The Hounds Know

 

They may have been out a few times this morning to explore the yard like they always do. With temps in the 40's that is warm enough to where they don't want to come inside ... except Walter. While Henry and Watson walked the yard with noses to the ground, they were really interested in something else. It is something they have become addicted to. They are waiting for me to clean the yard so right after I am finished, they know they get to go on their morning walks.

The Only Snow Left Is Up There

The snow from yesterday didn't last long as I described yesterday. By the time the sun had burned off the snow on the ground, the street and the cars, the mountains were covered with clouds. Since I am short on time today and tonight, here are some photos from yesterday afternoon that I took after my post plus what is left today. Some of the mountain roads have reopened, such as the on taking you to the Coronado Monument Visitor Center and up and over Montezuma Pass.

Cold winds continued to blow the rest of Friday afternoon. All of us found that out on our daily hound walk. Heidi set her best time at 19 minutes and trotted most of the way. She felt warm to the touch but it was obvious she preferred her blankets and bed to the cold wind. Stella of course was oblivious to the low temperature and was hopping each time she would turn to trot.

This morning I could finally see what the mountains had collected yesterday. Here are photos from this morning from different camera's and different lenses. Both hounds had no interest in going on the walk nor did they stay outside too long each time they 'thought' they wanted to go outside.

She thought she heard me say something about food ...

I am "this close" to "cutting the cord" as they say. I'll have to pay a fee for breaking my Cox Cable contract but after the recent increase and other mysterious billing they can't explain to me, I am now paying ~$60 per month more than I was quoted when I signed up for their tv/internet service last June. It will only take me 3 months to get my money back in savings for the fee I will pay up front.

I have double checked and find that times have really changed in streaming tv for sports addicts such as myself. I've had Amazon Prime for a long time but never checked out their tv aspect and was amazed of all the free movies available. AppleTV has some great programing of their own and it looks like YouTube TV is going to get my monthly payment for all the channels I get on cable.

I'll keep Cox internet since it is a great service. After a few hours of some serious studying I have figured out how to put all of these ballgames and movies on my tv plus all my devices. A pretty simple process that I should learned months ago.

It's been too cold or wet to ride my bike outside, so I've been riding inside just to keep the lungs and legs in shape. I do have a few local trips planned but will do them next week. Heidi's vet appointment was moved from this afternoon to early Monday morning. It should be nothing more than getting her rabies shot which here is good for three years, not just one.

It's cold and sunny today in the 'Wild West'.

Hounds See Their First Arizona Snow

Snow was in our forecast for sometime after midnight. We had a winter advisory warning out until Saturday morning for areas above the 4,500' elevation. By the time we woke up on Friday morning that prediction of 3" of snow had changed to 2-5". It would be our first snow since moving to Arizona. It was expected more than a surprise because of the weather data research I had done before deciding to move the this great area. Believe me this is nothing compared to what we were used to. Although ... the hounds acted like they had been Arizona hounds their whole life.

Stella was nudging my hand sometime around 4:30am wanting me to get up. She didn't need to go outside, she wanted to eat breakfast. Without moving a muscle I told her to go back to sleep in the room filled with darkness. Luckily she obeyed and I was able to get another 35 minutes of sleep before Stella officially called it the start of the day ... she started howling at 5:05am ... in the dark.

That howling was the same one I hear in the afternoons if I am late feeding her lunch so I knew she was wanting to eat. It was the first time I ever heard her howling before we were up for the day. I hope this isn't her new routine ... even if it is only for a few weeks.

This will give you some idea what that howling looks like. This is from Wednesday when I returned from my Miller Canyon hike.  Once she starts howling then Heidi will join her by barking until the kibble is in their dishes.

Scanning the fence line this morning once it was daylight, as you can see the mountains we normally see were no where to be found and I did not see any signs of overnight snow. I started thinking the weather forecasters were not any different than the forecasters back in 'the tropics' of southern Indiana.

When I first glanced I thought my patio chair that was blown off the patio during the night might be filled with snow in the bottom. Those little white tabs on each chair leg looked like snow. I was wrong. Only white plastic pieces for the chair legs and that was nothing but rain on the chair. You can see a little snow residue on the blue towel. Nowhere near the 3" they talked about after midnight.

While I was back in the computer room I didn't realize the snow 'storm' had stated without me or the hounds. It was only when I got up to get more coffee did I see it was snowing outside. If we had a full day of this type of snowing I could see the 5" by the end of the day. It was going to get too warm to do that though. The scouting report I had about snow in this area, it is always gone by the end of the day.

After two attempts to go outside but immediately turning around on the patio to go back inside, Stella could no longer hold it and had to go out in the light snow fall to pee. Heidi ??? Not a chance. She did the immediate turn on the patio hours ago and was back on her bed in the deep corner of the bedroom sound to sleep. Both hounds had proved to me this morning, they were officially Arizona hounds.

Just for proof to text some out of state friends, I found the one place that had the deepest snow.

Some time during the morning she had moved from her bed to her other favorite sleeping spot in the computer room.

It wasn't 3 hours later I hear the water dripping from the rooftop. I look outside to see sunny blue skies and not a trace of snow in the yard. You can barely see the drops of water coming off the roof to the ground.

It looks like the foothills had some snow but all of this was much less than I expected.

It was a photo of a bird like this on a Facebook Group for The Wonders of Cochise County that I decided to try the Canon Power Shot SX70. I mentioned the other day in the right kind of light I get better results when zooming than I get on my Nikon D3500 70-300mm lens. If you look closely at the bird I think you will see the quality I am talking about.

Although the snow is gone, Heidi, Stella and I are dreaming for a day like this. Taken just a few days ago we all know it's possible to have some bright hot sunshine even when the temps are in the 50's. After all they are officially Arizona hounds and they LOVE sunshine.

If Heidi cannot get a good warm place outside to sleep in the sunshine after breakfast she will always find a warm sunny spot in her bedroom. She has a vet appointment tomorrow for an annual checkup, annual shots and hopefully a nail trim by one of the vet techs.

After getting serious about it, it was not really hard to connect my tv for the first time to my wifi. I could then access Amazon Prime Videos and found more free movies to watch than I had ever found on Cox Cable On Demand. I added a ton of them to my 'watch later list'. With my Best Buy award points that I had built up I only paid $29 for the 6Gb Apple Tv. I have that hooked up and am in the process of connecting it to some sports channels. Once I get that accomplished and see that I can watching the ballgames I want ... Cox TV will be canceled but I will keep their outstanding internet service.

Hard to believe we are just a few days away from 2020 (sounds weird) but that means we are also closer to warmer weather.

First now here in the 'Wild West' this morning.

Teasing Us With Spring

With it raining most of the day yesterday there just wasn't any chance of taking an afternoon walk, otherwise all three of us might have floated away while walking the path. Heidi came out late afternoon but only to relieve herself and then headed back inside. The warmer afternoon temperatures are nice but those overnight lows make it quite cold first thing in the morning.

So when Stella and I went out for our first morning walk in two days, the "feels like" temperature was 23° !!! The forecast is telling me it will get up to 51° later today and that is fine with me. With the wide range of temperatures in a 12 hour period, Spring is teasing us. I want to feel the heat of the sun, not just see its brightness.

Cold temperatures were not the start to our day though. That happened in the dark bedroom a little after 5am when I thought I heard bloodhound toenails pacing back and forth on the hardwood floor in the bedroom. It's a familiar sound and I knew Stella was wanting to go outside. I could hear her stomach making those gurgling sounds again and figured she would eat some grass to settle her stomach

With it freezing cold outside I wasn't going to accompany her, even with a coat. I wasn't planning on getting dressed to go outside and figured she would be back at the door to come inside within 10-15 minutes. With the announcement of Apple updating their macOS, it was a perfect time to download that 2.5Gb of data while I waited on Stella. It would be a total of 5Gb for my iMac and MacBook Air and with the free data period (2am-8am) it would be the perfect time to do the update.

I have noticed Safari is faster than before after that update. There were some updates to their built-in privacy internet program. I found it interesting that I had to give my computer permission to allow access to Google Mail or the other way arround. I had not seen that before anytime since October 2010. I only use my gmail address to log into my blog on Blogger.

With the moon in the southern sky, I had a passenger plane flying from the north. When I see plane traffic I always wonder what their destination is and what model of plane they are flying. I am around 70 miles south of the Indianapolis airport so I do get to see a lot of air traffic, especially at night.  I forgot to mention that within a few steps of our walk this morning my face and hands were freezing as if the temperatures were in single digits.

One good thing about the freezing temperature this morning, the wet soggy path was frozen hard enough to walk on. Just the little bit of sun you see up ahead turned that frozen path into over saturated softness and as we approached the back of the field there was standing water on the path in the two to three usual places.

When you miss a day of walking due to weather you can count on the strength and number of scents will keep Stella more than busy. Just after she made that first turn I didn't know if we would ever leave that area. To get from this picture to the one below where she was on the right side of the path, looking in her direction, it took half the total time we used to finish the walk. She wasn't eating deer scat, just thoroughly investigating what her nose was picking up.

She darted across the path as if she was onto something but it was a false alarm. Within seconds of the sudden change in direction, she was walking toward me.

I did look at the different WordPress Themes yesterday. They have added quite a few new blog designs, or what Blogger calls templates. I've never gotten use to the word theme that WordPress uses. Either I was too lazy to really look for something different or I had lost my urge to make any changes ... nothing happened and I doubt I looked longer than three or four minutes. I decided a late afternoon siesta was the better option.

My own test with grains, beans and wheat bread continued yesterday. I am still eating some of those foods until they are gone. I hate wasting food and I wanted to see what combination caused indigestion. I have confirmed it does not matter if it is normal Jif Peanut Butter or one that is a different brand with "natural" on the label ... I can no longer eat Peanut Butter of any kind.

David's Bread is a high quality organic wheat bread with grain and seeds ... sometimes I can eat it without issues and other times I am reaching for a Tums. I am cutting out all grains anyway, so that will take care of that problem.

I went to the US News & Word Report where a panel of medical experts test, analyze and rank over 40 different diets. I've looked there before in past years. Their latest review was this past January. They have never had anything good to say about Paleo or Keto. This morning I had a different idea. I wanted to look at three kinds of diet and pull off their macronutrient percentages.

The diets I looked at were Mediterranean, Flexitarian and Paleo. For a man my age the recommended daily calorie intake is 2,200 grams per day. That is an US recommendation not the panel of experts. I wanted to see what percentages were recommended for Protein, Fat and Carbs. After writing them down so I could look at them to compare the three diets, there were some pretty interesting results.

For those that don't know how to convert a percent of those three topics into grams of food allowed per day ... the formula is this:  calories times the percentage, divided by the number of grams for Fat, Protein and Carbs. There are 4 grams of carbs and protein per calorie. There are 9 grams of fat per calorie.

An example for a daily intake of 2,200 calories would be:

2,200 x .29 / 4 = 159.5 grams of Protein per day in the Mediterranean Diet. It did recommend to eat only 1,527 calories per day for a man my age, so the amount of protein would be reduced.

As I looked at the different limits by each type of diet, it all fell in line with the way I have been eating for a year or so. I call it "My Diet" because I take a little from each kind, overall. I have tried enough of these diets since 2014 that I know which veggies to buy, which fruits to eat if I want to lose weight and those I can add back if weight is not an issue. I know that most of my diet has been and will be fresh veggies and fruits with more salmon, trout or halibut than chicken or beef.

Some of those days will be meatless, mixed in, not intentionally but because there will be times I will want to eat some veggie recipes I have used in the past, like Spinach Lasagna. Once or twice per month I'll lean Keto/Paleo where it's only meat and veggies. Pizza or burgers on special occasions I guess.

I was about to give up all dairy products because the short time I have eliminated them, my winter cough has decreased and my sinuses are clear of mucus. Yet, there are too many articles that overlap different diets that consistently mention cottage cheese and greek yogurt as beneficial for gut health.

I have to watch it if I add those two because I am addicted to both cottage cheese and yogurt.

Yesterday was my first day in a long time of getting on my road bicycle that is attached to an indoor trainer, where I can ride inside. I am still feeling the soreness after an easy 30 minute ride. Stella sat and watched me, not sure what was going on. Heidi slept through all the excitement. For a while I plan to ride every other day inside and hopefully be in good enough shape by warmer weather in April to take 25-40 mile rides outside. The 40 mile ride use to be the daily norm after work, then a 100 mile ride one day on the weekend.

I am probably past the days of riding those 100 mile rides.

So things are pretty well set up I think as far as eating. I have some new things I want to do besides the to do list. I need to get in better shape because just the short hour of climbing, leaning around the bank along the driveway cutting small saplings had me sore for a couple of days.

I didn't watch the Apple announcements yesterday. I never do but always read the day after articles to see what they are going to do. Since they don't sell software like Microsoft does they have decided they have to make their billions somewhere else. People like me are not upgrading or buying a new iPhone. Once I read that their new version of Apple TV would not carry prime time sports, there was nothing for me.

From what I have read the past year, Apple TV is the best streaming service of all, but if I cannot use it to watch live games in football, baseball or basketball, then this Apple customer will not buy their Apple TV services.

Speaking of sports, besides a day of bright sunshine I will get to watch a Reds game this afternoon in Atlanta and then an IU basketball game tonight at 7pm. Fit in an afternoon hound walk, some steamed broccoli and baked salmon ... that is almost a perfect day.

It's good to see the tables have turned in D.C. All I can say is, payback is a bitch and I hope they nail every one of them involved. I hope Lindsey Graham gets his request for a special counsel to investigate those involved with the real corruption and those whom directed this mess.

How many of you have lost friends due to politics since pre-election 2016 ??

It's trying to get warmer here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana and that's a good thing.