Weirdness Starts The Day

It's nothing really, just a time where I feel somewhat 'weirded out.' It makes me wonder sometimes if this is part of the process of getting older. I don't feel old physically, nor do I think I am old mentally ... I've discussed that somewhere before. Yet, this feeling I've had  so far today (2.5hrs) is something I've felt only in retirement. That might happen only because I am not so busy this time of day where I use to be getting ready for work or at work ... so that's understandable.

It's not a feeling of anxiousness nor paranoia, just strangeness.

I feel warm in my clothes yet the indoor thermometer tells me I shouldn't feel warm, just comfortable. The weather forecast tells me it's going to be another great day but I don't feel that way. Maybe it's a letdown after all the energy and thinking I did the past few days changing the design of the blog. I have nothing to do here. The dishes are done, house is clean, no urge to keep reading the Steve Jobs book. No urge to grocery shop while I need fruit and salmon. I've been hungry for days but for nothing that is in my kitchen.

I couldn't help but try to put this mental puzzle together while on the walk this morning. Was I feeling regret about buying a camera when I have a good one in my hand? No. Do I need to go on a mini-roadtrip, get out of the house more than just 25 miles away? No. Is the simple lifestyle routine getting to me? No.

It may have started within seconds of opening my eyes, and taping my Garmin to see the time. Stella and Heidi were both whining as they normally do when they are awake and ready to get another day started. My Garmin's bright white background, brighter than any nightlight was showing 5:03am ... I got up anyway. I was ready to get up. I wanted to get up with a feeling that I needed to do something. There was nothing I needed to do.

While the hounds inhaled their kibble for breakfast I was making coffee like every morning when I glanced at the clock and it says 6:39am. What ??? I've only been up 10 minutes at the most and it's 6:39am ... how did that happen? So I glance at the Garmin on my wrist and sure enough, it also says it's 6:39am. I misread the time seconds after opening my eyes. It wasn't even close to 5:03am when I glanced at the Garmin.

That is not where the weirdness came from.

That feeling started somewhere during my first cup of coffee. Different day same routine. Nothing needed to get done. The 'Reminder' program Apple gave me, shows nothing is a high priority. My mind is restless. Ah ha .... restless? It's like anything else when I design a blog, drive cross country, research my next car or truck trade, or plan a camping trip (only a few years ago) ... it's the normal excitement of 'the chase' and the big mental 'letdown' after it has been accomplished.

After the blog design is decided upon and finished ... now what? After that car or truck is bought and sitting in the driveway ... now what? After driving 1,800 miles sitting in the middle of nowhere with the most beautiful countryside around ... now what?

It's always the same. So maybe that is the weirdness I feel this morning.

My dad told me soon after his retirement, that he would feel anxious every morning unless he had planned things he needed to do that day. Just knowing he needed to mow the yard (large, acres) would be enough to take away that anxious feeling. Washing the cars? That did it also. Sitting around ... made him anxious. He had to be doing something.

You'll notice the deer decided to follow our return path sometime last night or early morning. Those hoof prints are fresh, within the previous couple of hours?

Normally I would have written about these feelings on my private blog just to log as reference, this weirdness. Still, I said last month that I would going to be more open, transparent on this blog. So here it is. Not a big announcement I'm sure but it is what it is I guess. It all stems from asking myself if this type of feeling is just me or is it something I should expect as normal as I get older.

Anyone out there over 66 years of age ... do you have feelings like this at times? Spaced out? Weird? A little lost?

There is more to this, I just remembered what else ... a feeling of being lost. No plans are nice in retirement, no schedules, but maybe they really are needed in this life of leisure. I do have some plans for this spring but nothing is firm yet and they are really dependent on someone else's health if they happen or not. I can still do it solo.

I also don't mind this simple lifestyle the hounds and I lead. We have for years. I'm content, no worries, no crisis that needs a fix. We just are, day after day. (I have just thought of something I can do today, doing two things in one trip and I'll add photos and blog about it later.)

Right now I feel distracted again, as usual. I have forgotten some things I wanted to write about the 'weird feeling' I've had this morning. In fact my mind is just blank about that right now.

For the first time in years, I have not had the urge to move west. It's January and that urge usually turns into obsessive searching of real estate in Arizona or New Mexico. Not this year. Of course the weather has been fantastic, around normal averages, where we have not dipped into the 20's too many days and have never been in the single digits this year. Maybe that urge to move doesn't happen until it's 20° or lower?

As I move through this post I have realized that all I need to get rid of this feeling is to DO SOMETHING !!!!

Get out of the house, take my camera with me, go for a drive out in the country in the local area ... country is all around me ... with gravel roads, very little traffic on some highways and many paved country roads to choose from that go in all directions.

So already, before finishing this post I have multiple ideas to choose from. Those options were not even a thought a few hours ago. It reminds me of the time now, when I would feel like this in the past, I would take my Z4 out for a drive of 50-60 miles. If the weather was good the top would be down if it was like today the heater would be on.

Those kind of trips decreased to almost nothing last summer for some strange reason. The spring or summer day would be beautiful and I didn't want to drive it. That is one of the reasons I sold it. All it did was sit here month after month, not being driven.

Based on the number of times I was driving it in 2018, I wasn't going to put more than 850 miles on it for the year. The times I did drive it I was beginning to feel that car would either put me in jail or kill me. Yes, speeding was a factor. Not a few miles over the limit ... but enough where they probably would have taken the keys away once they caught me.  :) It was hard not to drive the car the way it was designed to be driven.

I didn't like the color anyway. If I ever buy another, it will be the dark gray color, is it called "slate gray?" (I hate the way that looks with the question mark inside the quotation mark)

In the 'old days' of many years ago, I would have grabbed my tent, sleeping bag and some food ... then went camping locally out in the freezing weather for a few days. That always clears the mind. Sure I could do that now with the hounds but it's not fair to them to make them stay outside in cold weather, freezing weather just because I have a bug up my ass to go camping. That will only stay as a good memory.

What animal would be this tall to have Stella so interested????

No, I think what I have planned for this morning is going to be a good idea. An enjoyable idea. I'll take off within minutes of publishing this post. I'll post photos and a short blog later this afternoon or early tonight. I have an IU basketball game to watch at 7pm, so the post will take place in the late afternoon unless I schedule it for a later time.

Speaking of blog posts ... with the plan I set for this blog almost a month ago ... there will be occasional posts that is nothing but content. There will not be any photos while I ramble on those posts. I had one the other day and a few readers let me know they liked and wanted photos. Well in the story telling or rambling posts where I have to get something on paper and out of my mind ... photos aren't going to happen in those.

I also like the way the blog looks. I was able to figure out myself how to change the code that would change the colors of the fonts, the size of the fonts, different colors for links, post titles, etc. I did find out that I was wrong about the thumbnail size on the front page. Those small photos are 400x400 and will automatically adjust the height accordingly.

I could spend most of the day trying to figure out how to make them all 400x400 no matter what size they are when I upload them. Not today ... I want to get out of the house and away from this computer. The sun is out and it's not even 10am yet. That's a good thing.

My data leak is also mysterious. I spent weeks burning over a gig per day as I spent most of the day on the computer looking through WordPress themes, changing designs plus my normal internet surfing. Yesterday after seven straight hours I had only burned 358Mb of data.

That is extremely low for what I was doing. Almost half the amount I had last week after the same amount of time. What happened? Who or what was using my data? I looked through my Activity Monitor and found nothing to be soaking up data. Automatic updates were turned off years ago.

Well I hate to end this so abruptly but I have to get out of here ... like right now.

It's another good morning here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

A Little iMac Hiccup ... Virus???

Yes, there are some eyes under that skin you see. This is the look Stella gives me when she feels I have not given her enough treats or snacks. Last night she wanted more of the grain free dog bones that were flavored with bacon. For a 'cleaner' photo I wiped off the drool on the sides of her jowls before taking the picture. Even after the walking I did to grab the iPhone to take the photo, she never moved.

With the second day of the coldest days this winter, the hounds do a lot of sleeping. Although the room is not cold Heidi knows it is winter and will shiver until I bring out the sleeping bag for her to sleep on or wrap up in on the couch.

This was Friday night ...

I decided to test the quality of sleep for the hounds, so I put a piece of the pumpkin pie crust in front of Stella's nose while she slept. It was funny to see her nostrils twitching while she slept after the crust was placed there but she never woke up.

As I glanced out the window this morning in the computer room, the field was covered with white heavy frost. I did not know at the time it would be a great background for taking photos of Stella and bring out that red coat of hers. These fresh deer prints kept Stella busy this morning. She was active because they were scattered all over the field but not nearly as hyper with excitement as Sadie would have been. Sadie would have been going out of her mind with fresh deer prints like this.

Stella was going to try a different entry point into the ragweed burrs but I was right there and talked her into walking back to the path to start her walk.

It was freezing, crisp, and extremely quiet this morning. The skies were beautiful.

For some reason I keep wanting to buy a smaller camera with a zoom capability. I know the picture sharpness will not come close to what I get with the older Nikon D3200 but for some reason the urge to buy one has been strong the last two days. If I were to buy a new lens for the D3200 I have come to the conclusion I need one with a range of 18mm-135mm. But does it really make a difference if I already have a lens I use every day that is 18mm-200mm ... no it doesn't. I'll keep what I have.

The problem getting up at 6:15am or around that time to start our day ... the hounds are begging for lunch by 10am now. For 31 years I've had hounds, I never fed them more than once per day unless they were puppies ... until Stella showed up in August 2015. She had come from a home that had 'free feeding' ... ate when she wanted.

Yes, on the walk before 8am ... there is that sun again.

I could hear that distinct sound a bloodhound makes when they are sniffing a scent in the tracking mode ... their jowls flap just a little. One year when I left Bertha, Winston and Max at a kennel while I was away on a business trip the kennel owner heard that sound when walking Bertha ... she said in all the years she had hosted different breeds of dogs and walked all of them ... she had never heard a sound like that, only from a bloodhound.

This is about all the intensity Stella shows when tracking.

Of course there is always time for her to have some natural deer protein ... especially when it's frozen.

Freezing cold and crisp.

She knows the deer went that way but we are on our way home and it's getting cold.

When I told her "let's go home" ... she took off trotting.

There were till plenty of things to check out until she got to the backyard.

I was happy to see that the last of the leaves from the Mahogany tree are gone. I can now mow the leaves for the last time this year. I'll do that sometime this week after the temps crawl back up to the mid-40's. That small north side yard has the most leaves as the winds seem to always blow them there, where they get trapped between the house and that small bank.

Once again this morning Stella did not stop at the trees or the fence to smell but she took off along the edge of the field and yard. If she had her way she would have gone back into the field in the middle of all of those burrs.

For the first time since I have bought this iMac in May 2017 it had a 'hiccup' this morning. The computer hard drive locked up as I was moving my morning photos to the external hard drive, something I do everyday without any issues. The Activity Monitor was telling me a system program that moves those files was "not responding".  It did not matter where I put the cursor and clicked ... the computer was locked up. I had to hold the power button to turn it off.

I unplugged the 4-port USB hub, then turned on the computer seeing it boot up with no issues. I then plugged the USB hub back in and tried to export the morning photos to the external drive ... same result and the Activity Monitor telling me that same com.apple.xxxxx program was not responding.I repeated the process to turn off the computer but did something different after I rebooted it.

To find out if it was my hard drive acting up or the external drive I did NOT plug in the 4-port USB hub. I opened my Apple Photos program (like Windows My Pictures) and tried moving the photos I selected for this blog to the Blog Folder on my desktop so Blogger can import the photos to the blog.

Ah ha .... the Activity Monitor had in red "Photos" ... "not responding.

So it was something on the hard drive. I opened the App Bitdefender and updated their latest Malware files, then ran their Critical Locations Scan, something I do weekly. It did not find any malware or viruses. The computer was running normal as I read the internet sports, answered emails and a few texts during the scan.

I decided I'd run their "Deep System Scan". I had not done that since buying the computer. It took 48 minutes to scan everything. I gave it permission to scan my photo library that has over 70,000 photos since I was trying to export photos that froze up the computer. It found 3 files of malware, all from one App that I had personally downloaded before I bought this computer in May 2017. All the apps, photos and document files were uploaded from my Time Machine backup when I was setting up the new computer in May 2017. This app came along for the ride in that transfer.

The app is called DrApp Cleaner. It was an easy fix. Bitdefender had quarantined the files to prevent any harm to my hard drive. All I had to do was go into my Finder folder, then Applications folder and delete the App "DrApp Cleaner. Once the trash was empty, those three files disappeared from the Bitdefender log.

I turned off my computer, plugged in the 4-port USB Hub and then turned on the computer. Everything loaded normal with no issues. I exported 74 photos from this mornings walk to the external hard drive for backup with no issues.

The iMac was and has functioned normal every since I removed that App and those "spy" files as they were called. I jumped back into my Applications Folder in Finder (Windows My Computer Folder) and deleted any app that I had not used. If I could not remember what the app did, then I must have not been using it and deleted those too. Any system app was protected by Apple by not giving me the option "Move to Trash".

In the meantime I am going to try to warm the house up. I am going to 'give-in' to the hound's demands that they want to be fed and feed them. I'll try to grab a few more photos for this post before I post it.  SUCCESS with the after lunch photos !!!

It was the normal after lunch routine. That might show 38° but believe me it feels much much colder than that.
 

Stella stood and sniffed the air putting her plan together. I had a good idea where she was headed if she got the chance.

Heidi could tell by the freezing feeling, she didn't have a lot of time to relieve herself and then get back inside. She had to be quick.

Sure enough ... there goes Stella into the field but luckily behind the area with all the burrs. Once she saw me walking up the path she came running.

By the time I had Stella back inside the carport I see Heidi is sprinting across the front yard and up the driveway. She was cold enough that she was first inside not waiting for Stella to step in front of her. Then it was a fast run through the kitchen and jumping up on the couch for some afternoon sleep.

With all the leaves down from the Mahogany tree and most from the tall Sycamore tree, I'll get some but but not this many leaves after I mow them again. This should take about an hour to do the whole yard and I'll be done for the 2018 Leaf Project. It might snow on Tuesday but will be in the upper 40's for most of the week. I can mow then.

It's a pretty good retirement day here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.