New Year Blog Thoughts & Additions

In typical Indiana weather fashion, temperatures rose to 66° yesterday. Cletus shook out all of his winter allergies and got that loose skin of his ready for a nice day outside. Window blinds were opened for the first time in weeks, then the windows came open along with the patio door so the dogs could go in and out when they wanted. The weather was that nice yesterday.

To start this post off, on the side bar I have added a lot of the blogs that I use to follow. I remember years ago I was probably following 30 or so blogs. Over time, travelers went homebase, stopped blogging and some passed away. More than a few have moved their blogging operations to YouTube or one to Facebook. Anyway, those that I remember and could find a blog link, I've added to the side bar.

I am going to have some rambling in this post. I haven't done that in a while but I guess I have enough stuff floating through my brain cells to do some of that. By late morning yesterday I had shoved some of that tall snow in front of the patio to the yard for easier melting. It looks like I am going to have to sit with my Gorilla Glue and glue every one of those end pieces in place. The three missing are from Henry's habit of pulling them out for bone chews. Now at a $1.52 each ... glueing them in is the better option.

By late afternoon the snow melt was making progress and I was happy to see that the yard was absorbing all the water and not leaving me a lake to look at, like in past years. It has taken a lot of top soil to fill in those low spots or bare spots. Finally it looks like I have made some progress. 

I said "New Year" in my title today and now realize that February is almost halfway finished. I talked about the additions on the sidebar so now to the thoughts. As much as things change a lot doesn't with me. I can look back years on this blog or my private one, different spreadsheets of data and can see many things don't change at all ... just the months of the year.

The routines of the hounds, the dogs and I are pretty consistent to being the same year after year. My spending habits surprisingly are not only similar but very close in total dollars spent. Those similar numbers go back over 20 years. There is always a 'to do' list every spring to get started. This year I have a few new things added to the top of the list.

I have come to realize that everything that is broken can be fixed. From storm damage to some heart repairs, things get fixed. The grass will always come back in the spring no matter how dead it was in July or dormant in January. It always comes back green and tall. So will the berm behind the fence. I haven't touched that this year and don't have any plans too. 

We had a surprise last night to help the clearing of snow. Something called rain showed up and by this morning almost all the snow was gone. My ten day forecast looks like we are headed back to our normal mild winter temps, yet I know in Indiana, the weather can change and other snow storms are possible before April. 

I noticed this morning walking around the backyard it isn't as saturated as I thought it would be. With over a foot of snow sitting on top, that surprised me. 

It looks like all that grass I planted last spring and then again in the fall has filled in, although there are more bare spots to reseed in March. It was just a couple of winters ago this was all under water. 

Getting back to those things that don't change. Foods, activity, my weight and thought process. It is nice to be looking at houses or cars to buy like before where those two things would consume me at times until I either moved or bought a different or additional car/truck. I have no urges to go to Best Buy or Costco to "look around", where I would always end up buying something.

I have no idea why that has changed.

Like always I think about this blog, what to change, whether to stop it or go the opposite direction, get out with the camera and start blogging again daily like I used to. It was so much easier in the past to blog a couple of times per day with 20-25 photos of the hounds and dogs while walking through that field where I used to live.

There are plenty of places to travel around here with a camera and write about. Laziness is a battle with me at times, especially when it's freezing cold. Almost all activity stops when those single digits show up, even indoor activity.

Then I think of Blogger which this blog is on. The same template I have used for years because there just isn't that many to choose from on this platform. In fact I cannot remember the last time Blogger even had new templates to choose from.

When I think of that I go back to the time I had WordPress blogs and all the choices of neat modern templates to use. I remember the blog I tried with just a paragraph of content and then nothing but photos of the hounds and dogs for the rest of the post. I always came back to Blogger to rebuild the blog. 

I read something interesting yesterday about all the bot hits I am getting on my blog. In the thousands per day. Some are good, some are bad, some are real people it says. So in my research about the bad bots and what kind of danger my blog might be in while being bombarded ... it said that Blogger was much safer for any kind of bad results of those bot attacks.

WordPress and other platforms were more vulnerable. 

Not only on my blog but I seem to be getting a lot more spam phone calls, more spam email than before. Apple Mail does a great job filtering out the mail and sends almost everything into a Junk Folder. My phone, I have tried different things over the years and nothing seems to help. The "No Call" list rarely works. I've blocked a lot of numbers after they call once but that makes no difference.  So I guess it is what it is and we live with it, since my life is almost all electronic and has been for years.

I know you will find this hard to believe ... but I have still not watched tv news, read any online news nor do I look at news websites, even at their headlines. If it is not sports related I have no idea what is going on in the world or the USA. I cannot remember when I stopped following the news but it's been a while. 

Even on my X account I no longer get any kind of news in my feed from people I don't know. With a combination of me manually blocking key words or accounts that dealt with news, not "liking" or making a comment to those posts news related ... X (twitter) has adjusted their algorithm for my feed to only sports 99.9% of the time. There are rarely any leaks with news stuff.

I haven't watched much of the Olympics but that is not new to me. I stopped years ago in both the winter and summer Olympics. I like the downhill skiing, the luge and cross country skiing but that is about it. I will watch the cycling road race in the summer Olympics but that is about all that I tune into.

Of course my mind will always wander back to the time I lived in Sierra Vista and had this view from my patio chair and backyard. I never thought or planned on moving from there. It wasn't long after I moved that both my next door neighbors moved for the some of the same reasons I did. My neighbor on the left side of me had lived there for 17 years before he decided he had enough.

Not only Stella but all the hounds and dogs, grown and puppies, loved that really hot sunshine. The high desert environment had cleared up Heidi's skin allergies within months of moving there, with no medications of any kind. The high desert did what thousands of dollars of medications and four different vets could not do, get rid of her raw skin.

With the neighbor's houses so much closer than where I live now, any smells of food from a next door grill use to peak Stella's nose and interest. Those bloodhounds always have a nose for food inside or outside.

It was so easy to jump in one of my vehicles out there, grab the camera and take off on a road trip either up and over Montezuma Pass, which I was getting ready to do here, or head east to Tombstone for lunch or visit my friend's bike shop down in Bisbee. A lot more to blog about, or at least a lot easier to blog about.

This was a great bicycle shop. He only sold old road bikes and it was like a bicycle racing museum. It had a couple of chairs in front where we would sit and talk for hours about our experiences in bicycling while enjoying the view of Bisbee. Soon after I moved the owner of that building didn't renew the bike shop owner's lease because he wanted to turn it into another Bisbee coffee shop. 

The bikes were sold to a friend in Colorado, the building emptied. He sold his house and moved to Tucson and retired. 

Could I do those daily roadtrips here? I could and there is plenty to see, to write about ... so what keeps me from doing it?

BTW, anytime I see photos of that area I go to Realtor dot com and check out what houses are for sale. I do have a file of saved houses in different towns that have always interested me. Just from that it looks like the housing market has really slowed down. I wonder if it is from the new real estate rules for 2026.

For example, when I inquired about the off-grid house in Hereford, I would have had to pay the agent a certain percentage of the asking price for her to just do a walk around video for me. I cannot remember the percentage but I remember when she told me, it amounted to ~$6,000 up front. Even if I were to change my mind and not make an offer. Of course "the seller might agree to pay that". The word "might" is the keyword there. 

So basically due to that, any long distances purchases like I did with my last two houses will not happen. It's fun to look though.

This piece of property still intrigues me. I am sure the seller is more than willing to negotiate since it has been on the market for 163 days and their asking price has lowered from the $214K when I talked to them about it. It is down to $189K now.

Those are just some of the things flowing through my brain lately. It's not as warm as yesterday but it's warm enough and bright and sunny.

Another good day here in "the tropics" of Southern Indiana.