I made no progress on the "Road to Nowhere" today. But I have a legitimate excuse! Really!
I gave blood this morning and they tell you "no strenuous exercise" for a couple of days. I figure that the way I walk on the treadmill is hardly "strenuous," but the idea is to get the heart pumping and I suspect that was precisely what the blood people DON'T want you to do, so I decided to give myself a one day vacation after a whopping three days of religious exercise.
However, it was kind of cool at Blood Source this morning because they gave me a lovely acrylic paperweight to commemorate my having donated 3 gallons of blood.
Not today, of course, but cumulatively.
So I spent a good portion of the day under puppies again. These little guys go way beyond "craving" attention.
Russell isn't so bad. Maybe he's the calmer of the two normally, or maybe he's under the influence of the pain medication I'm giving him for his hernia operation, but you can actually put him down somewhere and walk away and not have him follow you.
Jack is just insane. He must. be. with. me. at. all. times.
I tried using the gate across my office, but he learned to climb it.
Figuring it was because he could get toeholds in the mesh of the gate, I tried putting a wooden barricade across the living room so I could look at a book I had just received that I couldn't read while he was leaping about in my lap.
I use this barricade to keep Sheila and Lizzie out of the living room. Lizzie can jump three times its height, but has never figured that if she put some forward motion into her jumps she could easily get over the barricade. Jack got in the living room within 10 seconds, without toe holds.
I fixed up the cage so that they could get into the cage to sleep on the soft bed and could get out the door into the back yard, but could not get into the house.
It took Jack about 5 minutes to figure out the dog door into my office so there went that idea.
I blocked the dog door the way that I do when I'm trying to keep Lizzie and Sheila in, by putting a large container in front of the door so that you can't get in and I saw Jack balanced on all four feet pushing against the container trying to push it out of the way. I gave up and let him in.
As long as I sit in the recliner, with Russell asleep on my right arm and Jack finally asleep on my left arm (after he's licked me and licked me and licked me and licked me), they will stay quiet for more than an hour. I can either nap with them or watch TV, but little else.
Looking at the two bodies lying on either side of me so much of the time today I thought better names for them might have been "Romulus" and "Remus."
They are sweethearts, to be sure, and I do love cuddling with them, but I just never get anything DONE with them around. Which, today, wasn't such a bad thing. Not that giving blood ever really wears me out, but it was a handy excuse.
On the computer scene, things are coming along. I have had wonderful help from many sources. I discovered, for example, Open Writer, which is freeware which mimicks Word. Sooner or later I will find my word perfect disks, which are "around here somewhere," but in the interim, Open Writer is wonderful.
Several people also recommended some non-Microsoft web design software for me and I think that it's going to work very well. I am thinking of changing the look of Funny the World, so between now and the first of the month, I will get to know the new software (I have three options to try out) and maybe feel comfortable with one by the time it's time to start the new look (in the meantime, I am doing the journal on the laptop!)
But one fabulous thing that happened is that I found and purchased a mailing label program which was one that I had used before. I had borrowed the program (it's one of those cheapie programs) from someone and installed it, but then returned the program disk, so when the computer crashed several months ago, I couldn't reinstall it. In preparation for losing all of my addresses, I had efficiently printed the file, but it was so wide that each page took three pages to print and it was later impossible to tell which page went with which other page, so the print-out became essentially useless.
BUT, when I reinstalled the program from my brand new paid-for disk (which I have filed in my new "programs to reinstall when the computer crashes next time" binder), I discovered that I still had all the original files and they called up beautifully once I got the program running. At least SOMETHING has gone right with this "clean reinstall" of XP.
Tomorrow Russell is going off to the newspaper to be photographed to be Pet of the Week (I predict he will be adopted almost immediately, he's so darn cute), I'll get back on the treadmill, for 5 minute spurts instead of ten and then ten minutes the next day, and life continues moving on.
No comments:
Post a Comment