Stella And I Tip Toe On The Walk

I keep reminding myself this is just a normal winter, that winter weather is NOT the same every year. From the history of my photos, sorted by day or a blog post written in the past, I can see consistent changes taking place about ever three years. Although I cannot remember off the top of my head the last time we had a major snow storm where schools were closed, highways were closed and the bread plus milk aisles at the grocery store looked like the last day on earth ... empty. I remember those types of storms happening a few times since I moved in this house in March 1998 but unless my memory is really in the failure mode, that type of snow has not happened in the past ten years.

But it wasn't snow that Stella and I were concerned with this morning ... it was the extremely saturated ground with standing water on the field path in spots, after some rain, temps near 40 melting the snow from Friday night and as we started our walk, little balls of sleet were hitting my dark blue down parka sleeve.

Here you can see how the light overnight rain depeleted a lot of the snow, only to have its evidence frozen with low overnight temps. As my North Face boots took each step through the yard you could hear a loud crunching of ice only to met by 'mud' ... not really mud but ground so soft I thought I was stepping in mud.

You can see here each step we took yesterday at the end of the walk has melted. Also it's interesting to me to see that up in the north yard, the bare grass is the exact spot that the underground water flows, even making that right turn ... I've only seen that path after I cut and cleared all the natural overgrown brush in that area a few years ago.

I took this picture of Stella not knowing  my camera was still on "landscape" mode, after I was checking some things out yesterday. I did intend for the flash to be on because it was that dark outside, even at 8:05am.

When I saw the flash show up on the image on the camera monitor, I turned if off ... this is the exact time I caught the camera in "landscape" mode instead of "auto no flash" mode.

As you can see, with bad weather yesterday and about 4 hours until kickoff for the first NFL Playoff game, I had time to 'play' with the blog template. If you checked the blog between 12:30pm and 3:30pm Saturday you may have seen 3 or 4 different designs I had published. I was close to what I wanted but was still looking and using up my internet data like a water faucet left on. Yes, I thought I loved the dark background, making my pictures stand out but there was just something about a white background I really like. I even caught myself seeing every sports website now moved to white backgrounds along with the news websites I saw a few weeks ago. I found my own eyes preferred the white background with black fonts better than my dark and light tan color font. Still at 3:27pm ... I was still looking through the long list of WordPress themes I could choose from.

Then there it was!! Had I seen this theme before? If so, why didn't I choose it. I had used some search terms I had not used before such as "clean", "one column" (I did use this prior) "grids" (I did use that prior) ... but this theme looked great before making any adjustments plus it had a feature I had never seen before. I could choose for the home page to be skinny, standard or wide. I could choose my blog post content to be skinny, standard, wide and wider. If I made the home page wider I'd have less columns and if I made my post pages extremely wide I had huge pictures for us that read the blog on large monitors. For those of use that use laptops, those pictures would fill the screen ... for the tablet and phone readers, it did not make any difference. I checked the new blog design on my laptop, iPad Mini and iPhone so I had some idea what the readers on those devices would see.

Unlike yesterday I saw a ton of deer tracks in the melting snow this morning and so did Stella. They had followed the edge of the woods up to the first turn. Then around the corner where Stella is always checking out their entrance to or from the woods, there were tracks coming out of the woods and following the edge of the gully heading east across the field to the back.

It's funny to see when Stella picks up her pace. It reminds me that she really does have a bloodhound nose and she isn't a 100% 'couch potato' ... a term a bloodhound breeder told me once. She separated her puppies with a test at 45 days old and could tell who the 'trackers' were and who the 'couch potatoes' were. I have never bought a puppy from her but at the time I was talking to her about some issues Sadie was having as a puppy. I did not get Stella until she was 6 years old

If that isn't an overcast day I don't know what is. The temp is hovering around the 40° mark so most of the white stuff will be gone by tomorrow. I must admit I like the pictures I take in the spring, summer and fall from this vantage point. There is just something about bare trees I don't care for. At least when I lived in Washington, it might rain a lot in the winter and get dark by 4pm or earlier but those pine trees are always green.  :)

While I walked softly along the wet path, Stella had been tip toeing most of the way as if she didn't want to get her feet wet. She will walk around puddles of water near the house or on the carport floor, here I have her in 7 acres of puddles this morning.

Here you are looking at 4 stages of weather .... snow from Friday night ... residue of ice from last night ... tiny holes of rain drops from last night and then frozen overnight ... and standing water from the warmer temps Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.

Although in recent months, she has never taken off north toward those woods or even tried to escape on the worn ATV path made in the summer of 2017 ... she glances that way at times wondering either "what if ... " or "I remember when ..."

Stella is walking in the exact same steps she took yesterday ... she even veered left to walk parallel ... can you see where veered turned left?

With that left paw held up, that just shows you how slow she was walking with each step as the path got wetter. Super slow-motion. Tip toe through 'the tulips' ... wasn't that a song many years ago??

I've been feeling lighter this week. How can I tell? Two ways ... by what I bought and snack on since Thursday plus how much easier it is to fasten my jeans. I always find out that I can no longer eat breads in any form. It doesn't matter if it is wheat, sourdough, rye ... it's bread and my body craves it like candy when it's in the house. I also know that a 1/2c of pasta sauce isn't enough, nor is the 1c of 'dry' pasta ... even fact the word pasta can only be eaten about once per month and only in the recommended serving size on the jar or bag. I was looking through the list of diets by USNews the other day for their 2019 ratings. At #4 was something called the Flexitarian Diet ... I found out I'd had been following that for the past 5 years more or less. That is mostly veggies and fruits, eggs, seafood, chicken and then an OCCASIONAL burger at 5Guy's or that Stromboli at Nick's.

Yet that doesn't help me lose weight. And .... I'm not really dieting but just finding the best way to eat for the rest of my life ... of course open to changes as I get older.

I keep thinking about writing and posting my review of the Apple Watch I bought a little over a week ago or has it been two weeks already .. not sure. I still love it as much as I mentioned the last week. I still consider it one of my best if not the best electronic purchases I've ever made. I did a lot of research before I bought it. I also talked to an online friend who bought hers last year for health reasons. She emailed me a couple of days ago with an update about the watch, with some news you could almost consider negative as far as the watch goes but very positive that she is okay.

She has atrial fibrillation (A-fib) and that can be picked up by the Apple Watch Series 4. This newer model is supposed to detect when you fall, then automatically call 911 if that person whom has fallen does not respond in a certain amount of time by pressing a button on the watch. She fell, and passed out but that was not detected by the Apple Watch plus it did not call 911 as it was designed to do. Test reports stated it was very accurate in detecting a fall and if you had A-fib. Luckily her husband was at the house and found her soon enough to call for medical help. She did say the watch DID detect that she had a A-fib episode.

Fall Detection is one of the reasons I decided to buy the watch since I live alone. As I said when I wrote about it a few Fridays ago .. I don't think I will ever be in that situation, but you never know. If I would fall and the watch did NOT detect it, I guess I would be in the same situation as if I had not bought it. So nothing lost really ... I still love the additional information the watch gives me and the different ways it provides that information.

I have two more NFL Playoff games to watch today. I did not finish watching the second game last night. It was not that late but the urge to sleep was greater than wanting to watch the game. I guess that is what I get when Stella thinks I should get up every day at 5am. Only today, she let me sleep late. In fact I had to wake her and Heidi up to go outside a little past 7am.

I know you have heard me say this many times over the 7+ years of blogging on this blog, either here on WordPress or over on Blogger. I really like this current theme and am pretty sure this is the final design. I DO have one more option to check out. It is on this same theme.
I can add a sidebar either on the home page, the post page or bothI can only add to the footer, a sidebar is not an option I found out I had two options, in the footer but only two columns wide or on the single post page BUT only after the post BEFORE the comments section So I chose in the footer so the comments section is just below the post ... a sidebar would let me list those other blogs or websites I like to follow, the most visited posts or pages for those first time blog visitors, maybe a few favorite pictures, or the link to my new Flickr account that I keep forgetting I set up a few weeks ago.

That will be the only change that MIGHT HAPPEN ... a sidebar added ... IF I decide I want that information within a click away.

The Question of the Day ... why does Stella always whine or howl when I sneeze or when I am trying to break the record for the most consecutive sneezes in a row?

It's Sunday, the snow is melting, the hounds are laid-back like always, my coffee was good and my Apple Watch battery has lasted longer active than the 18 hours they told me it would. NFL games on today with some college basketball, good food available, a fairly clean house for a single hermit and a 'toy' list that is once again blank.

It's all good today in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Retirement Life Is Easy !!!

I can get use to this great weather very easily. Just like retirement, it's another great day not to jump in that line of traffic 'flying' by the driveway and join them for another day at work. That is probably one thing I have never gotten tired of as I approach my 5th year ... FREEDOM !!! It is so much different to wake and start your day not having to follow a schedule. I can do what I want like the hounds do. Heidi and Stella basically dictate most of my schedule.

Even though the weather was great this morning for Stella and I on the walk, Heidi needed some extra sleep time. She did get up like we all do, had her breakfast kibble and then went back to bed. She likes to scratch the sleeping bag and blankets into the perfect spot before circling three times and laying down. She slept late today because I was up too late last night (2:36am) changing and fine tuning the blog.

I also found out this morning that the actual time on the clock isn't what dictates what Stella wants, such as her walk ... it is based on when she wakes up, and has her breakfast. For example, this morning we didn't start the day until 7:52am, much later than normal. So with her walk set to take place eight minutes after she woke up .... instead she went in the dark bedroom to sleep on the floor right after her breakfast (normal routine) ... an hour later she woke up, drank water to let me know to prepare for our walk.

Starting with this photo here I clicked on the screen in back of the camera to take the photos instead of using my view finder. Three reasons for that. One, I wanted to find out if my hands were really shaking during these morning photos that seem just a tad blurry to me. I wanted to see how hard it might be, since I have rarely taking photos like that. I will discuss the 3rd reason Friday or Saturday. :)

I was surprised actually how well the photos turned out with me not using the view finder. I also found out my hands are not shaking when taking the photos BUT when I pushed the shutter I noticed a few times that I was pushing in a way that my camera would tilt just a little to the lower left. It made me also wonder if my head against the view finder was a factor in moving the camera ever so slightly.

I have also been wondering if Stella's supplement, the VetriScience GlycoFlex Plus, was working or not. She is into her second bag. This morning I found out that the supplement really was working. She was running fast enough that at times I couldn't raise my camera fast enough to catch her running. By the end of the walk as she stepped into the yard, she ran and jumped into me wanting to play like she use to do with Sadie. We wrestled for a short time but there was no way I could take a photo of her with any kind of camera.

Stella was in what I call her tracking mood this morning. She spent a lot of time on the move with her nose to the ground. I let her go on her own and followed her after we made that turn at the corner of the woods.

I soon found out that she was going to lead me diagonally across the field. I had a hard time keeping up with her and for a few seconds I thought she might take off on me and head to the woods to the north. She did that a few years ago and I eventually found her in the woods. Sadie would always find her before I would.

With the 200mm zoom I was able to find her in the tall grass.

You can barely make out the worn path ahead of her made by deer traffic.

As she lagged behind me on the return path home, as I turned to get my camera ready to hopefully take a photo of her running ... she was already passing me on a full-speed run.

It was up to her whether we take the path that ends up at the north property pole by the yard, or take a left and follow the old path used for 20 years back to the house. This morning she headed left ... the scent was just too strong for her to pass up.

Verbal herding was needed here. Then some louder tone to let her know I wasn't a happy camper when she ignored me. She lifted her head to stare at me as if I was crazy, then slowly walked home.

Tuesday afternoon I decided to use only my iPhone 8+ camera. It does well with low light, close-ups and the 2x zoom ... but nothing more than that. I thought I took more photos than these two but college football must have shaded my memory from yesterday. Neither of these photos were edited in any way, straight from the iPhone.

I will be fine tuning the look of the blog today. Barney was nice enough to give me some feedback about the font color, something I wasn't keen on either. I fixed that but there are a few other things I want to fix that will require me to read to find my answer or use the free WordPress chat where their techie will give me the correct answer within minutes.

My priority is finding a way that all of the thumbnail photos on the home page are all the same size. When I inspected the element of the home page it shows the correct size is 200x200. So I have to find a way that any photo I add as a feature photo will be that size. In writing that I just figured out what I need to do, to make that happen.

My brain is on fire today with correct answers ... maybe it's the new year eh?

I signed up for and get the notices from USPS telling me the mail they are delivering that day or within the next few days. It makes a world of difference because in past years I knew I was losing some mail because I was getting too much mail in my mailbox belonging to my neighbors.

Today USPS is reminding me that society thinks I am old. I see the four pieces of mail I am getting today are for hearing aids, life insurance, funeral insurance and joint supplements. All will be thrown into the recycling bin after I take my name and mailing address off.

Since synchronizing my Garmin Connect app with the food MyFitnessPal app ... the food app is now adjusting how many calories I am allowed to eat, plus or minus my 1500 that I manually entered ... if I am not getting the amount of exercise that it believes I should be getting, based on previous activity ... it subtracts a certain number of calories from the 1500 for that day.

Some are reading this and saying "I don't count calories" or "That is not needed" ... but in my case it is. When I don't track the food that I am eating and counting calories I GAIN WEIGHT FASTER THAN EVER !! Plus it's like playing with spreadsheets I guess, in a sick way.

I still have the big urge for pizza and ice cream ... will I "fall off the wagon today?"

I just remembered since the font is now 'bone white' ... I will need to figure out how to change the color of a 'link' so when I do add links into my post you will be able to see them BEFORE you hover your cursor over them.

Well we are a little behind in our normal routine today ... the hounds are still sleeping and not howling or barking for lunch. Based on what I have seen so far, they will not want lunch until around 12:30pm local time, about an hour or so after their normal request.

I TRIED WATCHING SOME TV NEWS THIS MORNING ... 'tried' is the keyword there. By the time it took me to walk from my computer in a different room to the tv remote in the living room I turned it off mumbling to myself "I'm not going to waste my time with that shit."  (noticed how I tucked that period inside the quotation mark)  LOL

Well busy day ahead today in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

The Changes Continue With Me

It was a day of changes Saturday as I made a couple of mistakes that I mentioned in my previous post. A lot of them were blog changes but some of the small changes with me still continued into this morning. I guess it's one of those moments where my brain might be in the overdrive mode, where I cannot make up my mind what I want in the blog design. Plus I can't make up my mind on what to do on anything. No big deal, this is a common occurrence with me.

I am going to try something different on this post, let me know how you like it. I am going to put a little commentary about the photos listed and will wait until the end to write what's on my mind or as I call it ... 'rambling'.



It was still fairly dark this morning just like the past two days. I planned on waiting until 9:00am before starting the walk but Stella had other ideas. I heard her walk across the hardwood floor in the bedroom from her 'after breakfast' nap. That plan of waiting an hour was gone as she stood at the doorway of my computer room, whining. It was 8:03am, her normal time.

She was in the tracking mode again this morning. Signs of deer traffic were all over the field. I could see fresh hoof prints that had dug into the ground through the thick grass. I like these mid-40's temperatures so early in the morning, with only two days before Christmas.

This warm weather isn't something new. It was Christmas Day just three years ago where Winston sat outside looking for snow and wondering why it was so warm. He had become paralyzed from the middle of his back and rear legs just six days prior. To this day it is still a kick in the gut when I think about it.

Instead of trying to keep Stella on or near my path, I decided today I would follow her. Her nose was right on point, in the middle of deer tracks, with those hoof prints I mentioned but also a couple of other signs I'll get to.

I am not a deer hunter, nor a deer expert but I am assuming with the way the tall grass was pressed so close to the ground, that is a place where a deer might have laid down to sleep? I'm serious when I ask that because I have no clue. I know my answer is just a few keystrokes and clicks away if I asked that same question on DuckDuckGo image search. I thought I'd show just how little knowledge I have when it comes to any kind of wildlife.

Here is another more prominent 'bed', only this time the grass looked like it was almost damp compared to the grass around it. Something had been laying here an hour or two before we got there. You can see the two hoof prints, looking as if it dug in as the deer tried to stand up.

A poor quality photo but shows that Stella is on the move. That is rare for her and I can assure you she will not move that fast on any afternoon walk. Never

I tried getting as far ahead as possible  so I could possibly get a photo of her running. By the time I turned she was already running at me and she was so quick I barely got this photo and the one below.

Obviously she wanted to get way ahead of me.

As I walk on the path you can barely see on the right edge of the photo, towards home, this small path crosses both of our paths moving left to right in this picture. It is the deer path from the woods, across the field, to the woods behind my neighbor's house.

As we slowly make our way home ... Stella isn't done with her exploration. Too many scents to smell and catalog in her computer database called 'the bloodhounds brain'.

I knew something was strange when she abruptly moved from the center of the field heading to the backyard over to the path I take back home. She rarely does that, so something is up.

While taking some other photos of the woods, sky and my house roof I did not notice she had moved left of the path into the "land of burs". This is blurry but will give you some idea what those burs look like attached to her coat.

I was trying to hold her with one hand and take a photo with the Nikon D3200 in my other hand. She was covered with them on the other side. She thought she was going inside with all of them attached. :) :) :)

Just like I said I would yesterday, after the IU game was over a little after 8pm, I slid back into my desk chair to play around in the blog "dashboard", looking for that 3-column theme and photos just as big if not bigger when the post is opened up to read. At least you can sort or filter the 300+ themes to choose from by what you want. Not in detail but just some basic things. I tried this ... "3-columns, page-wide images". The number of themes to look at went from over 300 to 86.

Long story short, by 12:35am I had a theme I thought I liked. It was soooo much different from this one but it did have the two things I wanted, 3-columns listing 9 past posts on the homepage and images that were even larger than what you see here Sunday.
(as of 10:18am)
Yet as I looked it over there was just something I didn't like. Was it the all black background or that the three columns did not line up exactly perfect because some of the thumbnail photos were different sizes? Stuff like that drives me crazy, similar to a crooked picture on the wall ... anybody's wall.

With the lights turned off, computer turned off and both hounds asleep, my overactive brain was wide awake and still working at warp speed. 15 minutes later I jump out of bed, lights on, computer on .... yes, I was changing the theme back to what I had at 8pm Saturday and right now (unless I change it again Sunday). {I changed it a little after 2pm on Sunday}  Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!

With the different theme design I had to quickly edit my last nine posts, taking out the feature image, then installing the 'excerpt' so the posts would be summarized on this themes homepage. This morning with some help from the Wordpress techies I was able to install some CSS code to remove the categories that were above the titles of each individual post.

Here is the 'sick' thing with me. The blog looks good to me. It's easy to read, it's bright and easy to navigate BUT .... I still have a small urge but big enough to have me look at other blog themes (design) and possibly make changes today. Somebody take my computer away from me!!!

Oh, that is not all I can't decide on. That slight confusion of never making my mind up occurred all day Saturday. I went back to logging in all my food, at least for now. This morning I brought out the small container of granulated sugar for two level teaspoons per cup of coffee. (interesting results).

Those results were immediate and surprising. I tried the sugar again because I didn't want to wait for a month or a year to see if there was a difference. I found out something before I even finished my second cup of coffee. By adding that sugar I was feeling a little indigestion. Enough to notice the difference from the past four to five days. I'll not be using sugar anymore in my coffee, nor will I buy anymore granulated sugar nor substitutes.

I even thought about starting a new blog that was subject specific ... sports!!! What am I or was I thinking ???? It has to be the 'winter mentality' that keeps me in front of this monitor bouncing from one idea to the next while I am doing something else. I need outdoor projects to do.

At least the hounds are sane and keep to their routines without much change. They are mentally stable and know what they want, what they like, etc. They don't bounce from idea to idea. They only get confused if it is raining outside and they have to dump their tanks. Their eating habits and sleeping habits never change although the spots they sleep might.

Hmmmmm do I post this now or wait until tonight with pictures of Heidi. I can do what I use to ... post mid-morning and then include any afternoon photos on tomorrows blog. See, it's questions like that make me move in circles. Don't ask what I want to eat for lunch, I have no idea and if I did I would not be able to decide. How screwed up is that?

It's
the last daythe 16th week of 17 weeks of the regular season in the NFL. I'll watch the Colts today and all the playoffs. I have yet to watch a College bowl game because none of the match-ups interested me. It looks like I'll start watching them about every day/night starting December 26th until the final National Championship game. That will stabilize my brain a little to where I will not have time to be making blog changes but I will have time to publish a blog post.

No worries, it's all good today here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.