The photograph I am starting this post with showed up on my Facebook page today, it’s a set of photos I took 9 years ago when were in Florida. At that time we had six greyhounds, and unfortunately they are all at the bridge now. I firmly believe that I will be re-united with Mindy, Peanut, Ranger, Rambo, Lady, and Leona sometime in the future, hopefully far in the future. Missing from this photograph are three other Angel pack members: Raven (she hadn’t joined us yet when this was taken), Bracken (he was long gone by the time this photo was taken – he went to the bridge during a dental that I still blame myself over – I tried a newer vet, closer to the house that we should have never trusted with him), and Gizmo (she was hiding someplace). Sometimes Facebook memories are good, sometimes they suck. I think this is one of the better ones.
Started off the day at close to my normal time, well…. maybe 30 minutes late because I just didn’t want to. Did my normal routine, let the dogs out, gave them their snacks, and got my coffee. I did sit down and just preview my work email real fast, I had some techs that I had excepted some responses from and I wanted to make sure I received them. I am glad I looked, I had one urgent issue that I needed to take care of. I also made sure that I caught up on the last two days of new technicians and got them added to Alpine Intel University so they could do their training. Note to self, I need to send out reminders next week to techs that have not logged in yet to do so before they get turned off.
I do one of my normal “over the weekend” tasks, and that is to do my Moodle and system updates. I don’t like doing that during the week in case I have to shut something down, but over the weekend is always a good time to do Linux upgrades and Moodle LMS upgrades. Another one done and now everything is current. OK that’s it for work today.
After Jesse got up I started walks. Saturday’s and Sundays are lone walks for the dogs. I think it is really important to remind them that they can go places and come home without each other. We also work on walking manners and get some distance in. Res always goes first, today we did a little over three miles because he did not want to stop. For some reason he really wanted to do the same walk I do with Climber, it was almost like he knew where she went lest week and he pulled me in that direction.
It was a nice day for a walk and I listened to one of my Podcasts while we were out and about. He was a little slow near the end, but I think I finally may have figured him out. he likes to be outside and when we are heading back to the house he does not approve.
Climber was next, now Climber is a pup on a mission some times, she knows exactly where she wants to go and she makes it very clear when she is unhappy about our directions. I got to the end of the part today and I wanted to turn left and go down the hill as I had a specific walk in mind for her. Nope, that was unacceptable, she wanted to cross the street, turn right, and do our walk past the credit union. Actually, think she wanted to go further, but I vetoed that as I didn’t really want to cross that intersection with her this week. So, she got part of what she wanted, just not all of it. She was a little stiff today as well and I didn’t really want her to be hurting so I did the best I could to keep her walk under 4 miles, we ended up with 3.7 miles by the time we got back to the house.
She did give me a little bit of a hard time on the way back up the hill next to the park as we were headed to Power Line Trail. She did that the last 3 weekends. She is fine once we get past that spot, but for some reason that area is not good for her, and I am not sure why. She’s curled up asleep now, maybe I wore her out? Nah. Not a chance.
After Jesse and I had a late breakfast, I decided to take a chance and go swim. Why take a chance? Because the pool is a nightmare on Saturdays, it has way too many people and the lifeguards work real hard to make sure open swim in the general and kiddie pool does not spill over into the lap pool. Anyway, I was able to get in 2700 yards in a total time of 57:50 minutes. I should have tried for 3000 yards and done the hour, but I just didn’t feel like it. I think tomorrow I need to work on pace rather then distance, it may be an hour of so of 100 yard swims. If I can do 25 of each of Freestyle and Breaststroke I would be happy. But, let’s start small and see if I can even do that.
I am happy were I am at with swimming right now, but I really need to get some of my times closer to the 1:30 per 100 yard pace and down from the 2:00/100yd. I am pretty sure I could do the 2.5 miles needed for the Mountain Lake Swim, but I do need to improve my pace a bit. I also need to, for pool swims, not make a fool of myself when I work on my flip turns. Yeh…..I’ll think about it. Maybe.
Onto other news, we ordered the Droplet Water monitor from Hydrific Water and it showed up today. It clamps on the main water pipe coming into the home, after the meter, but before any splits and you train it to recognize what fixtures are being used and what fixtures are not being by identifying what is running over a few days when it is showing water flow.
I think it is a little confused on it’s first day and hopefully it will get much better at this. It is currently showing that we used 9.58 gallons today with a shower at 5:45PM this evening. There is just one problem, nobody has showered today yet, that happens in the evening, and more recently I am showering at the Recreation Center after my swim. I think it may have gotten the washing machine right, and I think some of the other appliances, but the shower???? Not really. Maybe that will fix itself in a few days.
Jesse and I are a little concerned about this Summer when our water use normally increases. Our water department, Aurora Water, has us under drought restrictions. This means that we are going to pay a surcharge per 1000 gallons over our Winter water use. We use an average of 2000 gallons per month during the Winter months. This changes drastically in the Summer when we start to irrigate the lawn and gardens. We have already made some changes to the irrigation system that will help, but we got a ways to go. As you can guess it also varies a lot with my travel. On weekends after I come back from a trip we have more heavy laundry. On weeks where I am traveling the daily usage is lower. We are also going to do a lot with hydroponics this year for our vegetable gardens and greens. So, I will keep you all posted on what’s happening with that.
Anyways, it’s time to wrap up today, I will be back tomorrow, I am going to sit back, relax, recharge my Garmin watch, and sit here read and watch TV for a bit. There is probably another 100 things that I need to get done, but I just don’t feel like it. Anyways, goodnight and talk to you tomorrow.
