For Those That Follow & Read My Blog

I apologize for all of this movement the past 6 days but I am making another change and one for the better.  The new domain is good for 2 years until the renewal (automatic). One of the main reasons for the move to a domain away from Wordpress FREE blog .com is below.

Due to all the advertising you saw on my blog put on there by Wordpress, I am in the process of getting rid of those by attaching a domain name .com to this site with Wordpess Premium Plan.  In fact those should be gone right now just by me buying the Premium Plan. Until I connect this blog to my new domain name you will still be able to see the site with bhounds3blog.wordpress.com

IF and WHEN that domain name will not work .... the new domain name for the blog will be:

houndsandotherstuff.com

Yes, that is the blog title or was the blog title to my old Blogger blog, but I changed that title last night by adding a "B" in front of it.

For those that link my blog to your sidebar on your blog ... I'll notify you when the new domain works and the current domain name doesn't.

Thanks for your patience scrolling through all of those advertisements these past 6 days and still came back to read the blog. So many advertisements.

I was aware there would be advertisements because I had their free account. Until a friend told me how many there were and how many I saw after I logged out of my Wordpress account and came to the website ... I didn't know there were so many.

Email me if you have any questions.

My Blog Is Moving

From now on I will be posting on my other blog at Hounds And Other Stuff on Wordpress. Yes, that is the old name of this blog and was changed for certain reasons. If you notice I added a B to the title of this blog.

I will leave this blog active and public for those that want to see past photos or read past articles. You will be able to follow my new blog either by email or if you are a Wordpress user there will be a follow button where you will get my updated post in your Wordpress Reader.

For those that do not wish to go with the move, thank you for visiting this blog over the years.

In case you do not see the link to click in the first sentence you can click here to see the new blog.

Stella Had A Perfect Day Yesterday

The move was so quiet, few noticed. No, not Stella ... the blog!  I was going to wait and then I decided not to. I had everything I needed updated, except the comments made on the WordPress Blog. Now there is a thought I just had ... hmmm, no don't even think about it.

Anyway, I could have copied and pasted all of the comments from the old blog I guess, but there were hundreds of them. Plus there wasn't a way of bringing your user name and blog link in that transfer. With a working converter that was required, comments would have come along for the ride.

I can live with it.

Next came the color and design of the older blog. I was planning to keep it but you know what happens when I have too much time on  my hands. It was not intentional but when I was finished, the blog template in Blogger looked almost like the theme I used on WordPress. I don't miss the header image the other blog had. My other sidebar had about 40 photos from the past. Some readers liked it, I liked it ... so I added a page at the top of this blog with some of those same photos listed. I will add more as I remember what I had listed before.

The redirect of the domain name was  painless and took just minutes before the .net address started transferring all visitors to the new residence. If you want, you can change all of your bookmarks back to the www.houndsandrvs.com. You don't have to because the .net side of the house will bring you to the same website. Even my old blogspot domain will bring you to the blog.

It's good to have everything, 4+ years of history under the same roof again, if you know what I mean.

Stella Stella Stella ... what a mystery.

The tests continued yesterday, keeping her in the room with Sadie and shutting the door. All tests were different amounts of time. I drove off a few times for short trips. All of the periods of time she was confined in the bedroom were short. Each time I opened the door to let her out ... there was zero damage. She was awarded in a positive way. Yes, dog treats were involved. Heidi and Sadie approved of the payoff method for Stella's training. I am beginning to think that all three hounds are hoping I leave more often now.

By early evening I needed to restock the kitchen. It was a short trip, a little over an hour. I quietly walked to the door when I returned not hearing a sound. I knew that both bloodhounds would be at the door waiting for it to open. It's the bloodhound way, with each one wanting to be the first one out the door.  I was expecting the worse ... nada ... not one piece of evidence she had been upset or frustrated while I was gone. She didn't even move the heavy chest of drawers to dig at the wall. There were no signs anywhere she had been upset.

Don't get me wrong ... I was thrilled with perfect results. It's just mystifying. What is getting her so upset at different times, different periods of time, to go crazy and tear stuff up? Living in the country means no pedestrian traffic walking by the house. Animals are not usually seen on this end of the house. The squirrels, the birds, an occasional rabbit are always seen on the south end of the house or opposite from where she is located.

Claustrophobic?  It seems like if she were, then every time she was shut up in a room 12'x15', then the results would be the same. I mean Stella can't be claustrophobic just certain days of the week.

The training will continue with positive reinforcement, even if it's nothing more than the time it takes me to walk down the driveway to the mailbox and back. On those trips I let her run the house but I also raise the blinds in the living room so she can see out the window. She looks at me every step of the way.

No matter what, Stella is and has been a great bloodhound since she arrived August 30, 2015. She has been great for Sadie, who didn't realize how strong she was as she tried playing with Winston or Heidi. She was leery at first when Stella arrived but they have been basically inseparable since that first day.

A few months back I mentioned I would start showing photos of the hounds I have had in the past, along with a short story about them. I had my first basset hound in 1987. I moved to this house in 1997 and since that time, I've had more basset hounds and bloodhounds than I ever planned on. The number of hounds at one time would range from 2-4 but most of the time 3 hounds seemed to be the common number. Many passed on at young ages due to cancer. Most lived to be 9-12 years old, but a few didn't.

Max was my first adoption from GABR in 1999. He was located in Peru, Indiana about 4 hours north of me. From the one photo supplied I just thought he was a basset and the size of car didn't matter. It almost was a bad bad mistake. Max was the biggest basset hound I had ever seen. They said he was 100% basset, but he was huge, way outside the AKC specs. The car I chose to drive that night in the middle of the week was small ... like really small ... a Miata, a 2-seat sports car.

As he walked out into their living room to meet me, the lady told me "he doesn't eat his dog food (Purina) unless you put cottage cheese on it". I found out the next day at the vet's office, that combination of cottage cheese on top of his Purina Dog Chow had him weighing in at 83lbs. He couldn't walk 30' in the backyard without sitting down to take a break. The daily hound walk was the same in 1999 as it was yesterday in 2016.

I took him off of the cottage cheese diet immediately, moved him to some quality dry kibble and walked him daily ... while slowly building up his distance without taking breaks. A couple of years later I had him down to 62lbs where he stayed the next 7 years. Of course being a lot longer than I had planned and heavier ... it was fairly exciting fitting him into the passenger seat of the 2-seat Miata.

I still had to shift the 6-speed manual transmission and that stick shift was now located somewhere under his right shoulder for most of the drive home. He slept most of the 4 hour drive with his butt pressed up against the passenger side door, shoulders across the console/gearshift and his head either on my knee or hanging down on the driver's side foot area.

It wasn't long after his arrival in the 'tropics' of Southern Indiana, I noticed one day that he was trying to walk back inside the house but was 8' to the left of the door. My suspicions were confirmed the next day ... Max was 100% blind at 5 years of age.

That didn't slow him down though. For the next 7 years he took the daily walk. He played with Arthur and later decided he new friend Winston wasn't a bad basset hound to hang out with.

Max's eyes didn't work but his nose was stronger than ever

Blind and leashed he still liked getting his running in

Winston's uncle Arthur would always give Max a lot exercise chasing him

That's Max, Winston and Bertha enjoying a hot fall day in the 'tropics' of Southern Indiana

The temps have dropped this morning to feeling very cold but it's still high 30's and we have yet to see a lot of days of single digit temperatures. It's been a good winter so far in the 'tropics' of Southern Indiana.

A New Week Brings New Ideas

It’s beautiful here this morning. The temperatures have dropped into the high 40’s but it feels good outside with just a jacket. The hounds and I kind of took the day off yesterday after posting about Stella’s separation anxiety. That post brought a lot of ideas and thoughts in my email inbox. A few good ideas in the comments here. Even one very long phone call that started with Stella and ended up with Heidi as the topic.



I just realized looking at the title of this blog post — It’s NOT Monday!!! It’s Wednesday!!!  LOL

Doesn’t matter, I still have some new ideas floating through my always active brain cells. There is nothing major with those ideas, nothing life changing. Just a lot of thoughts that get through my filters that cause me to pause and really think about them.

Last night I spent watching not only my IU team shock their fans with the basketball game in Ann Arbor MI, but also watched another game after that one. That 2nd game didn’t start until after 11pm local time.

Trying to decide where I start today … different subjects are going to be covered in this post, I can tell that already … from Stella, Heidi, to blogging, and even WordPress vs Blogger. I might end up throwing a few other one liners in the mix also.

 I’ll start with not online blogging .. but the negative side of blogging.

When you decided to leave yourself open to all kinds of opinions from people you have never met and probably never will in most cases … there comes to a point in time where you ask yourself is it really worth blogging publicly? Can a blogger get the same satisfaction and reap the benefits of writing, in a ‘private’ journal?

In a strange way, I think of blogging at times as if I am standing down by the busy US highway in front of my house, passing out a book with descriptions and photographs of my life to every passing car and truck … Very very few of them do I personally know. That's the way blogging seems to me at times. Strange??

Over the past couple of months, my email inbox seems to be seeing an increase in emails from the anonymous readers to the experts in all areas of life. They like to let me know exactly what I should or shouldn’t do in my life … from the hounds to retirement living. They have all the answers and don’t hesitate in voicing them.

I even caused a “storm” just by moving MY blog to a different platform and then a few days later to a different server.

I’ve never been one that puts up with a lot of crap and I usually discard it as useless and move on. At times I feel the same way about blogging. I’ve followed my own ideas, my own path from a very young age and will continue to do so, always. Let’s just say that when I get tired of putting up with the negative side of blogging … is when I think of going into settings and clicking that box for “private”.

That’s where I am now.

By nature I have always been a private person. I even debated with myself in 2011 just what and how much I would write about. Like anything else, blogs change over time, following a different direction as it sees as the correct path.

Today, I am not sure which direction that path is going to be but I am fed up with some aspects of blogging.

 Now onto a lighter subject but heavily discussed.

A lot of good ideas about Stella. Some of them are going to be strongly thought about and tried, others have already been trashed. It is interesting to wonder what is her ‘trigger’ point? A question came up yesterday … is it really separation anxiety or does Stella just have a case of being claustrophobic?

I had never thought of it that way.

I do know when I did a test with her in my very small bathroom yesterday and the door closed with the light on … she was howling like never before. She was very upset and very happy when I opened the door. Yet when I did the same test with her in the bedroom, a place she always stays when I am gone, with Sadie beside her … she was perfectly quiet. I even walked outside to listen for any barking or howling. There was none.

Yes, Stella is left with every bone and every Kong ball possible, filled with either peanut butter, cream cheese or a dry dog treat … hopefully to keep her from becoming bored. You have to remember though, there is another bloodhound in that same room following the Bloodhound Property Laws and thinks those same bones, Kong balls and food are just as much her’s as Stella’s.

I don’t know who wins but when I return home, all of those scattered bones and balls are all in one neat pile … as if one of them were protecting “their” stuff.

After 30 minutes, I glanced in the window from the outside of the house … she was sleeping next to Sadie. Whereas Monday night she was digging her way out of that same room within a 12 minute period.

There will be more reading today, more tests and a few ideas readers suggested will be bought and tried. I will continue to leave her alone in that room with Sadie and slowly build up the amount of time I am gone … to see if we can get back to where she was before November 22, 2015.

 Heidi is a different situation. Four different vets have not been able to figure out what is going on with her in the past 16 months. Different dog foods have been tried from grain free to kibble with rice and barley. I basically can say that everything has been tried except canned dog food, raw dog food and Purina Dog Chow.

Based on dated photos, and a daily record on an Excel spreadsheet … it is not a seasonal issue with her skin, here in the country. A few readers plus some local friends agree that it is something physical, and possibly emotional.

On the negative side of blogging that I spoke of earlier … one particular email received recently accused me of abusing Heidi. I think one of her comments were “she is nothing but skin and bones and that proves to me she is being abused’. Those are the people I would LOVE to meet face to face.

It is also when I really wonder if blogging is worth it.

Once the weather gets warmer, I am going to try some things with Heidi and see if I can get her back to her old self. As far as the food, it will stay the same. Also, no medication will be used just like I have done since May 2015. She is going into the vet this week to get her thyroid checked, as that is something I have not tried and was suggested at the vet office.

She is happy though. She is back to sprinting around the living room when she comes back inside after her first trip of the day outside. She has even added some afternoon sprinting … but only if it’s sunny.

 Now … onto the subject of WordPress vs Blogger.

It’s already been almost 3 weeks since I moved from Blogger to WordPress. That included a week where I moved from the ‘free’ side of WordPress to the side where I needed my own host for the blog. That host will have to be paid monthly or I could pay a year in advance … low-cost really for all that it does.

I read all the ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ of each blog platform before making the move. After 3 weeks I have come up with some of my own. I still am undecided.

I like working with WordPress. I like all the different themes I could and can choose from. I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t have the options to change EVERYTHING that I wanted on the free themes, unless I paid for the WordPress Premium Package. The templates in Blogger are plain, old-looking but even being free, I could change everything with my own design … without being a computer geek that can write code or change the css.

The dashboard is similar to each. I haven’t found anything plus or minus with either Blogger or WordPress. With choosing a paid website host there is more work to maintain the blog, with adding plugins to not only get your site work but also protect your site from being hacked. Being a website on your own server has more chance of being hacked into rather than a free blog on either platform but on their servers.

I do know that both of my blogs, like all of yours, are constantly being “attacked” looking for the unlocked door so they can get in.

I must admit that even though I like all the ‘themes’ to choose from in WordPress, I still like my old blog design on Blogger. Each has their own features that I like, as well as don’t like.

I mentioned a few weeks ago and some readers agreed with me, that the photos were much sharper and clearer on WordPress vs Blogger. They also enlarged to the original size on WordPress.

That was until I moved from the ‘free side’ of WordPress to the side of my own domain and server, using the WordPress platform. I then noticed my photos didn’t enlarge as big as they did on the free side. Also, the quality was no longer that sharp, clear look that WordPress showed before. They are right now the same quality as Blogger.

In the Photo Library or the “Media Library” as WordPress calls it … I like the way the most recent photos uploaded are on top. What I don’t like is they import the photos out of order. That is hard to work with when you want a certain order when posting the photos on the blog post.

On the Blogger side, I don’t like that all the recent photos are moved to the bottom of the screen. In some cases that is a lot of photos to scroll through to get to the ones you want to post. Blogger does post the photos in the order you chose them and they also upload the photos in order that you export them. That is something that I really like and put as a priority.

Currently I am not sure I will stay with paying for a self hosted server. I am not even sure I will stay with WordPress. Because of that indecision, yesterday afternoon before I started watching basketball on tv, I moved my Blogger blog to ‘private’ status, then I started and completed late last night, copying and pasting all 33 new posts from WordPress to my old blog. That also included uploading all the required photographs.

Crazy?

Maybe not. I found that there was a converter needed even after exporting your WordPress blog file and before importing that same .xml file into Blogger. That converter was no longer available and many websites that had that converter were no longer in existence. One forum tech rep, suggested copying and pasting all the posts you wanted to move IF you had the time. I have nothing but time.

It was faster to do than I thought it would be to finish and I even fit a little over 3 hours of watching college basketball games last night, before I finished the job.

IF I decide to move again, there will be nothing announced nor anything that YOU have to do … I’ll just redirect that new .net domain to the servers on Blogger. You will click your bookmark or favorite and the old blog will show up … updated with all the WordPress posts.

But then again … I might change the template design on that old blog also.

After all, “A new week brings new ideas” … even if it is Wednesday (hump day) !!

That’s all I have to say today, from the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana.

An Enjoyable Monday

An enjoyable Monday … those three words were rarely spoken in the years that I worked. Sure, I’d have good days at work, even Mondays, but starting the night before on Sunday I would always seem to dread the thought of going to work on Monday. That was different last night because I was sure of what I wanted to do today and by early afternoon if not before, I had finished what I planned on.

That plan was moving my blog once again from the WordPress free side to my own domain. So I have two domains, the same name except one ends in .com and this one ends in .net. That is something I’ve been thinking about doing for over the last couple of years.

I am already finding it much easier to come to one site, load images, post and do any of the editing work I need to do in the background. I’ve updated some pages that are located on the red banner across the blog. It was also easier to download images from my Apple Photos program into just one folder instead of four different folders, so they could be uploaded into this blog.

Just a couple of days ago setting up each of the hounds with their own blogs, they had their own folders for their blog photos to be uploaded into their blogs. I’ve always had separate folders for them in iPhoto and Photos.

Needless to say I have not heard even one objection from Sadie, Stella and even Heidi about losing their blogs. They must be okay with the new arrangement. At times I’ll add their ‘point of views’ to my blog post that day. They are still opinionated, still demanding at times and still spoiled. They will enjoy the additional time they will get with me spending less time on only 1 blog instead of 4 blogs.

With the temperature starting the day in the upper 30’s, it felt like spring had arrived compared to the single digit temps less than a week ago. Sadie, Stella and I started an afternoon walk but the ground had become so saturated with the above freezing temperature, it was very soft and muddy. We turned back to the house after only a few steps into the walk. Back inside they were given a couple of treats for wasting their time and letting me clean the mud off their paws.

Heidi? She didn’t do anything outside her normal routine of sleeping. She headed outside mid-afternoon and this is the only photo I was able to get of her. She is fast when she goes out and back in, rarely ‘posing’ for a photo. For concerned readers, she has gained a few pounds since her weight loss last summer. She is being fed twice per day and twice the amount recommended on the dog food bag. She saw the vet just last week for her annual check up. The vet is looking at some other possible causes for her weight loss, otherwise Heidi tested out “a healthy basset hound with a strong heart and a nice soft shiny coat”.

Sadie and Stella are still finding a lot of new scents to smell since the snow has melted yet that also leads to potentially new things for them to eat. It’s stuff that I don’t want them eating. Maybe I should just say heck with it and don’t look as they are gobbling down their fiber found in the field.  :)

No matter what, they always come running to the house when I yell anything about ‘eating’ or just the words ‘milk bone’.

Although the clouds became dark as the afternoon progressed, the winds picked up, it was still high 40’s today in the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana.

All The Snow Disappeared

As you can probably tell from the previous post today, I’ve spent most of the day online trying to fix the problem with photos on the blog, along with editing photos on my computer, and the occasional games of fetch with Sadie inside.

I could see the bright sun shining through the windows into the house. I knew it was in the 40’s around noon when I was out last with the hounds. With my focus on getting this blog fixed plus some design work … I wasn’t paying attention to outside. When I get up to get something to eat I notice the driveway and the front yard are clean, no snow. I look in the backyard and the snow was gone in 99% of it. So I grabbed my camera and took the following shots.

It wasn’t 40’s any more … try 56°

The hounds were so shocked they never left the top of the driveway.

I will say there are a couple of things I don’t like about the WordPress blog. I know to most readers it’s probably nothing but it drives me nuts. That picture in front of the 1st paragraph is always a half a character lower than the top of the word. Also I cannot spell check before I post but I can when I edit the post….????

The next thing I don’t like and there isn’t a fix, it’s just the way things operate on WordPress, explained to my by one of their tech’s in the forum. I am getting ready to insert about 8-10 photos for this post. I would like for all of those photos to have to ability to enlarge when you or I click on the photo. It does work that way in the other posts but it’s not automatic in WordPress

I can either add the choice before I insert the photo, one at a time. Or, I can insert all 8-10 photos at once, then go back and edit each photo in the post with even two additional steps. In Blogger once you had the settings to put a clicked photo into a large slide show, it was done from that point forward.

I basically want all my photos to enlarge once I or you click them.

At 12 Noon

At 4:00pm

How about the yard and field?

At 12:00 Noon

At 4:15pm

At 12:00 Noon

At 4:15pm

At the 12 noon trip outside Sadie and Stella decided some of their cabin fever needed to be burnt off.

Just as fast as they start playing ... they stop!

Yesterday I noticed the yard with snow on top, that sure did look like MOLE movement. In the winter with snow on the ground?? So today I was able to confirm it was a MOLE with the snow melted. The ground was pushed up, just like in the middle of the summer.

Yesterday Looked Like Possible Mole Movement

Today Confirmed Mole Movement

 Finally “Sleeping Beauty” decided to make an appearance outside. It was quick as usual, a trip behind the Yews and back inside. I did take about 5 consecutive photos of her with her tail wagging, trying to catch her looking at the camera. This was the best photo of the 5 but her tail is in the down position and her face is barely up at the camera.

This is about all I can handle tonight. WAY TOO LONG just to work on each photo so they will enlarge after the post is published.

It might have been 56° this afternoon but it is suppose to be a high of 19° on Sunday, here in the “tropics” of Southern Indiana.

This Blog Has Moved

This blog's new location is at:

http://www.houndsandrvs.net

That title might confuse, surprise and cause "I wonder what he has done now?". My post yesterday talked about possibly moving to Wordpress for various reasons. I had used Wordpress for some blogs years ago, so I was a little familiar with the process. It had a slight learning curve and one that was pretty frustrating, which was my first blog on the other site.

I went back and forth with the decision on whether to transfer this blog to my new one. I was reminded on January 21 that if I did that, I would need to delete this blog because search engines will penalizes websites when they find "duplicate" information. That would be the case here if I left this blog online and moved all of it's content to my new blog.

So the new blog on Wordpress is like starting over. Still about Hounds, RVs and Other stuff. It's only coincidental that the move to a new blog happened right after I put Winston down.

I like coming back daily to read the updated blog roll on the left side bar. I like reading the older articles from 1, 2 or even 4 years ago. I like reading the articles about Winston and seeing his photos.

So to make this rambling short ... as far as I know I will be staying with the Wordpress blog and will stop blogging here after this post. Everything here will stay online, under the same domain that you have, there just won't be new posts after this one.

Why move and why will this blog remain online?

1. In Wordpress the photos are clearer, sharp and when you click on any photo in a Wordpress post it, enlarges to the original size and even sharper for you to see.
2. Wordpress has thousands of free themes (blogger calls them templates) to chose from.
3. Wordpress has a dashboard that is very easy to work from
1. Photos upload right into your blog from your computer or editor extremely fast
4. The way that Google tracks your every move and those of your blog readers

One reason it will remain online is information on this blog is indexed and found in search engines used by others looking for certain information about hounds or RVs. Plus a lot of work by the hounds and the blog author doesn't need to deleted. Who knows I may need to come back sometime.

So, bookmark the new link at the top ... http://www.houndsandrvs.net

LET ME KNOW EITHER HERE ON COMMENTS OR BY EMAIL IF YOU HAVE ANY ISSUES THAT NEED HELP FIXING DUE TO THE TRANSFER!!