Thinking While Working On Monday

Sunday afternoon Heidi went to the door to be let outside. It was a great day, much warmer and the sunshine never disappeared. She spent over an hour outside on her own while I checked on her from time to time just to make sure she was still in the yard. She has never wandered off during her time alone outside. Yesterday she found the bank on the south side of the yard to be her resting point.

About the time I walked outside a few hours later she was just about to the carport, heading toward the door.

Looks like I have grass to mow today after it dries, sometime this afternoon. I knew it would be tall after two or three days of rain. I've been cutting it taller this spring, 3".

Stella could feel it was much warmer Monday morning. She had a few stops to start her walk. She needed to think about her plan and also eat some nice green tall wet grass as she stepped into the field.

t was a little over 60°, perfect weather. By the time I do laps back and forth across the lawn later this afternoon it was supposed to be in the 70's. I had a lot to do today and with the improved weather all of those things were finished by the time I put the mower back in the shed.

During my search yesterday of warm weather locations I asked my old friend that has lived in Phoenix the past 20 years and loves it and the heat, about some of the surrounding smaller town on the outskirts of the city. The map showed nothing around those towns but I also know how fast that area is growing. After all I am not the only person that wants to migrate to warm weather.

I thought his answer was perfect.

"If neighbors are your thing and you want "community" then it a good time to get into something there.  It's cheap and it's growing at a disgusting rate.  If you don't want to be around people, the place you buy today with no neighbors in site might just be overrun next year with families, cars, kids, and stupid barking chihuahuas. Houses are made with the lowest priced materials that can be used to mass produce houses as quickly as possible.  AND they are track homes, yuck!"

I sat outside in the sunshine enjoying the day when that email showed up on my Apple Watch. I can always trust that he will give me an honest answer about anything I ask. Always has and always will.

I looked through some locations that were suggested by a few readers either in the comment section on the blog or by email. A lot of nice places but I admit, nothing really gets my blood moving until I am looking at places out west. When it comes to southern California I've had to ask myself is it the year round weather I want or am I wanting those great memories back from when I lived there before?

Why am I willing to buy something smaller and overpriced just to live in heavy traffic and jammed packed neighborhoods?

To widen my search I even increased the maximum I'd buy a house for. Of course that brings up a wide range of new possibilities. Some of them even showed some good possibilities for the hounds but after a morning walk like this morning this field is hard to beat. The obsession had slowed to just curiosity by my first cup of coffee this morning.

I knew I would think and process the information I gathered just like many times before. I was able to eliminate a couple of places and both of those were places I had lived in the past. I kept remembering the key factor of this quest was to move to warm 12 month weather.

Stella decided Monday morning had some of the best tasting, freshest deer scat in a while. I let her enjoy her delicacy before walking over to her and telling her to "come on." She would move before I had to grab her collar.

On her typical stroll and her pace. She has her own world that spins on her time, it adjusts to her not the other way around. I am slowly getting back to the same way of doing things. Not paying attention to any news, tv or online, is a great start to that change.

I had time all day to think about the places and houses I had looked at over the weekend. It made the yard mowing seem shorter. I made the different tasks I did today much easier since I was distracted.

On a side note, in the past two days I have never seen the ticks as bad as they have been since I moved here in 1998. They are all on me and I have yet to find even one on either hound. I check them each time they come back inside and figured if I am finding as many as I am on me, they have to have some somewhere. Luckily I feel them crawling and can get them off of me before they try to dig into me.

The deer traffic scent was so strong Monday morning that Stella went past her normal point where she makes the last turn with me to head home. I let her go to see what she would do or how far she would go.

She finally decided it was time to get back home. That is a worn deer path you see in front of her moving in a north/south direction.

As you can tell, the grass is a little higher than 3". It was finally dry enough to mow by 2pm and I had enough grass everywhere to mow the whole yard for the first time this year. Today will be spraying the weeds on the driveway. A few years ago in August I spent four straight days on my hands and knees pulling every weed out by hand ... only to have them grow back 3x as thick.

After Sunday afternoon's walk, Stella did finish by walking down the center of the yard, nowhere near the house. So this might just be a 'morning' routine for her and not dependent on what kind of weather it is.

With great weather Monday I found out we are outside more even if that is nothing more than the hounds sleeping in the sun and me soaking up some rays contemplating life. With that in mind I also found there are not enough hours in a day when the weather is great and was one of the reasons I did not blog yesterday. No, I wrote the blog post and added the photos but failed to post it later Monday night.

I just finished comparing "Taxes for Retirees" in the five states I am now interested in. I have a couple of states that are not western states that have peaked my interest and both have good weather year round. Plus in both states you can buy a lot more house for the dollar compared to Arizona and New Mexico. One state I am familiar with and the other recommended by a blog follower is quite a surprise.

So with that in mind I will be checking out those two states in more detail sometime today. The website that Barney gave me in a comment the other day has worked out really well and I like it better than the one I had been using in the past. Their information took a few of the towns off my list.

Well Stella is doing her normal morning stretching right before she hydrates herself, which means our Tuesday morning walk is just minutes away from starting.

Another day of great weather here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Final Food Decision Is Made

Heidi is NOT recouping from her big walk yesterday, that is just her normal position right after her morning breakfast. You see the word "Final" in the title and I can see you shaking your heads and saying "sure" all the way from my computer desk. I know, I know ... the only thing 'final' in my life will be when I die. Until that time all my decisions are up for change. Yet ... it feels final.

Just like I said the other day, I had a lot of reading to do while I was trying to decide whether to change my eating from a low carb - high fat - high protein diet. I had been eating a combination of Keto and Paleo. More carbs than Keto wanted but not the fruit that Paleo suggested. Body weight and fat measurements with calipers was decreasing. That one thought just kept lingering ... all that grease from bacon, steaks, ground beef that I would see in my cast iron skillet was coating the insides of my arteries ???  Not something I wanted.

After staying up until 2am this morning reading, it wasn't until early this morning that I found this article in a folder I had bookmarked in 2016. With lights flashing as I read it, I knew I had no other choice but to follow the Vegan lifestyle. I had already cut out all dairy a few days ago and could tell a difference because I was coughing less with the congestion I've had for months. Then at night I didn't hear that phlegm sound in my esophagus as I tried to sleep.

I also went back and read every post that I wrote on my other blog in 2016 and 2017 when I had changed to the vegetarian way of eating. There might be some issues with this change I am making now and I will find out soon enough if some of those same foods give me indigestion. Some of those were oatmeal, and grains.

This was a good time to make a change if I was going to because I needed a grocery shopping run. It felt so strange to walk past the coolers with cheeses from top to bottom, or the section for chicken, port, beef and then salmon. I didn't make my normal trip to the back of the store where the dairy section is located. It was different not having any yogurt or cottage cheese in my shopping cart.

It's not because I want to post a lot of photos on Instagram but there are a few old bloggers I like following that moved there from blogging. More importantly there are great pictures and recipes for Plant Based meals and menus. So yesterday I signed up for a new Instagram account. Plus my sports teams I follow seem to have more and better photos than they do on Twitter. It's a win-win.

As you can see, Stella seemed to be path oriented on this morning's walk. No eating and really no tracking until she turned the first corner.

I am also going to attempt to eliminate any kind of oil in my meals. About the only oil I use is olive oil. For salad dressing I found 6 plant based oil-free salad dressing recipes. They all have simple ingredients and they are pretty simple to make.

A couple of people I have been in contact with, exchanging emails about this way of eating, told me I don't have to keep track of how many calories I am eating per day. Nor do I have to worry about macronutrient ratios. I was having all of that information provided by logging in the food I eat on an app called Cronometer.

One thing I like about that app compared to My Fitness Pal food app that I used with my Garmin watch ... is this app not only works with my Apple Watch but has a detailed micronutrient breakdown on every kind of food I eat without paying for a membership  ... including ground black pepper.

Since logging in my food into an app always seems to keep me from overeating and within some sort of boundary I will continue to log in my food because I want to make sure I am getting all the nutrients, vitamins and minerals I need. I will be taking a Vitamin B-12 supplement and shouldn't need anything else.

I also bought for the first time ever, some turmeric since I found out that just 3 tsp per day works much better than taking Motrin or Ibuprofen to decrease inflammatin.

As I went to grab a large bag of frozen berries in the frozen food aisle, I walked right by Ben & Jerry's ice cream. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. In fact I stopped to look and see if they had any non-dairy ice cream. I thought I had  bought some a couple of years ago. They had two different blends, non-dairy, but I never opened the door to read the ingredients label ... I walked away.

I started breaking myself in a little yesterday because I was that low on food. I never felt hungry, ate less fat, less protein and but more carbs since I added some black beans to my salad. It is not going to be a hard to make this lifestyle change.

I did read all I could on the Keto and Paleo philosophy. I know following those two diets you are burning fat instead of carbs for your energy but I could not find any medical articles that proved or even said the walls of the arteries would have increased plaque. They would always say fat is energy but nothing about reducing the plaque build up inside your artery walls. Did I miss something?

With this change I am able to start eating bananas and apples again, maybe a mango here and there. I can tell by looking at the list of foods that contributed to the high fat count, I have eliminated the ones at the top of that list for high fat content. Cronometer is great when wanting to see that type of information.

A few minutes before noon I had not only feed the hounds but had put alway all the food and was caught up on everything around the house. Saturday was 'cleaning hound ears' day. Luckily both of them enjoy that process.

It gets awfully quiet here with two hounds sleeping the afternoon away.

Stella was almost positive she had found the main scent of deer traffic, and followed it all the way to where we turn for home.

It might look like rain is on the way but that is looking east and by noon it was bright blue skies and sunshine.

The first picture was a little blurry so I was able to hold her jowls with one hand and take a picture with my other hand to show you ... yes there really are some eyes under all that loose skin when she has her head down or is sleeping.

There must have been some heavy animal traffic in the yard last night. From the time she took her first sniff as she stepped into the yard, to the time she was at the house, it took half the amount of the total time we took for the whole walk.

We didn't do much in the afternoon. The weather apps said it was above 50° but it felt more like a very cold 44°. Neither hound wanted to go anywhere after lunch once they stepped out into the yard and felt the 'real' wind. I didn't feel like doing much either.

Heidi still might have a little ear cleaner left deep in her ears from yesterday. Shaking is a good thing because that cleaner is designed to work days later it will bring out any wax that is deep inside her ear canal.

After an afternoon of sleep I thought Heidi might be telling me she wanted to take another walk. While I walked to my computer desk she and Stella headed to the door wanting outside. By the time I grabbed a jacket they had not ventured any further than this.

I changed the camera setting from 'manual' to 'automatic' just to see what I would come up with in photo quality and color. Someone told me in January when I was having trouble getting the new Canon 9G X set up, that she thought camera's made today were made to shoot in auto mode. Maybe I'll give that setting another chance.\

While I turned to let Heidi back inside I still thought Stella and I would get our afternoon walk in. Evidently she wants to walk later ... she was headed my way. As the door opened she walked nonstop back to her afternoon sleeping position.

Is this aerobic exercise or not ????

For some reason photos from the iPhone transfer into much larger photos once they are in WordPress's Media Library.

It's been a pretty relaxing day. Aren't all days in retirement relaxing? We might declare Sunday night as "movie night" or it will be a book reading marathon late into the night. I have been snacking on some food that bothered me in the past. So far so good without any signs of indigestion.

Spring feels like it is right around the corner here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.