Hounds Brace For Cold Weather

Friday afternoon the temperature started its steep decline to the high 30's. The hounds  enjoyed what little time they had left of the spring type weather. Heidi got no further than just around those steps and came back the same way she went, as fast as she could. You could feel the freezing air rushing in a little past noon .

She was set until later that night, so she could sleep the afternoon away ... and she did. Friday afternoon was getting colder but with the bright sunny skies it was so much better than the dark overcast skies we had just a few days ago. Isn't it interesting how moods change when the sunshine is visible?

Stella thought it was a nice day for a drive. I just missed her laying her nose up against the back door checking to see if she could open it with a nudge from her nose. She feels her 'nose nudges' are the answer to anything that she wants to open. All of those marks you see on the top of the bumper are from her wet jowls in past attempts of opening the door.

Here is a better view of those jowl marks. I'll claim the fingerprints on the door are mine but everything else is Stella's. You cannot believe how hard it is to remove dried hound drool from car paint. It is worse the smashed bugs on the front of any car or truck.

With skies like these Friday afternoon it was hard to imagine bad weather anywhere else. What would this morning bring compared to what I was seeing on the national weather stations?

It turned out to be nothing more than a 27° drop in temperatures in the last 24 hours with most of that decrease taking place by 5pm on Friday afternoon. No matter what, Stella was ready to 'move out' by 8am this morning. The walk was windless, not too cold and extremely quiet.

I am finding on these morning walks I am having a hard time focusing the camera as I look through the view finder. No, I cannot take photos by looking at the monitor on the back of the camera. What is strange, the camera is always in auto mode and I flip between 'single point' and 'all area AF' ... I should be able to aim at Stella and have perfect pictures. Are my hands shaking that much to produce bad photos like these from this morning?

In the 'all area AF' mode I can choose to have Stella in focus or the foreground in focus with her blurred. Even when I try that I have a hard time seeing if she is in focus as I press the shutter button half way down, waiting for Stella to come into focus. I have no doubt my hands are more of a problem than anything else. Plus my left eye as the better vision of the two but you could never tell it from those photos.

Today and tonight is a big day for college football as the 4-game playoff starts tonight. I'll start the day of college football by watching the Michigan - Florida game at 12pm. I did some early grocery shopping this morning and passed by all the chips that were on display out in the open with price discounts. The only fruit I bought were bananas and red delicious apples but forgot the almonds. So there will not be a lot of things to munch on during all of these games compared to a few years ago when it was just one huge eating festival for 12 straight hours.

When I use to work with Microsoft Excel at work and used the Mac Edition of Microsoft Office at home, it use to be so easy to insert a bar chart into certain spreadsheets. Compared to Apple's Numbers spreadsheet program, Excel was so much easier. A couple of years ago when Microsoft Office stopped supporting the 2011 version with updates, so I would buy their new 2016 version of Office, I decided instead to try out Apple Numbers which came free with my computer.

There was a slight adjustment but after I started working with Numbers just here at home, I liked it. Both Excel and Numbers had their good points. Yet I am almost to the point this morning of converting all of my Number spreadsheets back to Excel. Since I rarely send these spreadsheets anywhere outside my computer hard drive
I see no reason that I cannot use the 'unsupported' 2011 version.The problem is Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 is a 32-bit software. Microsoft chose not to update that year to 64-bit, which is needed to run on the latest Apple Operating Systems. Their 'new' 2016 version Now 2019 as of October 2018 of Microsoft Office was 64-bit of course.  :)

Why the switch?  Making simple charts that will be inserted into some spreadsheets, like I already have in years 2007-2018.

I do know one thing ... including the time it will take to convert those spreadsheets back to Excel, I'll have those few charts made for some 2019 spreadsheets faster than it will or has taken me to read the Numbers manual on how to insert a SIMPLE spreadsheet !!!! I cannot remember how I did it on Numbers last year.

Good, that will give me something to do today before the first football game at 1pm.

Evidently HughesNet Gen 5 fixed their internet speed issues ... I believe that was the REAL reason that I had slow download speeds the past week. I never did believe their excuse of bad weather where my 'gateway' was located in Utah. Staring last night the speeds were back up to the normal range of 30-45Mbps. That's just my opinion because I've had great speeds in all kinds of stormy weather for the past four years.

After a lot of thought off and on the past few weeks, I went back to Facebook yesterday. It is a great way to stay in touch with old friends. Many of them do not read this blog or any other blog because they don't have time. Facebook is much easier for them and for me to keep in touch. They wanted to see the few pictures I post of the hounds. They are the same exact photos I post here, just fewer of them. I also find it easer to track my sports teams, favorite music, MacRumors forum and specific groups.

I opened my accout to the 'public' so it will be interesting who finds me that I know and will send a friend request. In recent years I never looked for many friends, 10-15 maybe. I did have an old friend find me last night after opening that account, then gave me a call. We played on the same basketball team in high school.

Instagram might be my next jump back into social media. I would only use that to follow friends that like showing pictures of their dogs. Plus a few blogs I use to follow do not blog anymore but write on Instagram instead. Again the good part if you use it responsibly is there is good information. Yet there comes a price with that, with lying Mark Zuckerberg at the helm.

I also went back to Google Chrome yesterday. Retro Roxie sent me a link inside WordPress giving me some ideas to check out, to find out why Google Chrome kept logging me out of my own blog plus not letting me make comments or hit the 'like' button ... the cause was, I had a setting not letting 3rd party website to collect cookies and data of where I have been on the internet. Once I unclicked that setting, it worked perfectly.

I don't care what Google collects or do. It's like I said a few times in the past few years ... if you spend any amout of time, little or a lot, on the internet then they already have the personal information THEY need and are looking for. That data collection happens so fast you cannot even back out of the website you just went to. No big deal ... let them make billions off of me in advertising while I use their great services for free.

It's bright and sunny today in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

I'm Borderline OCD

I make off the cuff comments sometimes about being OCD but I'm not. I thought I was for sure until I finished reading more information online about it today. The best example I can give to prove I am not OCD,  is my 'obsession' with an organized clean desk ... but my desk is not clean. LOL I will on occasion get the urge to clean every room in the house spotless but that doesn't mean I keep it that way. If I were OCD wouldn't I NEED to keep things spotless?? My mother was like that.


One picture of my computer desk would show that it is not clean but organized. It is not overwhelmed with stacks of papers and other things.  I still have the sorted photos in small stacks based on the hounds name, waiting to be scanned in a slow printer/scanner whenever I get the urge.


A few weeks ago I was looking at eBay to see what some old software was selling for plus some old VW maintenance manuals. I wanted to see if they were worth listing on eBay to sell. That small stack of software CD's and books are still there.


That is definitely not someone that has OCD.


What about my possible obsession with making spreadsheets for everything? These are the ones I keep updated:

• checkbook register w/auto payments all loaded for 2019
• monthly miles driven
• diet measurements
• income and expenses by category
• savings
• auto maintenance
• each hound has their own health log if sick or injured
• dental plan analysis
• grocery cost comparison with three stores
• internet data used
• personal health issues log
• best foods to eat sorted by research
• usernames and passwords
• daily electric kilowatt usage  (why?)

That looks a little excessive to me. You too??


When I thought about all the spreadsheets I do, I was positive that would make me 100% OCD ... but there is a fine line to determine that and I am straddling the fence.


The determining question on OCD is:  Am I doing those spreadsheets because I want to or do I need to?


Well almost immediately I would answer "I want to" but then when I think about what would I do if I lost all of them, deleted, totally gone .... would I want to rebuild all of them or feel like I need to rebuild all of them because I had to have them?


Looking at that question I feel myself teetering, trying to balance myself from falling on the other side of the fence into the field of OCD.


I begin to see that I MAY not be doing all of this data entry because I want to but because I need to. The thought of stopping the checkbook register and the income & expenses by category makes me anxious. Instantly telling myself "no way, I'll never stop those."


A friend tells me that until I do stop them, I am not totally free.


The others listed I could stop doing them, have stopped doing them but came back to them. Understand that not all of these are updated daily. Nor does it take a lot of time for a couple of entries IF they happen.


For some of them the data is not logged in until something happens, like personal or hound health issues and new online research on food, dog food or whatever.


Sometimes I think I keep doing any kind of spreadsheet because it keeps me kinda attached to the job I retired from, where I lived on financial spreadsheets. It's not that I need that to feel good or anything because I love being retired and would do it again the same way same time frame. It just makes me wonder why I have such a strong attachment to spreadsheets.


There are those I use to update all the time but they have been retired and filed in my documents folder on the computer. Things like analysis for dog food, trading cars, buying or selling my house, moving west ... I also had a spreadsheet that gave me a good view of my finances if I were to retire.


In fact that specific spreadsheet told me it was a great move to retire and I could financially afford it.


So really there is a fine line between being OCD. Just because I keep a clean car with nothing laying around inside of it does not mean I am OCD. It's just that I like having a clean car. Now if I were to clean that car daily .... then I would be OCD.


I might be organized (all DVDs, CD, are alphabetized) and downsized, but my life has a 'lived in' look to it. I mean I wear my jeans more than two days in a row. Whereas growing up my mom washed my jeans daily and had them back in my room before I opened my eyes.


I always wondered what she thought of that stuff she would pull out of my pockets before washing them, that did not include car keys?  Ha Ha


I want to look more into why my my brain is so scattered. Is it a getting older thing or have I been this way for years but never had the time to notice.


This post might be one of the few I have written publicly in seven years of blogging where I stuck to the same subject as the title.


What do you think of a post with no pictures?


Any thoughts or experiences with OCD?

The Hounds Check Out Rain Except Heidi

All of that nice weather I've been bragging about has left again. At least it's not cold and the rain is suppose to stop by 1pm today. That will give me some time to work on a computer mistake I made yesterday. Nothing drastic, nothing that crashes my computer. We took off this morning in what looked like rain but looking through my binoculars standing in the kitchen, I did not see any rain coming down through the Sycamore tree. They hounds of course were happy ... they don't care about weather, they just want to walk.

Sadie took off sprinting while Stella had some fresh wet tall grass to supplement her morning kibble. After every rain I guess the grass tastes that much better to her. 

Once she saw that Sadie had found something she took off sprinting ... no way was she going to miss out on something Sadie had.

I was dressed for light rain, heavy rain or no rain ... so I walked my pace, they walked theirs.

I heard Stella snorting while her nose inspected the fresh scents.

Still a little color from the fall hanging around.

With me taking pictures and obviously not walking fast enough for Sadie, she had other plans and the scent she was on was all she was focused on. She sprinted around the corner with her nose to the ground, running out of sight.

I called Stella's name loudly to see if she would come running and join us ... LOL ... what do you think of her response? the picture after this one was taken within seconds of her looking at me.

That's fine, Sadie and I could continue on ... these seems to be the norm anymore for our 1st walks of the day. In the afternoon walks Stella is right there beside me without any words spoken, even during the times I don't have her on the 25' retractable leash.

I am assuming these are very very young tree saplings? Am I right?

I mentioned the other day, maybe yesterday's post that I had moved all of my spreadsheets back to Excel. They say that memory is the first to go as you get older and that proved to be true numerous times yesterday. While I was looking for a solution to my other macOS problem that was self induced, I was reminded why I moved all those spreadsheets to Numbers in the first place a month or two ago.

I have Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. Since I really only use Excel in that program and really just design basic spreadsheets for my personal use I have no reason to spend $150 for their 2016 version. Especially when Apple Numbers gives me what I need and the only problem is I have not learned all the ways to do things differently compared to Excel.

It will take me less than an hour to study what I am having a problem with and once that is figured out, then Numbers will be perfect for what I want. The reason I switched a month or so ago, is the new Apple macOS is not going to support the older 2011 version of Microsoft Windows. In fact Microsoft no longer supports it and updates will not be sent to that version.

Currently my spreadsheets are working but I didn't want to take the chance to lose them due to macOS finally realizing that I was still using 2011 version of Office and then not give me the ability to open them. That has already happened to many users.

So I changed all of them back to Apple Numbers late last night (early this morning) in a very short period of time.

The biggest 'senior moment' came yesterday afternoon where for some strange unknown reason ... I decided to leave the Apple Beta Program and download the latest public release of macOS High Sierra over the top of a more current version in the Beta Program.

No big deal. After a couple of hours it took to download and install my computer worked perfectly without a hitch ... and still does. EXCEPT I forgot something very important .... My 330Gb file called "photos.library" would not load with the new public release of the macOS High Sierra because the Beta version is always going to be a newer version.

My only choice was to start a new file for my photos. That is also not a problem. I know a few people that have different photo library files on their computer they work with daily, but in my case until the macOS is updated in a few months I have no way to access those 100,000's of photos on my computer, except to copy that file to my external drive and plug that external drive into my laptop which is still running the beta version of the operating system.

I wasn't in a panic. I haven't lost those photos. The file is still there and is also backed up. I also have all them backed up online in Flickr, a free TB of storage in original file size. So I joined the Beta Program again with a few taps on my mouse pad but didn't get the screen to re-download the beta version of the macOS.

I dug around online and found a different way to get that page of download links. An hour and half later when the file had been downloaded, it stopped before it installed the program. It didn't show up anywhere in my files. So back to the mac forum to see what to do. Others had similar problems.

So the rain has come at the right time. I really do enjoy solving computer problems like this and will spend this morning looking for more ways to fix my problem. Once I can get the Beta version of the operating system installed, my large photo file will be available again.

In the meantime as a temporary fix ... I'll continue to operate as normal on the public released operating system and keep adding photos to my 'new' photos library file ... then import from that file later on when my large file is available again.

Yet, those two examples with the photo mix up and forgetting about why I moved my spreadsheets shows that as you get older you have to be on your toes when it comes to making decisions on a computer. Memory, memory, memory.

An online friend that reads the blog sent me something to check out for my slow Safari problem. Once I went into preferences and unchecked the Apple Pay box ... Safari was back to being faster than fast (thank you Mary) ... thus it is back to being my default browser. It does not let Facebook, Twitter, and all my Sports sites to play their videos automatically. I like videos but I want to be the one to decide what I want to watch not the computer gods.

Once again this morning I told Sadie to "go find Stella" ... she ran right to her, directly in front of us. Needless to say, Stella didn't get in her large number of steps in this morning but she doesn't count them and does not wear a Garmin watch or FitBit to track them. She is just Stella ... in her own little world ... that likes to sleep behind my computer desk chair as I type blog posts everyday.

We were almost finished with the walk when I thought I heard drops of rain hitting my light rain jacket. It was light enough that I really couldn't tell but it was good that I convinced Stella to at least head our direction with Sadie and I.

She acted busy and ignored me of course until that rain became a sprinkle ... that moved her from head down in the tall grass to a slow paced walk. I wasn't going to wait any longer because it was starting to rain harder ... so I ran to the house with the camera facing down in my hand and Sadie running right beside me.

By the time we got to the carport Stella had decided it was raining harder and she never likes to be in the rain ... she picked up her speed to somewhere between a fast trot and a slow run. But that's just Stella ... one of the most hilarious personalities in a hound that I have had in 30 years. There isn't a day she doesn't have me laughing about something.

With her sprinter speed, she brushed by me hitting the side of my knee as she ran to the door with plans to get inside before Sadie did. Everything is competitive between those two.

The rain sounded harder then it shows on my cap. You don't see many ball caps that say Sacramento State Hornets back here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

So a little rain, some online research to fix my self induced computer problem and ..... my interest has been tweaked into looking more into the specs of those new iPhones ... Verizon told me yesterday that I could get a new phone and get paid $197 for my 6s after trading it in for the upgraded phone. I don't need one but why not ... ???  LOL

It's still a nice day here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana even with a little precipitation.