Every day's a holiday

Dana had a rheumatoid DR visit today so I had no pickleball.  I'm OK with it.  I'm scheduled for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday so is enough.  

Beaux got me up (he does not have to do much more than get down to the floor and I hear his collor) around midnight.  He sometimes has stomach problems and wants to eat some grass as a midnight snack so we've done it before.  I let him out without thinking much about it and he was off like a greyhound at the races and Toby who perked up was out flying after him.  Beaux can really move when he's hunting.  It is the dachshund in him.  The good news is that he was vermin hunting.  The bad news was the vermin was a skunk.  I saw a flash of moving black under the chicken coup and realized what it was.  I called for both dogs to come back and Toby was smart enough to do it.

Beaux got a face full of skunk and I did not handle the outcome well.  At all. 

What you are supposed to do is keep the dog outside unless/until they are at least partially cleaned up.  We did not have any skunk degreaser (entirely my fault since we've had skunks in our back yard before and I should have been prepared) so I brought him inside to take him to the shower.  His interest was getting the crap off is face ASAP so he was wiping his muzzle all over the floor in the living room.  In the bedroom.  In his dog bed.  Pretty much anywhere he could get a good wiping surface. 

Results:
1 - The house will smell like skunk likely for a month or two.
2 - Chewy is shipping me dog skunk shampoo and dog skunk floor and furniture cleaner.
3 - Having written the above I realized that Chewy was going to take too long so I bought some from Amazon and it is coming today.
4 - I was up most of the night after the adrenaline dump and the nasty smell (which Dana does not seem to even notice) and I'm exhausted.
5 - We will have a skunk kit by the back door for future encounters.  

So, just as good there was no PB today.  It would not have been smart of me to push through. 

Nothing else to do today.  I'm about ready for a serious nap and then to figure out what to have for dinner.  We have, for the moment, stopped all the food service companies.  They all have one kind of issue or another.  I really hate figure out what to make for dinner and then having to go to the store.  Basic, every day kind of stuff.  Don't like it.  But for various reasons I've burned out on the food services we've been using.  So for now I'm stuck.

Sad, sad life around here in the first world.

My team won in their first Premier League outing this season after having been promoted last year. And my first Premier match.

The level of play was about the same as I expect with MLS tonight when Austin meets Philadelphia.

It is really a luxury to have a morning game and one at night.

The universe is clearly screwing with me.  I lost another pound since yesterday.  I'm a little over one pound below my plateau.  It doesn't change anything but I do think it is funny.  Maybe I feel a little more hungry than I have been.  It is so difficult to tell whether the fading of GLP1 in my system is making a difference in my level of hunger.  I maxed out on my calories last night ending up at 91% of my available calories and 105% of my allowable fat.  We had pizza and that pushed the fat envelope. 

But I ended the day not ravenous so no matter.  I can eat 100% every day.  

Being able to track and being used to tracking food so easily I think will make a difference.  It helps a lot.

I've had my morning protein drink (it is chocolate Whey powder and I do love chocolate in the morning) and my morning psyllium orange drink.  And coffee.  And a small bag of trail mix.

I went to the shelter and gently ran a meeting to get their processes going so that they can streamline their intakes and get them running without depending on working at home.  Right now the staff of two works all day and then takes home a bunch of data to enter.  They've spent so much time doing that they haven't spent any time planning and they are killing themselves and limiting their potential.  I volunteered to set up a Google drive and a process for them to scan in the source data so that volunteers can grab work from a directory and enter it during the day.  Process over people.  Fingers crossed.

So I should be hungry.  My brain has been working.

But I'm going to do my workout first.  I've got about 20 mins of core exercises to do and then a proper meal, I think.  It will work as late breakfast and as lunch.

Yesterday I ended up doing a three or so hour project for the dog shelter.  They had an issue with registering dog tracking chips that had been going on without their knowledge since January.  They had about 140 chips that needed to be registered with the chip tracker people.  Someone had figured out how to drop a list that had the dog/cat name and the chip number.  So the job was to cross ref that data, get the owner info, and enter it into the online site so that it was connected.  Fortunately they only needed owner name and email.  It was a research, cut and paste, enter and cut and paste kind of job.  

I decided to ping a volunteer that had recently been helping (a retired high school science teacher) to see is she wanted to divide up the work.  She was willing so I collected the data from one database and entered it into a spreadsheet.  She took that data and entered it into the chip tracking database online.  

She is so much like me.  I explained it once and she got it.  Then two questions texted during the three or so hours we did the thing and that was it.  The next text was 'done'.  No chatting, no repeating instructions, nothing.  It was really nice.  And we did what would have taken the shelter a week or two to accomplish in under four hours.  Same day they asked for help.

It is an interesting development.  As work inevitibily expands to reach capacity the shelter will no doubt find other such things.  As with all non profits they have royally screwed up some stuff and I've been fixing it by myself.  Now I've got someone to do it with me we might actually replace people with process and develope some efficiency in what has been a chaotic place.  The shelter is about to open a new canine shelter building, a HUGE update to what is currently a pretty depressing and overcrowded dog facility.  It will allow them to add something like 40 or 50 dogs.  

They do not have a process that does that very well.  So maybe we can figure that out.  It would be interesting.

The other volunteer is a dog person too.  !!

This morning I decided to cut myself off from GLP1.  I've reduced my dosage so not it's not much.  I can still feel the effects of taking it so stopping may matter.  But right now I can still kick it off again, renew the shipments, if I want to.  So it is a good time to test.  I've plateaued at 185 now for months.  I'll gain a couple of pounds then lose 3.  Water coming and going.  I don't much change my eating habits and I maintained a plateau before I started taking the drug.  It was just too high.

I'm still 'overweight' by medical standards but for whatever reason I've always been overweight.  I was borderline in the Navy at 180 and my original intent was go get down to 175 which is where I am 'supposed' to be.  But I would be lean and not have enough strength to be safe.  I need to have sufficient muscle mass and strength for all the stuff, like walking, getting out of a chair, and such.  And at 185 I can retain sufficient muscle.

I'm doing the daily 'Lifelone Mobility' program and really have just gotten used to a half hour a day every day no matter what.  It won't make me an olympic athlete but I can move, balance well, and maintain enough muscle to play pickleball which is an absolute bargain with so little time involvement.

So we'll see how it goes.  I weight myself every morning and have set an upper limit of 190 max or 187 for five days.  Either two happen and I'll go back on GLP1.  

I've still got my food tracking app, Cronometer, and am used to using it.  The process is protein first thing in the day, then some good worthless carbs, and then more protein around lunch and some healthy carbs and then about half a dinner with some balance.

I'm good at boring so doing that every day is not hard for me.  We'll see how it hits in a month or two.

I've walked the dogs, had my protein shake breakfast, had my coffee, gone to the Ortho doc and got my knee shot, been to UPS to drop off a return, bought a couple of things at HEB and picked up prescriptions.

I feel so accomplished.  While all that was happening I listened to my Hacks On Tap podcast and got my political junkie fix listening to the Michigan primary wrapup and the Wisconsin preview. 

Now what?

I'm kind of at loose ends until 4 this afternoon when I've got pickleball drills.  It is three people and a trainer.  It is fun and I learn a lot and develop muscle memory that I really need and I run around for an hour and a half.  Good stuff.

The shot in my knee was to facilitate both pickleball and resistance training.  I'm back in my online program every day again.  The cataract surgery threw me off, or I used it as an excuse.  Either way I fell behind and lost some of the muscle mass in my legs.  So I'm working back and until I get a little further down the road I've got too much pain in my knee to do what I need to do.  The last shot I got was in February.  The object is to no longer need shots and never knee surgery.  I'm not sure if it is possible but it it is I'll get there by being diligent in building up my muscle mass around my knee and keeping it.  

Just to balance things out I just scheduled a massage for my birthday to run at the same time as Dana's counselling session located next door. 

Dana's therapist's name is Roxie.  My massage therapist's name is Candy.  Kind of makes you wonder.

We didn't make it out of the house yesterday to see Dana's brother.   She had some spaghetti that she'd saved from lunch the previous day (she had it for lunch, brought it home, I had a meal of it and there was enough left for another meal..  such is portioning in America).  The sauce was spicy as nearly everything in Texas is spicy.  I really didn't like it and would have been happy to see it in the trash but she had what is left and the spicy hit her hard this time.  She spent much of the day in bed.

So we're going today, I assume.  

I'm playing computer tech at the moment with the Dell laptop I acquired.  I've got Chrome Flex on it and that was working fine until recently.  Now it is in a reboot loop that I've tracked down to a problem with Chrome.  And, actually I just fixed it.  Turned out to be an update issue.  Something in my Chrome that I routinely sync crashed the new installation when it was not updated.  So, now it is working.  

I'm putting off trying to fix a problem at the dog shelter that I thought would be easy.  It is an spreadsheet merge job that should be a breeze with Gemini but I'm having all kinds of problems and it is hurting my brain and now I'm putting it off.  Fortunately it is not a must be done today kind of job but I do need to get it done one way or another.  Gemini is great until it isn't.  At one point a couple of days ago it was telling me that there was an entry on line 119 on the spreadsheet that was not there.  It is very annoying when you can't really say 'look here!!!'.

I backed out and started all over again with a new prompt that I told to not use any history or prior chats or prior inputs.  Then something came up and I had to stop.  So I'm starting all over again with more knowledge this time but less patience.

Looking at our schedule this week revealed a bit of a surprise.  Dana's son and wife and, presumably, two children are coming to town.  She told me they were coming but I don't think ever said when and so I'm only semi-included in the stream of information.  I'm committed to some specific work at the shelter on Tuesday morning when we're supposed to be with them so will catch up when I'm done, I guess.  We have lunch, again without my knowledge, on Thursday.  Fortunately I don't have anything scheduled mid day on Thursday.  They're more interested in hanging out with each other than me anyway and there are a lot of explosive contact points that I generally avoid (Trump/religion et al).

Other than that things are the usual suspects.  Pickleball, dog shelter, soccer matches at night.  A few doctor visits only one of which is mine (knee shot).   

I've decided to add a year of Peacock to my subscriptions.  It is $109 per year for the version I want and it includes all the Premier league matches for their season starting later this month.  I'm assuming that Peacock with add a bunch of stuff and then jack up their rate next year so I'm going to get it while I can.  I'd have to renew Fubo if I didn't do that and not everything I want is on Fubo and Fubo is $157.97 per quarter.  

So I basically will be paying $210/year for all the soccer I want to watch.  Actually a pretty good deal.  Goodby NFL.  I'll probably catch a game or two as it flies by on Amazon or something I've already got access to but I don't much enjoy it.  Way too many commercials and after watching soccer, way too many starts and stops.

Funny how things evolve.  If Austin had a pro baseball team I'd likely be more interested but when my 'local' teams are Astros and Rangers I can't get very excited about it.

Wow, now we've got August and then a couple or three months more and it will cool down.

I decided to get a second steroid injection in my right knee. The last one was in February. I'm doing OK but I do think I can do better, more physical therapy strength training and push my court mobility so that may be I can get back to where I don't need any more injections at all. I'm pretty sure unless something drastically changes that I can and will put off knee replacement indefinitely. The Internet Death Clock said I was likely to die at 89 but now says over a hundred. Regardless I'll keep my knee as it is as long as I can.

We're going to visit Dana's brother, Mark, today. He has some kind of progressive nerve desease in the vicinity of ALS. He's been bedridden for many years now in a care facility and, of course, his mind is not all there. He's only a year or so older than me but their family genes seem to be problematic and he didn't take care of himself much.

Dana visits once a month or so and obviously can't drive there. It is a $50 Uber ride so I'll be taking her. I haven't seen him for maybe a year so he may not even know who I am.

Nothing to be done. It is why I keep up the long term health insurance for both of us.

Today is insect day it seems. Somehow we ended up with a batch of houseflys all, it looks like, born in the past few days. It is not at all usual for us to have even one fly and we've killed dozens. Not sure how they got in but I ordered what turned out to be the wrong size replacement dog door flap from Amazon today. It came within 3 hours but by following the manufacture process to measure the flap I ended up with a medium when I needed a large. I ordered the right size and it will be here tomorrow.

Meanwhile we continue to deal with wasps of all kinds. This has been going on for a year. Whenever it is warm we get wasps. I will go around and spray half a dozen nests in the house soffits and the next day there will be more. I bought a couple of wasp sticky traps. They are replacing the ones that I've had hanging on the corners of the house. Not cheap but not chemical. And they work. They seem to keep the nest population down but I've spent about $90 on three cycles of the things.

Having written that I made a DIY wasp trap.  We'll see if it works.  

I cut the grass and my hair yesterday so I don't have much in the way of chores to get through today.  Other than the Mark trip I'll just be waiting around for the Austin FC game.

Having played a couple of hours of pickleball in the morning yesterday and then a two hour clinic I'm very glad I did not keep my reservation to play this morning.  I'm really sore.  Mostly good sore.  By the end of the pickleball clinic I was not doing well at all.  Just didn't have any juice left.  It is absolutely that my body has been hanging around for nearly 73 years and my mind forgets that and doesn't understand why I'm not doing better.  And part of it is I'm not in as good shape as I could be.  I've lived my life in the top third of my age group, frequently in the top 10 percent.  When I turned 45 I could still do the military test maximum of 67 pushups and 100 situps.  And then run two and a half miles faster than anyone in my command.  And I was not in as good shape as I could have been tending towards being a bit lazy.

So now my brain knows it is not 45 but it ignores that fact and is always pushing to do more.  Fortunately a part of my brain knows better and cancels the engagements like this morning.

I'm going to do my resistance workout today in a little bit.  Dana's physical therapist comes this morning so I'll parallel their work.  But that's a 20 minute exercise routine so is not too bad.

Last night was Austin FC's return after World Cup.  And we beat Seattle FC, a team with a LOT of problems and injuries and possibly a new head coach in their future.  Austin has an interim coach after firing the one that had been leading for two unsuccessful years.  The interim coach has been with the team from the beginning 7 years ago.  And he's made some innovative changes the seem to have potential.  

Two of our three highest paid players, 20 million dollars worth, did zero.  One of them did zero until he had the ball placed right in front of him right in front of the goal by the youngest player on the team and one of the lowest paid.

It is very hard to watch MLS (and I've seen part or all of three matches now) after the World Cup.  First of all is the fact that they are playing in front of at most 20 thousand people who are in part more concerned with the price of their hot dogs than the match vs World Cup where we're talking 80 thousand people who are all jumping together for the entire match.  But no one can maintain that intensity day in and day out.  The World Cup players may not be used to playing together for the most part but they are the best of the best and they are motivated.  MLS is a mix of people nearing retirement and starting out and hurt and living their lives through the entire season.  

That said it is still disappointing after having watched the most amazing display of defense (first time ever for me) in the England Mexico game where 10 men vs 11 held off 20+ minutes of a continuous barrage of offense never once letting the ball near the goal.  Surrounded as they were in a home stadium with over 80k screaming fanatics who had never lost a WC match in that place verbally supporting the Mexican attack.  It is hard to watch a sloppy defense line let a slow moving player through to score while my mind sees that iron line of the English wall.  

It will be interesting to watch the Premier League which contains most of the players who were on that pitch that night play their day to day matches.  I'm given to believe that the intensity of the soon to be relegated if they don't win THIS GAME matches approach that kind of focus.  My intention, since I don't currently have a favorite Premier/Champion team is to decide on one near the bottom and see how they handle the pressure and what kind of soccer is played then.

I've frittered away enough time now.  Surely there's something I need to do.

I was sitting around Friday afternoon about 3 when I got a text from the shelter asking if there was any way I could drive to San Antonio and rescue a dog. This one.



He was apparently in some distress and likely to not survive without surgery which, I guess, the San Antonio shelter was not inclined to do.

The San Antonio shelter was about 2 and a half hours away with traffic. They have a good van and a credit card so I figured, why not?, nothing else going on. I made the drive down there and arrived about 6PM. They did not expect me and I had to wait 45 minutes for them to bring the dog out. Then back north. I got to the Leander shelter around 9PM where there was a vet tech waiting for me. She, at least, was expecting me. I finally got home about 9:30.

The male dog named Twiggy (?) did, apparently, get through surgery and will be OK. I see on their site that a foster family is already arranged so he will recover in a luxury that will likely flow into adoption. Such is the life of a small bulldog.

I'll probably never see him but know he's safe and healthy.

A little more positive karma I'll no doubt blow through soon enough.

Yesterday I cut the grass and trimmed plants all of which had grown significantly during the recent rains.  It was really nice to be done with it and caught up on the yard.  It is frequently difficult this time of year to fit yard and pickleball and dog walking all in before the day gets hot.

Before the animal transport gig we had planned to get the title on the Lexus we just bought.  I got the paperwork and called my insurance guy to get the car insured and grabbed the checkbook all arranged just knowing that I'd have fogotten something or done something wrong and we'd have to go back after waiting in line for hours.  None of that turned out to happen.  We got to the tax office to find that the entire state computer system for titling and registration was down.  Infuriating.  

We'll try again Tuesday afternoon.  I don't too much care since we don't need the car.  I'm happy driving the Smart Car.  But the thing is hanging and the registration under the previous owner expires end of this month so I don't want things to get more complicated.

In retrospect I think the guy I bought it from might have been skirting the law a bit.  He took the car in compensation for the transmission work.  In kind payment.  He did not file the title, did not re-register, and did not most importantly for the state pay sales tax.  So I've got to be careful how I phrase the inevitible question.  I'll say he sold it as a kind of consignment.  In reality he sold me something that he only kind of owned.  All word and hand shake.  The title I have is from Arizona with a Texas address.  It is registered in Texas but the title was never transferred since the ownership had not changed.  And, of course, there is business and personal money comingling on his part.  I paid him to his personal account but the vehicle actually belonged to the business since it was taken in payment.

I'm pretty sure it will be OK.  The state will get their money, $500 + reg fee, so they should be happy.

And once it is done there will be no further questions.  But I'm suck a stickler for doing things above board it is a little unusual for me.  I'd have not ever done something like that in my business.  I had a pretty strong wall between me personally and my business.  

But I did not do anything that could be much construed as wrong.  I'm protecting him by saying it was a consignment sale and I'm pretty sure it will work as long as they don't ask me too many questions.

It is why I build up karma points.  

Another fours years before I need this again:





It was an interesting month or so.