I Think

The huge bone I gave Rocky apparently got buried. He won't have another.

The spam on a2k seems to be much heavier than normal. Maybe it's just my perception.

I put off construction of my ramp, for lack of material, after building the higher platform. It will reverse direction, after twenty feet. I now have what I need for that platform. It should touch the ground after a total run of thirty feet.

...and win! "Just WIN, Baby!"

What about using one of those 3-D printers?

3D printers need raw material, don't they?

It has rained all night, with 100% to come, all day long. I can't complain. We have needed this for weeks. Frogs strangled are frogs thrown under the wheels of our bus of good fortune.

Yes, it has to 'ramp up' with something in the tank.

I thought it might be like an old Sunset Carson movie, where his gun never runs out of bullets.

Looks like I will be working every day for about a week. The lead man is on dr. restriction. Monday, I had an A/C that at first stumped me. It was getting electricity throughout the system, but the condenser would not run. After checking all the parts more than a few times, I realized I was bypassing one of the most important steps. I checked the breaker. It was halfway tripped. So I reset it, figuring I could tell the lead man to watch it and be prepared to replace a weak breaker. In the meantime, the A/C works great. It may seem far fetched to some people, but a fair percentage of our functioning A/Cs were installed in 1983. The only thing, the evaporator coils have been replaced.

I hope the uprising over the potential loss of net neutrality has its effect. As long as the decision makers remain the same, I expect them to keep cooking up schemes, until something slips by, to get a foot in the door.

This is what I see when I look up, while standing in the back yard.

I worked four days this week. I could still handle five a week, if they reinstated my time. Yesterday, I ran borders around flower beds and went and brought back over 60 squares of sod (grass) and distributed them. Turned out, I should have bought about 30 more.

I'm having too much fun, working on the new manuscript. I have never been able to turn out hundreds or thousands of words of usable prose at a sitting, but things are much improved. I do a few paragraphs at a time, numerous times a day, and they are adding up.

The last rain filled up Lake Conroe. It had been low for a few years. I'm a bit less worried about drought now than I was even a week ago.

Rocky cut himself on the fence, where I had worked on it to keep Punky from tearing a hole in it. It was not a deep cut and the stuff I put on it seems to be healing it nicely. I redid the fence. I've been learning that what worked for Punky does not always work with him.

Well, let me see - The Mentalist was renewed for season 7. A surprise to me. I figured since he killed Red John, had a plush new job and had a shot at becoming a couple with his partner, the series had run its course. I don't know how they can move the sub plots along much further.

Jane is certainly no law man, in the traditional sense. Last episode I watched, he drugged a man and then made him think he was going to cut out his vital organs, without anesthetics, even, until the man gave up certain information. He and his partner put their word against his, insisting the incident never happened.

How soon the June
Wowsers. Nearing the middle of the year, already. Have you begun Christmas shopping, yet?

I have lots of trimmed tree limbs in the yard. I don't believe in burning or sending such to the landfill. Mostly, I shuffle them around, until they finally rot back into the soil. It is an inconvenient solution, but I don't have the resources to seek one better.

The weekend will be six days long, this time, what with the holiday coming on. No excuse will do to leave the yard in a mess and take care of a few honey-dos around the house. Except that, maybe I don't feel like it. When you are young, you are lazy and irresponsible to have such an attitude. Now that I am old and getting more worn out by the day, I don't need any other reasons for how I feel. Life is good.

Rocky has some peculiar attitudes. Never had a dog like him. When I turn the air condition on or off, he spins in circles, acting pretty ferocious. Then he runs to the air vents to verify they changed from or to blowing air. He is the same way about the dish washer, hair dryer and other mechanical things. But at least I have broken him from going after the lawnmower.

When we were at the SPCA looking at dogs, all of the ones we saw were standing calmly or lying down. Except one. Rocky was bouncing all over the cage. As we neared the cage, his energy level seemed to increase. He was the only one that reached out to me. I don't regret that we chose him. I do wish he had a young person to spend time with. I am not always up to the task.

I spent the last two days being physically lazy. I need to get out and do some work today. That's the ticket. Later, maybe. We shall see.

This song is stuck in my head this morning - sung by Joan Baez on the Baptism album.

Hush-a-bye, don't you cry
Go to sleep ye little baby
When you wake, you shall have
All the pretty little horses

Way down yonder in the meadow
Lies a poor little lamb ye
Bees and butterflies pickin' out its eyes
Poor little thing's cryin' mammy

Hush-a-bye, don't you cry
Go to sleep ye little baby

Songwriters
SCHICKELE, PETER

I've got screws drilled in my jaw bone
To hold in these pearly whites
I've got lipo sucking all of my fat gone
I've got pills to get me through most nights

I've got hear aids stuck in my ear holes
To hear your lovely voice
I've got glasses covering my eyeballs
I've got salve to sooth my itching roids

When I leave this lovely planet
Going to leave a pile of trash
When I leave going to plan it
To will you this instead of dirty cash

I was awakened by intense itching of my fingers, on one hand. I was not ready yet to wake up, but I scratched and itched, until there was no other choice. It was a new outbreak of poison ivy and my fingernails had added pain to the itch. Normally, I treat this stuff with undiluted H3O. But, all I had this morning was about half a gallon of it, diluted one ounce to one gallon water ratio. So, I wet the fingers with DMSO, to open up the pores, let that dry off a bit, and then put some of the H3O dilute into a cup. Then I soaked the fingers for about fifteen minutes. After I finished, there was no more itch. Just a slight discomfort from where I had scratched the flesh, repeatedly, with my nails. I plan to repeat the procedure a bit later in the day.

I know a little bit about nutty dogs, both our dogs bark the entire time I take the ironing board off the hooks. The barking doesn't stop until the board is opened up and standing up. They also bark if I stand on a chair to grab something out of reach. Use a ladder to replace a flood light, the barking continues until the ladder is returned to the garage. One dog flings herself in the air when I pick up her food dish and doesn't stop until it is returned to its rightful place, but the other dog barks with increasing urgency while this is going on. It's worse lately, because the 6 year old is on a special diet intended to help her damaged liver, so the barking from her starts as soon as I pull the can opener out of the drawer until her food is delivered to her feeding spot.

When they jump, they can fling themselves up and look you in the eye. I'm 5' 6" and I have had my nose licked while standing up in the middle of the family room. I know these dogs are not for everybody, the shenanigans don't always seem charming to others, but we are constantly amused by the things they do. Well, most of the time. Mr. GB was really ticked when Sofie snatched a steak off a plate right before he planned to grill them. Then there was the time we ordered sandwiches from a local Roly Poly and when I brought them home, I had to call and reorder my Cuban. The owners wife said wow, you must have really liked your sandwich. She thought it was funny that the dog had stolen my sandwich, and it disappeared so fast, damn, I hate to make return trips.