Sadie & Stella Play During Walk

We've gone from a hot bright sunny afternoon on Thursday, to overcast skies and rain this morning. The skies are here but the rain is not suppose to arrive until early afternoon. The day was so nice yesterday we had 3 hound walks, I mowed the yard/leaves and still had enough time to add a few more Mahjong games to the list of being finished under 3 minutes.

With the forecast of rain today I wanted to stay outside as much as possible yesterday. Two of our walks included the camera, the last one included just the retractable leash. With three walks and mowing the yard for 48 minutes, my Garmin told me I had a lot more steps yesterday than my normal amount.

I'm not sure if Stella tracks the number of steps she takes every day but I do know on those afternoon walks she is entirely different than her morning walk by walking as slow as possible and she has no interest in running anywhere.

We were on our way back, had made the final turn for home ... she continued to walk in slow motion, while enjoying the warmth of the sunshine at 66°.

Heidi even came outside late afternoon for her 3rd time for the day. I thought she was walking with us, but she only wanted to make a lap around the house and spend some time laying in the sunshine. She stayed outside relaxing even after the bloodhounds and I returned from our walk. That is her normal path when she comes outside.

This morning was a different story though. It was 45°, spitting a few drops of rain but not enough to cancel our morning walk. Both hounds were happy we were out and Stella decided early in the walk that she was making all the decisions today for Sadie and I.

We were about to get started when Sadie hears what I heard over in the woods to the right of our house. By the sound of it, a very tall tree cracked ... then made a sound of dropping to the ground. From the tree tops I could not tell where it was but that is the 2nd tree since the summer I have heard falling ... each sounding like a tall large tree.

As Sadie ran far in front of Stella and I ... I had to walk over toward Stella to 'herd' her back to our path. She was heading lower in the field, trotting toward the neighbors house ... ignoring every word I was saying.

Once she walked over to the normal path we take, she took off running for Sadie.

Both explored more than anything, falling behind me and then running past me to get ahead.

I am not sure what the reason was ... but Stella heading left in this picture, suddenly spun around as she walked away from us and let Sadie know she wanted to do a little wrestling this morning. It caught Sadie off guard and she was already on the defense.

Just as fast as they started, Stella then turned around and started running up the path made by the ATV, heading north woods, with a head wind providing all the scent she needed. I took off running and yelling her name because by her pace ... she was not going to stop.

Either she finally heard me yelling "No" or decided she had done what she had planned ... to get me jogging this morning ... she stopped and waited for me to catch up.

Just as I caught up with her and Sadie ... Stella took off running full speed down the path and toward the house. I had not seen her run that far for that long since her last deer chase sometime a year ago.

I didn't run this time ... I thought she would spend enough time snooping around for me to catch up and even pass her. She did not disappoint.

She had me and Sadie waiting for her to come back into the yard where I saw I had twice the amount of leaves on the ground than I mowed and l cleared yesterday afternoon. I am hoping for a weekend of high winds with hopes that the leaves blow all the way out of the yard.

I am still using Firefox for my browser. One website it does not work well with is Flickr. When I load my photos of the day into Flickr, the cursor hesitates and bounces around when I try to highlight the photos that I want to add to an album.

With having no interest in the three college football games on tv tonight, there will be no interruptions by switching channels to different games besides tonight's World Series game from Houston. I am hoping the Astros are the first team to win 4 games ... it's tied 1-1 right now.

Apple seems to be pushing out their macOS beta updates about every two days and we are up to #5 as of last night around 2:30am. They will continue to tweak things, improve and fix any reported problems ... before their make their next official release to all users. I had to sign up for the beta program.

For some reason this morning I am being hit big time on my phone with spam calls. How do I know they are spam calls if I don't answer the call?  I go to Whitepages, type in the phone number that is calling me in Whitepages 'reverse search' and it will tell me if it is a spammer. Then I add that number to a Contact I set up named 'SPAM' so when they call back in the future I can tell with a quick glance at caller ID if it is a legit call.

All of my spam email disappeared when I deleted my old old old blog gmail address 'houndsnrvs'. I was getting over 100 spam emails per day on that 6 year old gmail address.

It's a quiet Friday so far here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Stella & Sadie Sprint Next Door

Like I said yesterday, there is never a dull moment with two bloodhounds. This morning for the first time ever, Stella ran down over the bank into the neighbors yard with Sadie showing her the way. I'll get to that story further down the post. It proved that they can hear and smell live moving things (people) a long way off.

With Heidi already moving into her winter hibernation mode she only comes outside after her lunch and then depending on the temperature, gets back inside as soon as possible. She has moved a Mexican blanket out from her spot in the bedroom to the living room and that's a sure sign that winter is just a few months away.

Starting time for the day started later than normal. We were up late with the last MLB playoff game plus an hour or two of computer work after that while I was still wide awake. When you are retired and the hounds being quite adaptable the daily schedule can be a floating one ... without dull meetings and a day of work it's pretty easy to do.

With the temps in the late morning only in the high 50's, it was still beautiful outside ... the air smelled clean, felt a little crisp but a great time to take our first walk of the day. The sky was the bluest of blue.

I was willing to let Stella do whatever she wanted to do on this walk. She lagged behind as Sadie was darting all over the field that was loaded with fresh new scents to track. It must have been a busy night in the field with deer traffic because Sadie was beside herself with excitement.

About the time I took this picture of Sadie ... Stella sprinted past me barely touching my right leg. It was surprising because from the last picture I took of her I didn't think she would be moving much in this walk.

I did catch Sadie in one of her sharp turns but missed getting all the other darting action of her.

I'm not a weather expert, nor a naturalist expert but I am guessing this fall will not be taken over by bright colors from the trees around here. What should be bright reds straight ahead are dying leaves. Yellows are nowhere to be found. There is still enough leaves and enough time to tell me I'm wrong so we will see.

I could tell by the actions of the hounds, scent tracking was the theme of the day and there were more scents to track than what they could manage. Sadie was running everywhere with Stella doing more of a steady paced search.

I had a feeling that Stella might try to duplicate her escape like yesterday so I kept an eye on her. She looked like she was sneaking away again but she stopped heading that direction when I yelled her name. She didn't turn our direction but stopped heading north.

Sadie had that look of hers when looking in Stella's direction that seems to say "where is she going now"????

Something was in the air as the hounds met on the path and took off running, leaving me way behind.

As I started heading back on the normal return path, both of them had noses to the ground at a good pace on the alternate path we take. It leads right to the north property line pole. So I moved over to that path with their suggestion.

This is where things get interesting. They NEVER are in front of me on this path. I normally have to walk back once I get into the yard and tug at Stella's collar to get her to move. Not today.

They started running .... that put my mind on the alert and I prepared the camera for possible running.

And then they started sprinting and never stopped. I had a pretty good idea what was leading them across the yard as fast as possible toward the bank by the burn pile. I started running because I was pretty sure they were headed next door to meet the neighbor for the first time ever.

Earlier I had seen the neighbor out clearing some brush in different parts of his yard and thought the hounds might have decided it was time to meet.

By the time I sprinted to the yard the hounds were out of site. I could see his truck parked near the bank, through the dead wild ragweed stems. By the time I got to the bank the hounds had ran over the bank through the weeds and had him surrounded --- blocking his way from getting out of his truck. They don't jump on people but are more than happy to let that person(s) know they are glad to see them.

Luckily he has a sense of humor. I called them to "get up here" and they both charged through the dead ragweed, up the bank and pranced around the driveway excited they had met someone new and proud of what they had done.

While we talked about the bank's future next spring I put the hounds in the house but not shutting them up in the bedroom like I usually do even when I mow the yard. That prevents Stella from eating my bowls of fruit, dragging my glasses, iPad mini or iPhone off of the counter to give them a good lick or snooping around for new stuff to taste.

So it was a test for the hounds since they had run of the house while the neighbor and I talked.

I am happy to say the glasses, iPad Mini, iPhone and my laptop were still on the counter and kitchen table when I returned. Nothing was on the floor from Stella dragging stuff off the counter and the only 'damage' was she ate one of my mangoes but left one in the bowl for me to eat later on.

Here are some photos from late yesterday afternoon. Sometime around 3pm my TMJ kicked in and drove me to my knees at one point ... not actually to my knees but you get the idea how bad the pain was. I tried 800mg of Ibuprofen ... nothing improved.

I tried rotating an ice pack and then a warm damp wash cloth on my jaw ... that didn't help. What caused it may have been a sandwich I ate mid-afternoon. With a recent dental exam giving me a clean bill of health I knew it wasn't a cavity that was causing the pain.

I lived with it until about 9pm when it finally got so bad that I stepped away from the baseball game I was watching on tv and headed for my computer. I had bookmarked two years ago a site that was about TMJ .. in fact it was tmj.org

I wanted to review what I was doing to see if I missed something. I found out that with constant pain I need to apply heat, not ice. I needed to take some more Ibuprofen (I didn't) ... so I soaked a wash cloth in hot water, squeezed out all the water and then put it in the Microwave for 15 seconds ... it was hot and felt great against my sore jaw.

As the pain diminished I massaged around my jaw bone, near my right ear, behind the ear and at the base of my neck ... a couple of hours later I noticed the pain had all gone away without taking more Ibuprofen.

The sad thing is, coffee (caffeine) is not good for TMJ. But I had to have a cup or two this morning and I thought what a good test it would be to find out if coffee would put me back in pain this morning.

I ate food on that side of my mouth to prove it was not cavity related. When I drank hot coffee before our morning hound walk I did not try to keep the coffee away from that side of my mouth. There was no pain of any kind when the hot coffee was on that side of my mouth.

It's been a couple of hours since I had that coffee and there is no pain at all in my jaw bone area or the teeth. I do sleep with a mouth guard to prevent me from grinding my teeth or clenching my jaw while I sleep. Sometimes I can feel how much I did that when I take out the guard in the morning. So the guard does work.

As I was typing this I heard two bloodhounds wrestling in the next room. It's been almost a year since Stella has wrestled with Sadie inside the house. The play ended with a yelp from Stella and I could see it's her hips or lower back that is the problem just like I have mentioned here before. She came running to my desk wagging her tail to let me know she was okay.

"No harm no foul" as the say in basketball. Sadie shared her water bowl with Stella and the both laid down beside my desk chair to take a nap and to let me know it was time for lunch even after a late breakfast.

No plans today except for more hound walks, more pictures and watching two baseball games this afternoon and tonight.

It's a beautiful day here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Stella Had Her Best Day Yesterday

First of all ... to all the people that follow this blog "by email", getting new emails in your inbox each time I make a new post ... I APOLOGIZE !! One of those 'followers' emailed me yesterday to let me know that she had 56 new 'blogger emails' in her inbox for some reason ... finding out as she opened them plus reading my Tuesday blog post where I said I had gone back into my files and added 'old' post to fill in the blog date gap from August 2 - October 8.

I wasn't thinking at the time I was digging back into my blog backup file and adding those post ... I did not even realize that each time I posted an old post that you would receive a new email in your inbox. Almost like a blast of 'spam mail'. Believe me, that was not my intention. I just had a mental short-circuit I guess as I posted all of those old posts on Monday.

With my local electric company shutting my power off so they could move my service to their new lines they built last summer, about all I had to pass the time until my afternoon trip to help a friend out ... was taking these photos on the hound walk and playing Mahjong on my laptop.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing before Sadie, Stella and I left for our morning walk under gray skies and cooler temps ... sweatshirt weather. Stella was nudging Sadie inside the house trying to get her to play/wrestle like she did last year. Sadie wasn't accepting the invitation because she was more focused on me getting ready to take the morning walk.

But once we hit the yard and Stella finishing her short pee break ... she came running after Sadie and I just like 'old times'. She is definitely back to being close to her old self after not being well from February to sometime early this summer. Each day she is doing more running, playing and acting like she did when I first got her in August 2015.

With the distinct taste of a new bag of Seattle's Best Coffee #5 running through my veins, I was able to keep up with these two bloodhounds. They didn't realize it but the hounds were also in for a little surprise like those blog followers by email ... later on last night.

After ignoring Stella's invite to play inside, watching me put on the old green Sac State basketball cap, Sadie knows it's time for a walk when that hat is on my head ... along with the camera. She forgets about Stella and moves right into her exploration mode to track the latest deer scent.

Stella may have started running our way when she started her walk but her nose once again took over and she wanted to take her own path ... with the direction she was headed I could tell "some herding" was going to needed. As I continued to yell her name and saying "over here" ... she slowly gravitated toward Sadie and I. She will always test me to see if she can sneak away.

Once she decided she wasn't going to get her total freedom ... she SPRINTED past me and her and Sadie took off around the first turn. I was very very happy to see her running for the second time on this walk, only a 1/4 of the way complete.

Most of the time they ran so close to each other as they explored, their bodies would bounce off one another in full stride. They might share the scent they track but that doesn't mean they don't try to get there first.

As we all approached the final turn toward home ... Stella jumped into Sadie's chest telling her she wanted to play. It was her 2nd attempt in less than 15 minutes.

For the 2nd time since Sunday Stella was back to playing/wrestling ... something she had not done since last January.

They always stop immediately to look just like this when they play. There is nothing to see or hear in that direction because its the same pose they do in the backyard when they wrestle ... it's just a move by each trying to get the advantage with their next wrestling move.

Just as quick as they stopped ... they started playing again.

Then it was the sudden stop stare down ... letting each one know that the match was over and they had other stuff to do.

Off they went ... again happy to see Stella running fast enough that both of her rear legs are off the ground.

A good example of running so close to each other they bounce off of each other in full stride.

Tuesday night I had a call from my old friend that is semi-retired ... he had been spending the past month configuring his trailer from carrying two canoes to the original Laser sailboat. He is selling both and had the trailer finished but was needing one more person to help him lift the 135# sailboat up onto the trailer. His wife was busy with work ... his son that lives in town is even busier with a job plus bicycle racing and he thought I was too busy watching MLB Playoffs, College and NFL football that he ask me. I offered to help and I had an 'itch' for some kind of road trip.

So I was planning to take off for his house around noon yesterday. I had these photos for the blog but no electrical power at the house due the utility company's repair work. The FJ needed a good road trip going the same distance and place my Z4 did at the end of September. I was hopeful I could return without having a plastic grill dragging the ground. (joke)

It was also another chance for Stella to show me that she was completely over her separation anxiety since I was gone for a solid 9 hours. It's been since December of last year since since she has done any damage while being shut up with Sadie in the bedroom. As I explained in November 2015, that room is the only room in the house that I have the least amount of things that she could damage and all of it could be repaired. Any other room has items I own that if damaged, would not be repairable but would need replaced, bought again.

Just like two weeks ago she did fantastic, nothing chewed up, no window screens tore out (windows were shut closed), no digging through drywall, and no moving the bed and furniture around so she could climb up on and crawl out the small window.

Yes ... she did try moving furniture and climbing on top of the bed or end table so she would be at the same height as the small windows for her escape. She didn't escape that time, her first time where I was gone over 8 hours in November 2015 only 3 months after she arrived here.

The surprise for the hounds that I mentioned above was due to my mental short-ciruit. With their excited routine when I returned home, it's was the same routine they have when they are hungry and they are wanting lunch. I did not remember that I had already fed them lunch before I left, sometime around 11:30am. So just as I sat the 3 bowls of kibble down in front of each of them ... different areas of the room ... it dawned on me they had already had their normal two meals ... this would make their third of the day. Living proof they could eat forever if 'free fed' ... all dog kibble was gone in less than a minute.

With only one MLB game, winner take all to move to the next round, tonight at 8pm ... I have some time today to finally do a little house cleaning and post here later tonight of the pictures of the hounds I am about to take on our first walk of the day.

Again ... I'm sorry for those emails sent automatically with each old post that I added to this blog. I would not be happy seeing 56 new emails in my inbox all from the same sender.

It's cold enough for shorts and a sweatshirt on the walk this morning in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.