Tag: pets

I Wrote a Post Yesterday

November 6, 2020 2 of 8

It was mostly about how tired I was.

I worked until 6 yesterday and then got Mila and went to a hotel preparatory to her spay today. I mean, 6:00. That’s still early, right?

Yeah. That’s what I thought. Until yesterday.

I got off work, then grabbed a bag of dog food (spoiler: I didn’t need a bag of dog food) and then met Evelyn at my house.

The vet told me to start fasting her at 8:00 pm and so we had to hurry to get checked in at the hotel we were staying at (so that the dog wouldn’t bother my dad — also it’s been over two years since the last time I stayed in a hotel and I miss it). Then, after all that, Mila wouldn’t eat. I ate dinner while Mila ignored her food. I brought some pasta salad in a disposable container and a fork and I remembered after we left that I put the empty container and the fork in the fridge. I guess I should’ve put it in the car when we took the food down.

I left the food out until 8 and then we went downstairs, I put the food in my car, and we went to the park.

The park was mostly deserted, which freaked me out a bit, so we did one quick turn around the park and went back to the hotel. At the hotel, we explored the floor a while and then returned to our room, where we stayed until time to leave for the vet appointment.

Mila stared out the window pretty much all night, which led me to not get a lot of sleep, either. Overall, she did really well for her first time in a hotel. Clearly she was out of her element, but she didn’t bark at every noise or anything, which I was afraid would happen. If she does become my travel buddy (which is my hope), she’ll do really well, I think.

As for why I ended up redoing last night’s post, well, I composed it on my circa 2012 tablet computer (it might have even been 2011 — I just remember that I had it in Hawaii) in Polaris Office. Apparently, Polaris Office didn’t (maybe still doesn’t) support ctrl+s to save a document. I wrote the first couple of paragraphs, used file->save as to create the document, then pressed ctrl+s to save the document every paragraph. Then, when I came back to pull it up and post it today, it was only the first couple of paragraphs.

I’d given myself 131 words towards NaNoWriMo for the day for that post, which made my projected finish date move to mid-December, and then I lost them. I think I’m okay, though, because the count for NaNoWriMo is cumulative, so the algorithm has probably taken 131 words out of the post I made earlier today (while Mila was at the vet’s) and so everything’s good. I’ll aim for 50,131 anyhow, just in case.

Now, for my Gratuitous Amazon Link (and I still have trouble typing “gratuitous”). I noticed that a lot of the Ms. Marvel comics compilations I have in my Goodreads queue have no read dates. So I’ve been rereading the Ms. Marvel compilations and adding read dates to them. Today, I read the first of the ones without dates — Crushed, by G. Willow Wilson, Mark Waid, Takeshi Miayazawa, Elmo Bondoc, etc. This starts out as the Valentine’s Day issue and goes forward from there.

Home from My Errands

November 2, 2020 4 of 8

I went to the seamstress’s shop and dropped off my purse. I’m getting a new lining with the internal pocket and everything for a very good price. I hope her work is as good as it looks like because I will promote her services to all and sundry if it is.

Then I went for a walk and played Pokemon Go for a couple of hours. I also started a new (slightly imperfectly implemented) project. As I think I mentioned earlier, when Evelyn and I went walking with the dogs this summer, it was hot. Like hot-hot. Like “surface of the sun” hot. And the dogs weren’t fans.

So we’ve been looking for the most shady paths to take. It’s all pretty subjective, though. I mean, “Hey, that place we went walking last week was pretty shady.” So we go there and it takes X amount of walking in the sunshine to *get* to the shady place.

After I dropped off my purse, I hit the Leon Creek Greenway. While I was walking, I took a picture every 10-ish minutes (I missed one and took it three minutes late, so the picture before that was 13 minutes before and the next one was 6 minutes after). I stopped right after my sixth picture and the next time I have time to walk on the greenway (mid-November, probably), I’ll start from where I took that picture and then take pictures every 10 minutes.

This was the most shade I photographed on this outing. We’ll see what happens in future trips.

Then I’ll do the same thing on the Salado Creek Greenway and make movies of each greenway and see which areas of each seem to have more shade and next summer (if there is a next summer), Evelyn and I will take the dogs here.

Now, as I said, this is imperfectly implemented. Ideally, I’d take these pictures from, like 11 am to 1 pm or something, but I enjoy having a job. I don’t have the time to visit the greenway every day during that two hours in order to get a perfect view.

So, the shadows will be longer in some pictures and shorter in others. Maybe if my dad wins the lottery, I can buy a drone and zip the drone down a greenway at noon on a weekday during the summer when there aren’t many people on it and get one perfect shot of exactly what the shade on the greenways look like at noon.

But for now, as long as I’m doing this with shoe leather and a cell phone camera, we’ll get what we get.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link this time, we have The Authenticity Project, by Claire Pooley. Julian Jessop, a fairly well-known artist, decides that most of our problems stem from an inability to be honest about our true selves. So he writes his truth in a notebook and leaves it in a coffee shop, inviting the person who finds it to do the same and leave it somewhere else. In the course of the book, six people find the book, and then they find each other and their lives become more intertwined. I really enjoyed this one and hope that by putting this here, someone else will also find it and enjoy it like I did. This is the Kindle edition.