That Warm Weather Turned Cold Fast

With all of the warm weather near Christmas we had heavy fog almost every night, early mornings. The patio deck and the windows looked like it has rained all night when I would let the hounds and dogs out first thing in the morning. The sun would eventually burn off the fog by noon. It was better than ice and snow so I wasn't complaining. 

To celebrate the temperature climbing close to 70° on the 28th I opened every window on the house early that morning, put on a t-shirt and some cargo shorts just to take in the summer day. The forecast showed it would last most of the day but a front was heading from the NW and by that night it was going to be really cold again. 

We have had a couple of hard rains plus a day where snow melted and luckily this year there has been no standing water like the lake I had in the backyard last year at this time. There were some puddles that can be fixed with more top soil added this spring. (This spring sounds nice). Those puddles of water were absorbed and gone pretty fast. The perennial rye grass I bought has done well. It's short but pretty robust for a cold December. If it warms up a little this week I am going to rake the yard since there is only one tree left with dead leaves. 

I know you are asking why is the chair and patio mexican table there? Any ideas? With the hounds you know something is going on looking at that photo.

With the help of Henry, Cletus has figured out that is the best place in the yard to eat dirt. That is where the dried dirt stain on his nose comes from. It's not a deep hole, not quite an inch but it is as wide as that table. Once the table was there, of course they started a new one where the chair now sits. Or did sit.

It took me a while to come up with a possibility of "why" ...  I didn't use top soil in that area I used manure compost in October. That is the only wild guess I can come up with. A few hours after that photo was taken I not only took both of those out of the yard ... I put them in the house because I did not want them to go airborne. Later I came up with a new strategy to leave that area unprotected hoping that one spot would keep him there instead of digging up a new hole.

As time passed that day, that 69° was dropping fast. The t-shirt was exchanged for a thermal long sleeve undershirt, an Eddie Bauer thermal shirt and as fleece vest over that. Shorts were changed into some long pants with wool socks ... they would come in handy in a few hours. 

As it got darker in the late afternoon the winds picked up and that front was coming fast. I looked at Walter for any kind of weather update and he was calm, so I was too based on how he looked. He is an accurate bad weather dog.

It was good that the patio chairs and table were put inside just for the storm. It was now dark and the winds were howling and sounded like a train ... isn't that what a tornado sounds like? We had a tornado warning earlier. It was hard to open the patio door due to the wind but I wanted to go outside and see what was going on. It was dark but I could still see what the trees were doing. Would this be the first storm damage of the new year? The sirens for bad weather were loud and clear ... I went back inside.

The power clicked off and the winds were still loud. I try to hustle three hounds and two dogs into our 'shelter' which is the master bathroom, no windows and surround by a brick wall. 

By the time I woke up Cletus on the couch and Ava was trying to lead everybody toward the other side of the house ... just like a snap of fingers, it got quiet and the power came back on. Prior to that I had my small camping LED flashlight in my pocket so I could see what I was doing in the dark if I lost power. 

Turned on the tv for local weather and it was good to see the real storm was east of Hwy 41 and crossing I-69 with signs of circular winds pointed out by the weatherman on tv. Around 10 miles east of us, so the storm was moving away from us at a rapid rate of speed.

No tornadoes were reported here but where I lived 100 miles north of here, they had a EF-1 downtown. It had toppled the second story of a brick building built a hundred years ago, plus other damage to the businesses down that street. 

Since then we have gone back to our normal temps in this area ... 30s at night and 40-50s during the day.

For the second year in a row the nation of college football cannot believe that Indiana is actually good in football. Honestly the words "Indiana Football" and #1 do not compute even in my brain. It's like changing a paradigm ... but they are. Vegas said IU was 7.5 favorites but I was really feeling a blow out. Four times playing teams in the Big10 conference this year Indiana had scored over 50 points and 63 vs a #9 Illinois team earlier in the year.

Of course X (twitter) is on fire with fans of both schools and the media. This is nation wide depending who is playing who. The media along with ESPN are pro SEC conference, makes for fun times on the computer. So much fun that I admit I might have a new addiction. It started with the Ohio State fans before the game on December 6th and way too much time in front of the computer reading and discussing the game with fans. 

It continued with OSU fans after that game on the 6th ... but the time on X actually started weeks before that when Notre Dame was not chosen for the playoffs. It got so bad arguing, online threats with them, I went into my settings and muted any account and any word that dealt with Notre Dame football. I see this morning there are some "leaks" in that setting and they are still downgrading Indiana football. 

So last week Indiana knows their next game is with Alabama, a three loss team in a 12 team playoff. The OSU fans were replaced by some the stupidest football fans I had ever run into. Granted every team nationwide has their 5% of idiots. The Alabama fans were over the top with stupidity. Looking at profiles of some of the commenters, fans with white collar jobs acted and sounded like they had just walked outside from their beat up house trailer. Really it was that bad. All I wanted to do is discuss the game with fans of the other teams.

But ... when verbal stupidity flies towards me or my team, I lower my standards and fight fire with fire. It was easy to hit a nerve of the Bama fans when I not only told them it would be a blow out score, much more than the point spread. I would also add that photo above since they seemed to understand photos better more than written facts.

Now we are playing Oregon Friday night ... fans are more football discussion oriented and not nearly as brutal as OSU or Bama fans. ND fans are not brutal, they are just whiners since they were not chosen for the playoffs.

That is all for my sports news ... any Bama fans reading .. 38-3 tells the real story and like I told them, their history didn't mean anything once the game started. 

I ran out of current photos for this post, so I went into the library of photos back 10 years ... there is Stella bringing in the new year on January 1st 2016. I miss the hell out of that dog. Cletus not only looks like her, he also has similar comedy built into his personality. She was actually letting me know I was late in serving her lunch in that photo. 

Not until I saw these next four photos did it dawn on me ... hmmm 2016. Sad times. This is Heidi and Sadie the afternoon of January 5th, the day I had to euthanize Winston. You can read my thoughts on that from a post I made the day he was gone. Click here. 

I remember one blog reader that still might be on the blog, I don't know ... commented that dogs cannot feel and express their feelings when a dog is gone. All I know is that day when I got home, Stella and Sadie jumped up in back of the FJ cargo area and were smelling every inch of that floor. No Winston. 

They ran around the yard with their noses to the ground. Once inside the house they went room to room looking for Winston. No Winston. Finally Sadie climbed up into the oversized chair and looked like that.

Many years before that when another dog was euthanized, my bloodhound at the time Bertha would go outside every afternoon for a few days at the edge of the carport and howl with her nose straight up in the air like the photo of Stella above. She had lost her best friend, a basset hounds named Maggie. 

Around December 17th Winston had hurt his back when I got up early that day. I heard him cry in pain just outside the bedroom door. This page is much better than my memory on what happened. 

I cannot believe it has already been ten years. Still as comparison in time passing quickly, this May we will have been in this house 5 years. 5 years. Hard to believe. Similar to Cletus being a lot like Stella, Henry is a lot like Winston. Same laidback personality, stubborn as ever, and cruises though the ups and downs of life like there's nothing to be worried about.

It took me a long time to get over Winston being gone. As a hound owner of 39 years now, I have had to put down more dogs than I want to think about. But Winston's hit the hardest. 

These next three photos are from five years ago, January 2021 while living in the hot sunshine of Sierra Vista Arizona. 

Stella loved that hot sunshine especially in the winter, where the temps were cooler but the sun was hot enough to get a sunburn if I stayed outside long enough. She was a professional escape artist and that is how I ended up getting her. Once she got use to her new home I took away the concrete blocks I had put at the base of the pictured gate. 

Henry is a year and eight months in this photo. He already had the look to let me know that once I was done with my yogurt or ice cream container that he was able and willing to lick either kind of container completely clean. That hobby of his still is in action five years later. 

Walter spent a lot more time outside living out there compared to where we live now. During the hot summers he will do this out on the patio but this photo was taken in the month of January. He would have been a few weeks shy of one year old in this photo. Currently he is starting to show some gray hair in his mussel. 

So another year has passed and I must say based on how my summer went and the way Indiana football played this fall, that 2025 was pretty successful. No storm damage to repair either. While I sit here with the bright sunshine outside and the furnace just turning on, I can only count the days until spring. When this Indy Car driver is in Indianapolis in May, it will confirm that summer is finally here.

Things are good in "the tropics" of Southern Indiana.