. Municipal Bonds? Yeah right. The entire state of California is going under. My adviser likes the futures market. I just don't get it. Nobody really knows what the future is going to bring. When I graduated from college, I was convinced that people would be walking around on Mars by 2010. I never would have dreamed that almost everybody would have computers on their desks more powerful than the one Neil Armstrong took to the moon, but only use them to watch YouTube videos. Who could have predicted that shows like The Real Housewives of Orange County would become huge hits, or that there would be entire channels like HGTV, filled with nothing but shows about real estate.

The future is a mystery to me. That's probably a good thing too. Who really wants to know the future anyway? Especially if it might involve picking up aluminum cans on the side of the road to supplement your social security.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 90

For as long as I can remember, Dot has been trying to catch squirrels. She's only caught one during the past six years. I remember she was really proud of that squirrel and tried to bring the limp, dead thing inside with her. Being the rational human, I promptly took it away, put it in a bag and threw it in the garbage can behind the house. I feel a lot like Dot sometimes. I keep trying to do things that have a slim chance of success to begin with. On the rare occasion I do succeed, there will inevitably be a friend or customer standing in the wings, full of suggestions on how my creation can be "improved." Nobody will ever let me keep my squirrrel.

Today, I was putting the finishing touches on a poster that I thought came out exceptionally well. I was really pleased. As the proof was printing out on the Epson 4000, I checked my e-mail and what do you know...there was a message from my customer with a suggested headline for this poster. Was this headline the same as the one I saw on the large piece of paper coming out of the printer. Nope. Not a chance.

A friend told me recently that he thought the blog was too negative. Negative? Give me a break. This is a simple tale of a boy and his dogs. Sugar and spice and Dalmatians are nice. I think my message is full of hope, but who knows? Maybe my friends are right. They think I've become so negative that I'm not even aware of it anymore. Is the glass half empty or half full?  You'll have to decide that for yourselves.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 89

It was a beautiful Spring day. There was a time when a day like this would have been a good excuse for a picnic or an afternoon at a street fair. Not today. Instead of a picnic in the grass, I hauled a ton of dead leaves and brush out to the curb in anticipation of bulky trash day. I'm not even sure when they pick up brush in our neighborhood anymore, but for the past several days I've been seeing huge piles of everything from leaves and brush to old furniture and rusty water heaters accumulate in front of our neighbor's houses. I figure that bulky trash day has got to be soon. Dallas has cut back on city services so drastically lately that you really hate to miss bulky trash day. If I don't get all this crap out of the yard today, it will probably sit here until Summer.

Unleashed was almost empty this afternoon. It was such a nice day that everybody was probably outside with their dogs instead. I think Dot and Dash liked the quieter atmosphere in the park though. Dash was more playful than I'd seen him in a long time. After the dogs had their play time, we went to Terri Stone's new gallery opening. Janet and I have known Terri for years and it's amazing to see how she's developed as an artist. Her new show is fabulous! I have a few Terri Stone sculptures, but I can't really afford her work anymore. She gets big commissions now and I see her sculptures standing in front of public buildings when I drive around town.

It seemed like everybody in Dallas spent the afternoon at the lake behind our house. The place was a zoo. I think I like the lake a lot better on cold misty days when the dogs and I have the place to ourselves. I can almost guarantee that there will be trash everywhere when we go on our walk tomorrow morning. The city has nice looking trash containers all over the place, but nobody even bothers. They just dump their trash on the ground and leave.

Daylight savings time starts today. This means I won't have to worry about walking the dogs in the dark for another six months. It also means I'll have to re-set every one of my watches.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 88

My leasing agent called me yesterday and said that she thought she finally had a tenant for my rent house. This means I can't put off fixing the leaking toilet any longer, so I went down this afternoon to install a new fill valve. A minor repair like this should have been an easy ten minute job, but as usual, I forgot a few essential things. I should have remembered that I needed to replace all the rubber seals and gaskets along with the fill valve itself. Needless to say, the job took a little longer than I expected.

I got back the double-sided Xemex from my watchmaker today. I was totally amazed to see this thing again, since even the factory authorized service center in Ohio said it couldn't be fixed. David is an amazing watchmaker though. He hand-made a special part for me that is no longer available anywhere. The watch appears to run perfectly now. Oh, I forgot to mention...this amazing watchmaker is also the same guy who broke the watch in the first place. If there's a lesson to be learned here it is this: you should never yell and scream at people when things go wrong. Be patient, act nice, and things will eventually work themselves out. I try to remember this always, even though it is difficult when dealing with healthcare and insurance people.

Last week I felt like yelling at the iStockphoto people for rejecting some shots I happened to like a lot. Well, this morning I looked at those photos again with a more critical eye and you know something...the iStockphoto folks were right. The photos sucked. I never should have sent them in the first place.

Everyone seems to celebrate St. Patrick's Day today in Dallas, even though the actual holiday isn't until next Wednesday. I guess it's more fun to drink on a weekend. I didn't even have a beer today, which only proves one thing: having a lot of willpower and having a lot of fun are two different things entirely.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 87

I thought I'd go to Doctor's Hospital instead of Medical City to get my ultrasound test done today. Big mistake. They were so slow getting me checked in that I could have driven the extra distance and still been home an hour earlier if I went to Medical City instead. Appointment times seem to be meaningless to medical people. You can arrive early, late, or right on time and you're still going to sit in the waiting room for an hour.

The test itself was quick and painless. I asked the technician if my liver looked the same as all the other livers he'd looked at this week and he said it didn't look too bad. This wasn't exactly the answer I was looking for, so asked if he saw anything abnormal. "Well, I did see a little fat in the liver and the texture seemed a bit coarse to me," he answered in a matter of fact tone of voice. It sounded like he was describing a cut of meat in the Central Market meat department.

Maybe I should have been alarmed, but this just reminded me that I needed to pick up something for dinner at Central Market on the way home. I'm glad it's Friday. Even though I usually have the same amount of work to do on the weekends, it usually seems like a much more peaceful kind of work. The phone certainly doesn't ring as much anyway. I do miss having a Martini at the end of the day. It was a nice, relaxing way of saying that work was over for a while. Now that I've had to give up drinking, it seems like work is never over.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 86

I could sum up today's activities in a single sentence. Got up, worked at the computer all day, went to bed. I'm at one of those tedious points in a website where I have to write content for a lot of empty pages, resize pictures to fit the layout, create little animated sequences and then spell check and correct all the stuff I wrote in too much of a hurry. Every time I'm faced with filling a new site with content, I'll wish I'd made the whole thing smaller and less complicated. I guess it's worth the effort though. Lots of pages mean lots of chances for Google to find you.

I wish I could say I finished everything today, but realistically I'm facing four more days exactly like today. After I grew weary of working on website stuff, I ate a quick dinner and went to an animal rescue board meeting. The photo I initially wanted to use for marketing this year's Wine on the Roof fundraiser got voted down by the group and a different photo I'd taken the same evening was selected instead. The photo everyone liked best is cute, but there are several problems. Nobody seemed comfortable that a boy dog was wearing a girl's dress. "Can't you just take his wee wee off in Photoshop," said one of the ladies. Personally, I think it would be a lot easier just to tell folks the dog was a transvestite. People are so picky. Hey, it's a cute picture. That should be enough.

I've got to remember not to eat any breakfast tomorrow morning. I've got to go in for an ultrasound test and the doctor said I have to fast. I wonder why? I understand why you have to fast before you have blood work done, but this is a sonogram of my liver.  Oh well, I'll just eat breakfast when I get home.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 85

I got another new client today. This was different than most, because it wasn't a referral from an existing client. This time I was actually selected out of the blue by someone who happened to notice my website and liked the work I'd done. I don't know why I'm so surprised. After all, isn't this why I have a business website in the first place?  It is supposed to generate new leads and get me work.

I tend to forget I even have a business website though, since the only feedback I typically get from it are a lot of questions about dogs. People seldom write and tell me "Hey, I saw your work on the web today and I'd like to hire you." They're much more likely to ask me things like "My dog just ate a Brillo pad...what do I do now?" Maybe I need to do a better job of telling people that I'm a writer and photographer, because there are a lot of people out there who seem to think I"m a veterinarian.

I don't know what Dash thinks I am. He certainly doesn't think of me as any kind of authority figure. After four years of training, he still won't come when he's called with any reliability. Dash has stepped up to the plate since he graduated to the advanced class however. He seems to understand that more is expected of him now. Tonight at class, our trainer even came over and complemented Dash on his improved performance. Who knows? Maybe in two or three more years, he'll finally learn to heal properly.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 84

The lake behind my house must be the place to go for the local media on slow news days. Some of you may remember me telling you on Day 25 about getting interviewed by the Dallas Morning News while I was taking Dot and Dash for their morning walk. Well, today we got interviewed on our walk again. This time it was Channel 5, the local NBC affiliate. They were doing a feature story for the evening news about people dumping dogs at a nearby city off-leash park and wondered what I thought about the situation. As you might expect, I think it is terrible. There seems to be an epidemic of people abandoning dogs lately. The shelters are full. Animal rescue groups are overwhelmed with people wanting to surrender their dogs. I just don't get it. Sure, the economy is bad, but it doesn't mean you have to give up your dog. Cut back somewhere else folks. Your dog is a responsibility, just like your kids. It's not like an old sofa you can dump by the side of the road.


I watched the news while I was eating dinner this evening and sure enough, there we were. The dogs were as cute as they always are, but I looked a bit like a homeless person who was living under a bridge somewhere. I was wearing an old wool hat pulled down low over my head and I kept mumbling my answers so it was difficult to understand what I was saying. Oh well. What do you expect before breakfast?

iStockphoto has started accepting my photos in their collection. I need to send them at least 250 photos before I can apply to become an exclusive contributer. So far, I've only found the time to send a total of three images. This is going to take a while.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 83

Keeping a daily journal can teach you a lot about the ebb and flow of life. You learn quickly that not every day is eventful. Joy and insight do not come as frequently as you'd like and never when you'd expect. When something eventful does happen, it lingers in your memory for weeks. A few small triumphs can influence your entire month. When you start writing down everything you do, you begin to realize that in between these shining moments is a lot of repetition. You make the bed every morning. You wash the dishes. You put gas in the car. You pay the utility bills. You code some HTML. Over and over and over again.

All this repetition isn't necessarily bad. It doesn't make gripping reading though. Maybe that's the challenge we all face. How do you turn the repetitive necessities of life into something worth writing about? Although I make the bed each morning with military precision, you won't hear me write much about it. As repetitive events go, I'd much rather tell you about walking the dogs.

I like walking. It's slow and provides plenty of time for observation. I daydream a lot and have gotten some of my best ideas while walking the dogs. I don't take a cell phone with me on walks. I just watch what's going on all around me. I've seen a large owl swoop down and grab a surprised mouse right in front of me. I've seen a water snake eating a fish that was three times its size. I've seen intricate spiderwebs shaped like far away galaxies. After a while you begin to realize that life is so complex that it can't possibly be boring.

There are days when I still miss the expense account lunches and frequent business trips. It all seemed pretty glamorous at the time, but I never actually accomplished much. Maybe I came up with a few good headlines back in the ad agency days, but I never would have made a good web designer. I didn't have the discipline. It took discipline, solitude and a reluctant appreciation for repetition to turn me into a web designer. These days, I don't think you could pay me enough to return to the ad agency world. I've got two great dogs sitting under my desk, a beautiful lake to explore behind the house and the entire world just a few keystrokes away on my computer.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 82

I got lucky today. When I went up to the K-9 University kennels this morning, the rain stopped just long enough for me to get all the dogs walked. Five minutes after I was finished, it started pouring again and continued raining the rest of the day.

Lately, just about every day contains a little life lesson. For weeks now, when I get in the car, I look at the tires and think to myself “hmm, that sure looks a little low.” I never bothered to actually check the air in the tires however, because when I get in the car, I’m almost always late to where I’m going and gas stations don’t seem to have those hoses to pump up your tires anymore anyway. Well, today I thought that if I waited a bit to give Dash his bath the rain might stop, and while I waited, I might have time to rummage around in the garage and find the air compressor I knew was hiding under a pile of paint cans somewhere. I eventually find the compressor and what do you know…I don’t even have 20 pounds of pressure in my tires. I pumped them up properly and thought about all the other little tasks I’ve been mentally putting off just like the tires. Wouldn’t it be easier if I just did these things when I first though of them instead of wishing they would go away? Probably so.

So, instead of watching the Oscars tonight, I start designing the poster for the Easter Pet Picture event that’s coming up in just a few weeks. Yeah, I know I should have done this last week, but I was doing a lot of other things last week. It’s a good thing I got started tonight too, because I discovered that my big large-format printer is acting up again. The poster looks nice though. Now, I’ve just got to get the printer to print the same colors I see on the screen.

The Oscars run so long that they’re still on TV when I finish working on the poster. I watch for a while and realize that I haven’t seen any of the movies that were nominated this year. I haven’t seen Avatar. I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker. I haven’t seen anything. Sad. I love movies too.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 81

I'm a incorrigible packrat. It's hard for me to throw away clothing that I don't wear anymore. If I buy a leather coat, I'll keep it forever. It's almost impossible for me to throw away equipment that has become obsolete. I get fond of things. Especially stuff that I already know how to use. As a result, the house is starting to look like a it has been hit by a tornado. This year has been especially busy and there is camera equipment, dog beds, leftover stuff from animal rescue events and piles of paperwork everywhere.

I spent most of the morning trying to stuff tripods and light stands under the bed, putting winter coats back in the closet and trying to figure out whether the stacks of paper accumulating all over the office were junk mail or tax records. When I was younger, my house had an understated, zen like character. Now, it's just as messy and cluttered as my parent's house used to be. Try as I may, I just don't think I'm ever going to get the place looking like it belongs in Architectural Digest. There's always something more important to do.

Today's essential task was picking up the stray Dalmatian from Animal Control before his time was up. Some of these abandoned strays get put down in as little as three days after they arrive at the pound if a rescue group won't step forward and take them. This pup is going to get a second chance though. I did end up naming him "Smoky." He is a young, heavily spotted male who currently has heartworm and is very underweight. He'll be fine after we get him treated.  It's amazing what a difference proper medical care and a good diet can make in just a few months. After he gets a little healthier, you'll probably see Smoky here on the blog.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 80

Today, one of my customers wanted me to take a photo of all 50 of his employees standing in front of their building. I'm glad I took lots and lots of images, because in just about every photo, at least one person had their eyes closed, was looking down at the ground, or in a few cases, was facing in entirely the wrong direction. This photo shoot reminded me of last night when I was having trouble getting three dogs and a cat facing in the same direction. You'd think it would be easier with people, but not always.

I'm relieved that it's finally Friday. This week seemed like it would never end. I didn't even come close to getting caught up on everything and somehow ended up with more on my "to do" list at the end of the week than I started out with on Monday. It's good to be busy though. When I'm busy, I'm forced out of sheer necessity to think of ways to do things faster and better. When I'm not busy I tend to procrastinate and can make even the simplest task last all day.

Tomorrow morning I'm going down to the Westmoreland Animal Shelter to pick up a stray Dalmatian. I'm still trying to think of a name for the dog. It's kind of a tradition with Dalmatian Rescue that the person who picks up the dog from the pound gets to name it. Maybe Smoky would be a good name. This dog is a young male who has a lot more dark spots than most Dalmatians. I've named so many strays by now that it's getting harder and hard to think of a name I haven't already used.

The weather was beautiful today. It was almost 70 degrees later in the afternoon. Now that things are drying out again, I might finally get a chance to patch that troublesome leak on the roof.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 79

Finally! I got a letter from iStockphoto today telling me my latest batch of photos had met their technical and commercial standards and that I was welcome to join their stock photo agency. It was kind of embarrassing that it took me so long to get accepted. I kept sending them photos that I had "improved" in Photoshop. They kept sending them back, telling me that they only accepted original, unprocessed images. I should have realized several months ago that stock photos aren't the same as the photos I do for gallery shows. I think I've got the concept now, so maybe I can make a little extra income selling some of the thousands of images I have filed away.

I added a few hundred more images to this growing collection of photos today when I shot the advertising and promotional photos for this year's Wine on the Roof charity event. Everyone loved the poster I did for last years event, so of course they expect me to do something even better for 2010. This is still a work in progress, but it does involve dogs and cats wearing costumes and behaving well together. It would be a total disaster if I let my two dogs get anywhere near a cat, but the dogs we used for the photo shoot this evening were actually pretty friendly with their feline counterparts. I think I actually managed to get some pretty decent shots. Taking pictures of animals isn't easy. I think I have a short attention span, but I have the patience of Job compared to a dog in a costume.

I thought I was going to miss Project Runway tonight because it took me so long to get all the lights and equipment packed up after the photo shoot. Got everything put away in the nick of time however and watched the contestants try to make fashionable clothing out of stuff they found in a hardware store. The winning outfit was amazing. You'd never believe it was made out of trash bags.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 78

We've started watching Shear Genius after we get home from obedience class with the dogs. It's not as good as Project Runway, but it's the same general idea. You give people a short amount of time do do something creative and then see if they screw up. Some of tonight's haircuts were pretty bad and it reminded me that my own hair was starting to look pretty ratty as well. It's probably time for me make an appointment with Betty at Toni & Guy and get my hair cut.

I've been all the way from one end of the haircut spectrum to the other. My hair was as long as Shaun White's in college. When I was young, I used to wear a mustache to make me look older. When I got older, I shaved it off, realizing that it actually did make me look older. For quite a while I wore a mullet, completely oblivious to the fact that this was the official hairstyle of rednecks and trailer trash worldwide. These days, I usually wear my hair pretty short. My sense of fashion must have been influenced by Steve Jobs, because I wear black t-shirts a lot too.

I don't know why men's haircuts have gotten so expensive. I never know which is going to cost more: taking my car to the Land Rover dealer for an oil change or getting my hair cut at Toni & Guy. At any rate, I don't think a haircut or an oil change should end up costing me $90. Maybe it's time to start going to a barbershop instead. Nobody would probably ever know the difference.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 77

What a weird day. I woke up this morning, turned on the television and discovered that Terilli's had burned down early this morning. Jeanie Terilli is a neighbor and I know how many years she spent making sure the restaurant had one of the best reputations in Dallas. It's sad to see how quickly someone's dreams can literally go up in smoke.

I was getting ready for breakfast when I remembered that I couldn't eat breakfast today because of the blood tests I had scheduled in the afternoon. Damn. I hate to miss breakfast. It's my favorite meal and often the best part of my day. There are a lot of liabilities to being your own boss, but one of the perks is being able to eat a big, hearty breakfast while everyone else is fighting traffic on Central Expressway.

My regular doctor wanted to go over the results of the Endoscopy I had in late January. He wants me to give up drinking entirely. I certainly don't drink that much, but I do enjoy a glass of wine or two with dinner and the occasional Martini or Scotch. Giving up alcohol entirely is going to be even harder for me than the day I had to give up eating bacon. Life is stressful these days and a glass of wine can be very relaxing.

So, what's so terrible about a glass of good wine with dinner? Ordinarily, nothing at all. I have Hepatitis C however, and both my regular doctor and my hepatologist tell me that some people have no tolerance for alcohol whatsoever if they also have the virus. Just my luck. I was really hoping to avoid the peginterferon and ribavirin combo because of the bad side effects. My first hepatologist told me that my viral load was increasing so slowly that I would most likely outlive any damage to my liver from the disease. Now, I'm not so sure. Even though I drink in moderation, I apparently have the esophagus of an alcoholic. That's what all the blood tests were about today. They want to see which is worse: the disease or the cure.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 76

Another cold, wet day. I went down to take the new employee pictures I had scheduled for today, but nobody wanted their picture taken. I couldn't blame them. The weather was horrible. Lots of people had wet hair, soggy clothes, or both. I managed to get a few good "people at work" shots in the exam rooms, but I'll just have to come back on a nicer day for the rest.

I hope the weather clears up later in the week, because I have two more photo shoots scheduled. This is the worst Winter I can remember. There hasn't been much snow, but it's certainly been cold and the rain has been relentless. They say all the wet weather we've been having will make the wildflowers exceptionally nice when they start to bloom toward the end of the month. I'm sure this is true, but it's hard to believe that anything is going to bloom now.

Rainy days are always a good time to discover new things on the Internet, so I guess it's as good a time as any to admit I'm becoming hooked on Entrecard. I know the Technorati crowd thinks Entrecard is just for beginning bloggers and Mommy Blogs, but I think it's fun. I'm not much of a gamer and virtual worlds like Second Life were never that enjoyable to me. Entrecard does function a bit like a virtual world, but one that is more familiar to me: the world of business. Dropping on people's Entrecard widget is like the new business calls we all make. If you keep calling, eventually someone notices. Dropping is a bit mindless, but it reminds me of the persistence that it takes to make any business a success. If you want something more imaginative, you can always try the Entrecard Marketplace. I even signed up for the New Marketplace that is supposed to be modeled after Craigslist. We'll see how this goes. Virtual business ideas, just like the real variety, don't always work.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 75

A reader asked recently why I collected watches. It's pretty simple actually. Probably pretty simple-minded as well. I went through a period where I was depressed. I hated getting up in the morning. When I did get up, all I would think about was how long it was till I could go back to sleep again. I started looking at clocks and watches a lot to see how much time I had left. Then I started buying them. After I bought two or three watches, I realized that they were quite intricate and beautiful little objects. I've always liked pretty things and when I would see a watch that looked even nicer than the one I had on my wrist, I would buy it too.

It didn't take long before I had more watches than I knew what to do with. Some of the watches quit working and batteries went dead on others. I realized I couldn't even begin to afford to keep all these things running, so I began to buy books about repairing watches. I learned how to change batteries and make simple repairs. Then I started buying more complex watchmaking tools. Within two years, I knew a lot about watches. I started repairing watches for friends. I had totally forgotten the depression that caused me to buy my first watch, but the depression had been replaced by something even worse: an obsession with watches.

Tomorrow is March 1st. At the height of my obsession, I would spend hours moving the date on every single watch from 28 past 29, 30 and 31, so it was back at 1 again. It was ridiculous.  I don't even bother to wind or set the watches anymore. The only time I need to remember tomorrow is 2 PM. That's when I need to be at one of my client's offices to take new employee pictures for their website. Like most of the obsessions I've had in my life, my obsession with watches simply collapsed of its own weight.

I certainly didn't need a watch to tell me what I needed to do today. Sunday's are always the same. It's all dogs, all the time on Sundays. We walked the rescue dogs up at K-9 University and I took new pictures of Kobe and LeBron in their winter sweaters. Next, Dash got his medicated bath over at Vhea's Laundromutt. We took Dot and Dash down to Unleashed to play, and after dinner they got their usual evening walk in the park. This was the entire day. I wonder if this is what it's like to be a soccer mom?

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 74

Back when I was an ad agency copywriter, I always used to keep a daily journal. I don't think I ever recorded any profound insights in these journals, but I did make daily entries for many years. Personally, I liked carrying around the little leather-bound diaries a lot more more than I liked writing in them. It looked very businesslike. Some people thought I kept a daily schedule planner in the book. Others thought that I used it for taking notes in meetings. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The journal was just an excuse to postpone working for a while, just like this blog.

Recently, I thought it might be fun to go back to these old journals and scan a page from the same day as my blog entry, but maybe fifteen years earlier. I thought that if I put the scanned page side-by-side with my current blog entry, it would show how I had matured...how I had slowly and surely achieved my dreams. Then, I went and read some of the old journals again. Oops. The old journals seemed exactly the same as what I am writing now. The only difference was that they were written with a ball point pen in a little leather book. So much for maturity. It doesn't appear that I have grown or gained any insight at all after all these years.

I ordered a colorful new muslin backdrop for the Unleashed Easter pet picture event today. Janet found some great looking over-sized Easter eggs we can use as props too. With any luck, the Easter set is going to look even better than the set we put together for Valentine's Day. I think Dalmatian Rescue is right on the verge of turning pet photography in to a major fundraiser. The golf tournament and casino parties are still essential too, but it's nice to know that there is something I know how to do well that can actually help the dogs.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 73

The Internet continues to amuse me. This morning I was looking at one of those website analysis sites that seem to be proliferating recently. When I did a search on my own website, it told me that the content was written for a "graduate" level reader. When I did the same sort of search on this blog, it said I was writing for teenagers. Could I have regressed from producing erudite prose to writing twaddle in fifteen short years? Sadly, it's probably all true. Too bad it was my mind that has gone downhill. If only my body had regressed to being a teenager instead.

People are paying me now to write comments on their blogs. Oddly, this doesn't even seem strange to me. In a world where our president reads from a teleprompter and "reality shows" aren't even remotely like real life, why would blog comments be spontaneous and genuine? It's actually kind of fun to comment on things you wouldn't normally even think about. A bit like doing those Sudoku puzzles. It's good for the brain.

I've been thinking more about healthcare lately, but that hasn't been so good for the brain. It's depressing! You really can't escape thinking about healthcare these days. Turn on the television and nine times out of ten, you're going to be listening to someone talking about the healthcare crisis. Health insurance seems to be the largest single expense for people I know who own a small business like I do. Even in an industry like mine, where equipment costs are high, health insurance costs trump everything else. The sad thing is that even if the folks in Washington pass some sort of healthcare legislation, it won't help people like me who already have insurance but still struggle to pay for it. It will just help people who had nothing to start with. I'm sure when all is said and done, I'll end up paying even more than I am now. Like Kris Kristofferson  told us all a long time ago  - "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

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