Stella Cancels Morning Walk

From the signs of puddles in the carport and in the field across the highway, it rained pretty hard last night as the forecast said it would. I didn't hear a thing even with the windows open. Evidently Stella knew exactly how much it rain and just how wet the field would be because no matter how hard I tried to coax her into walking, she refused!!

It was still nice weather though. About 25° cooler than yesterday morning, a little more windy but there is an expectation of sunny skies later this afternoon. That will put the lawn back to mowing height for Saturday afternoon.

What I wouldn't do to be able to crawl inside the brain of a bloodhound to see what's in there, how it operates and how they think. It is one of the funniest breeds I've owned yet there has only been two breeds in 32 years of hounds. The basset hound and bloodhound is as far as I have ventured into the world of dogs.

I knew when I turned around to take this photo of Stella, there was a 'slight' chance she wasn't going anywhere.

When I saw this familiar look, I KNEW she was not going anywhere. Was the ground of the field really that wet? Standing water in spots along the path? How does she know?

I was even willing to let her lead the way, expecting her to turn left along the side of the house, veer up the small incline heading toward the north end of the yard and possibly walking on the 'return' path to start our walk. I would follow her along the way with no problem.

She did an about-face without any hesitation and headed for the door to go back inside. In fact she was so quick that by the time I turned the corner of the house trying to take a photo of her heading back to the door, she was already at the door waiting for me to open it.

So ... there will be no bloodhound walk on Friday morning. Maybe later, maybe not.

I started my day in a fog, it didn't feel like I slept that soundly. The hounds were not going to let me have more sleep, they wanted breakfast. I usually get between six to seven hours of sleep per night and close to half of that is sound sleep. Yet, that new bag of Seattle's Best Coffee (not Starbucks), smelled fantastic as I took a whiff inside the bag. It tasted even better and before I knew it, my brain activity rapidly increased.

I had the urge to drive the local area and look at some dog food, different from what I have been feeding the hounds since February 2017. If I were to go to the local farm supply store which has a wide range of dog food brands, grain-free and otherwise, I could also walk the aisles looking for something new to buy for lawn care or maintenance.  Maybe some winter vests or jackets would be on sale, which I don't really need.

Basically it's just a restlessness I get sometimes.

I like the dog food I have been feeding the hounds. It has limited ingredients and helped Heidi with her allergic reactions with raw chewed skin a few years ago. Stella is my new allergy puzzle though. It's never a fun puzzle to figure out either.

Could it be the dog food or those Glucosamine supplements I give her?

That's the million dollar question. If I don't give her the supplements, she has a hard time walking sometimes, well yelp on occasion and has a family history of bad hips based on what the previous owner told me. A vet a few years ago when looking at Heidi's skin issues told me his studies on dog food allergies resulted in finding out that dog food is not the major cause of allergies in dogs.

That makes the puzzle all the harder to solve.

An old friend of mine living in Phoenix has an older Mastiff that started having some severe issues with his skin. Luckily it took only one vet trip for him to find a solution. It was something I had never heard of during the long time I have had hounds. "Hypoallergenic Protein" was the key word and the key to solving the Mastiff's problem.

Dog foods that are good for allergies always try to stay away from chicken, beef, dairy and eggs. My ingredient lists of every dog food I used, listed on a spreadsheet showed that even the best limited ingredient, grain-free foods with a protein source other than chicken or beef .... ALWAYS has some sort of chicken (flavor or meal) lower down the list.

Maybe it's not chicken that is bothering Stella. There are no kinds of meat in the GlycoFlex Plus supplement. But there is some chicken flavor in her lamb meal and rice food.

The symptoms of an allergy can include skin rash, hives, itching, paw biting, obsessive licking and sometimes nausea or vomiting. She shows only those highlighted in bold print. Especially the paw biting and itching. I have scanned every inch of her looking for fleas ... I did not find any on her or me.

So I am very tempted to go the route that my friend took with his Mastiff because he saw a sudden change within 8-12 days after switching to a dog food with hypoallergenic protein. Basically that is food with lower protein, lower fat and more carbs. His vet still tells him to feed the food for two months as prescribed before they decide what food to move to.

Looking back through photos of blog posts of Stella in the past four years that she has been here (August 2015), there have been times she has stopped in the field to scratch. So then the question is .... environmental allergy? That is a major cause of dog allergies. We tried weekly shots with Heidi to combat environmental allergies with negative results in 2015. She only improved when I went to the limited ingredients dog food I use now.

A blog reader suggested last month that I splash a little yogurt on her food every meal. Just a teaspoon of it, recommenced by her vet and that showed results. A few containers of yogurt is a lot cheaper than a 20 pound bag of Hypoallergenic Protein dog food ... unless I started eating the yogurt.  :)

I admit I am not a fan of trying to solve dog allergies. My curiosity to try different foods will get the best of me. Plus I need to walk through the aisles of that farm supply store and tell myself no a million times when I ask if I really need this.  LOL

As long as the Cincinnati Reds continue to win, weather and dog allergies are not a factor in my day. Strange how sports can do that to you mental outlook. It's like I told that California State Patrolman in 1984, on a Sunday afternoon celebrating Cinco de Mayo cruising the coast highway back home to Carlsbad. I was driving my 1967 mint condition VW Bus, with the stereo blasting loud enough that I didn't hear his siren through downtown Encinitas. My friend saw him in the side mirror and said "Floyd, I think that guy behind you want to talk to you."  :)

As he arrested me he told me I was the happiest drunk he had ever arrested. I told him "my Reds are on a 7 game winning streak!!!!" ...

The winning streak ended THAT NIGHT.

Well I am off to look around at Orschein Farm Supply store .... maybe I'll buy a new lawn mower instead ... and some hypoallergenic dog food for Stella  :)

All is good this morning in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

A Day Of Changes ???

As you can see I had a hard time coming up with a title for this post. It might even change before I publish it, who knows. It's one of those days. I mentioned yesterday I might change the look of the blog. Nothing happened until last night around 10:30pm. I turned off the movie Woodstock and sat back down in front of my computer. I looked at only a few themes, tried one, the same one I changed too for an hour a few weeks ago. I was basically too tired to make any kind of decision nor did I feel like putting in the time to make the small adjustments after I would activate the theme. So, I ended the night and started today with the same theme as always. Why do I need to change it all the time?

Winter will not hit us until Friday.  A long time blog reader out in the Kansas City area always likes to test the weather we get here in 'the tropics' before it arrives. So sometimes, not all the time, I will get a warning a few days in advance of what to expect. She is more accurate than any weather online radar or local tv weatherman. I don't think she told me about this though ... the fog. She did tell me that temps were half of that 64° I mentioned and that was true this morning. I put my wool socks back on, the sock hat, my gloves, but stuck with the light four seasons jacket as a test. After the first photo from my doorstep, the low battery light started flashing. Could we finish the walk with enough photos?

I decided the best thing to do was to turn the camera off after every photo I took. Some might say that would wear the battery down faster but I remembered from last time just how little time I had left after that blinking battery icon a few weeks ago. I didn't have more than two to three photos left after that. So I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Off, on, off, on, off, on for over 25 times. I liked the fog this morning. It gave the walk a little feeling of mystery as Stella and I walked across a field fully saturated. There is more rain on the way this afternoon and tomorrow. It could be perfect weather for making blog changes.  :)

I also went to bed last night with my Apple Watch battery showing only 13% left. Would that get me through the night? I decided to test it and knowing I would be awake and up within the next six to seven hours, I thought the 13% of battery life would be plenty. I found out this morning, a night of poor sleep took a little over 1% per hour. I had 3% left as I let the hounds outside for the first time today. So ... two batteries needed to be recharged as soon as possible this morning if I was going to be able to operate like I normally do. Sad isn't it ... an electronic life. But ... a good life it is. I love electronic equipment.

Another change took place very early this morning. It's the first time in maybe two years that I am feeding the hounds lamb and rice instead of chicken and rice. I made the change with hopes that Stella will itch less, since I cannot find any fleas on her and there are no signs of raw skin or hot spots from any kind of allergy. Who knows, maybe she is allergic to deer scat? That's a joke ... at least I think it is. I did ask myself, what happens if Heidi's skin allergies flare up with the change in protein? Well if that happens I'll immediately go out and buy the bag of chicken and rice for her and let Stella finish the bag of lamb and rice. Remember, the vet told me two years ago that in his study on dog allergies, dog food was the cause only 3% of the time. Maybe Stella's scratching is a habit since it seems to take place in the same areas inside and outside. Strange.

Another change this morning, I went back to my old blog on Blogger, Bhounds And Other Stuff, and took off the private setting then checked all of the settings in the dashboard. Google always does this, someway settings that I set a long time ago were changed. For some reason the ticks had changed to where search engines were not allowed to index the site. The comments setting was changed. The number of posts on a page had changed. I thought at first all of those happened automatically when I changed the settings to 'private' the other day, but after checking my other two old private blogs, that was not the case. You can go there to see the blog list that updates each time a blogger posts something new. On WordPress I can list those same blogs but they do not update each time a post is published. WordPress keeps the list of blogs or websites in alphabetical order. It's that list of blogs that keep telling me I need a blog template that has the side bar on the home page or at least on the page that has the post.

Not quite halfway through the morning walk and I still am able to take pictures of Stella and the fog. The technique of turning the camera off an on is working so far. Later I'll look at my screen on the Canon camera to see if I can tell how much battery life I have before I get the warning so I am not in this same situation again. While walking I am still thinking about blog changes, or taking photos around my local small town that has some pretty sad buildings empty for the past few years. They all tell an interesting story and one that makes you wonder if the economy is really as good as the experts tell us it is. Or are they possibly proving just how hard it is keeping a brick 'n mortar store profitable year after year in the world of e-commerce? In a few cases the old businesses have gone out of business because of the owner's death but a couple more told me they could not stay competitive with online e-commerce. Other's just retired and could not sell what they had.

I could have gone lighter on this photo but I wanted to keep the overcast sky with fog as the main attraction. The tall grass really is that color next to Stella and there is something about that tall power line tower that keeps me taking photos of it. Over the years I will see an occasional state helicopter flying above the lines, going southwest, checking the lines but in the 21 years I have lived here, I've never seen anyone doing any kind of maintenance or repair.

As I walk this field I feel many mole tracks scattered within the half mile walk. That told me years ago, no matter what I put on my yard to control yard moles, they will always be a problem to my landscaping ideas. I saw one surface on top of the snow one year but other that than I've never seen them. I've tried everything on the market to prevent them from destroying my backyard. I rarely see them in the front yard. I remember in 2014 I dug 6" deep in the flowerbeds, then laid out the black plastic or net to prevent weeds from growing. I covered it up with 6" of river rock in back, mulch in front ... only to see dirt pushed up through the mulch or rocks, above ground level from mole traffic. I hate those little bastards.

No AT&T tower to see today ... the PNW has arrived in 'the tropics'.

Stella did not run again this morning but she did to a little short trot to catch up and pass by me. I keep forgetting that she will be 10 years old this summer.

Just as I snapped this photo, the screen on back of the camera went black and the lens automatically retracted. I had made it on a low battery for over 25 photos and 17 minutes of walking. So besides charging my watch, the Canon battery and finishing my second cup of coffee ... I had two decisions to make. (1) publish this now or wait until later today. (2) spend a lot of time and a lot of data, looking for that one blog theme that I wanted to change to.

The only search words I will use to choose from those 308 WordPress themes are "page wide photos", so the photos will remain as large as they are now with a different design. Besides the large photos on the post page I am looking for a sidebar either on the home page and/or the post page, where I can list those blogs of friends that I follow out in the open, plus other information. This theme puts them at the very bottom of both the home page and post page. I'm not a fan of that placement. Traffic reports show that for some reason there are not a lot of clicks on the past posts on the home page where all the photos/posts are listed, compared to my older Blogger blog. Some of that is by the way the blog is designed for phones and tablets. With those you have to scroll to the bottom to see the other posts. I tried it the other day and told myself "I'm not doing that" and stopped.

So we will see what happens to the blog design today. Maybe nothing.

I still have books to read. I will NOT be watching the State of the Union address tonight nor will I watch all the expert opinions afterwards. That reminds me, the other reason I want a sidebar ... I have four new websites I want to have on the side of the blog. Two of them were mentioned just the other day and two others were sent to me by a friend a few months ago. I read those two very informative blog in my Feedly account. So it looks like I have something to do this morning ... blog design. That also answers option number one above ... post this now.

See how easy life in retirement is. No approvals needed. No meetings to discuss those options. No outsourced input. I'm in charge and that's a good thing here in 'the tropics'. No .... I am NOT putting that period inside that quotation mark !!! :) Besides I am not really in charge here in 'the tropics' ... the hounds are the ones in charge.

I read somewhere yesterday, ah yes, in Team of Vipers. It's very well written and the author is very conscientious about what he is reveling about his time working in the White House. All the reports, the news, the chaos that goes on under the Trump administration does not bother me and does not surprise me in the least. Like I said a month or so ago, I use to work for a family owned business and one of the owners of the company was a twin of Trump ... he acted identical to him. He made decisions the same way, some good some bad. I found it to be typical business. People forget or don't want to remember, a businessman was elected not a politician. So why should his administration be something people and news stations are familiar with or like all the past presidents? It's not complicated for me to see and I'm not the smartest person around.

Well Heidi has moved her sleeping operation from the bedroom into the living room. Stella has joined her with a few hours to go before their lunch. That will give my Canon battery plenty of time to charge. Like I said yesterday or in the past ... I really like that smaller Canon G9 X with the Nikon D3200 as a backup or for those days I need a change. :)

It's foggy but still nice this morning in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Some Sunday Rambling

{Warning: Long and lots of photos}

Every day starts the same. The hounds are fed their breakfast somewhere between 7:30 - 8:30am. At times we may start our day then or later, depending on what I do.

Today ... it started really late. I guess that is what happens when you are watching college football at 2am eastern time. Both were great games and hard to turn off ... so I watched them to their finish. That added up to around 14 straight hours of college football ... flipping to check on other games when a commercial came on during the 'main' game.

During those 14 hours of college football viewing, the daily routine of the hounds does not change. They get their two meals per day, their two walks per day, their normal siestas in their different spots throughout the house.

All three of them go outside the very first thing in the morning. While they are outside I pour out their breakfast kibble. They never leave the yard when they know they are about to be fed food. Then while they are eating I am making my coffee.

After they finish eating, and as the coffee drips ... we head out for my first photos of the day. Some times they will wander the field but recently they don't do much but check out the area I cut just last week, explore the yard and then return to the house for a morning nap.

We took our first walk of the day after their lunch. Even with overcast skies, it felt warm ... like t-shirt warm. Checking when I got back, it was 75°. It is preparing us for three straight days in the 80's starting tomorrow, before the steep drop to 66° on Thursday.

Speaking of the warm fall weather, Ed answered my post about leaf color and why some years they are bright and other years they are dull. It explains what I was wondering about.

His info:

This may be what you are looking for: "A warm period during fall will also lower the intensity of autumn colors. A warm wet spring, favorable summer weather, and warm sunny fall days with cool nights should produce the most brilliant autumn colors."

While on the walk this morning I thought about not his answer but why does he have the inclination to look up something like that on the internet and I don't. He also answered my question a few weeks ago when I wondered why don't farmers here cut their corn shorter than they normally do, compared to other areas of the USA or Canada.

As long as I can remember, which is back to when I was approximately 5 years old ... rocks, leaves, bugs, exploring, etc ... didn't interest me. Sports did. I remember drawing up football and basketball plays on a piece of paper. I had a scrapbook of baseball and football cards ... but I never had a bug collection or leaf collection.

It's too bad I glued those baseball cards to scrapbook paper because some of those cards were worth thousands of dollars, if they didn't have that spot of 50 year old dried glue on the back of them.

Of coarse back in the 60's growing up, sports were not on tv 24/7 but you had the "game of the week" during baseball which was the New York Yankees every Saturday afternoon on CBS. While living in the Indianapolis television area, the weather man for the CBS channel in Indianapolis was someone by the name of Dave Letterman. Funny stuff, even if you didn't care about the weather.

As far as football games on Saturday, I can't remember seeing any more than one game per Saturday and Sunday's had one NFL game on each channel ... CBS and NBC. For me that included the Chicago Bears most of the time on CBS and the Cincinnati Bengals on NBC.

Later when something called the AFL started, some of those games could be watched on Saturday nights.

I guess I am getting off track here but what I am trying to say ... growing up, sports were what I was most interested in. Sixty years later it's still the same thing. I will go on Google to search for sports statistics or sports information but rarely will I go on Google to search for a name of a flower, a bird, or anything I don't have the answer for dealing in the subject of nature.

As far as driving, I've always enjoy 'road trips' but have never been able to stop and enjoy the scenery ... everything seemed to be drive straight through. Those 'road trips' included more than a few trips from San Diego to Indiana and some from Seattle to Indiana. Or the time I took "The Loneliest Highway in the USA" ... US Hwy 50 ... from Sacramento to Indiana. I still drove that non-stop ... stopping for only gas or a gas station to open so I could get gas ... drive thru's for food ... a couple of short 1 hour naps.

I commented at the time on this blog, I thought that might be the reason I enjoyed the driving as much if not more during our one week trip to Utah in June 2015.

I have a pretty long list of blogs I follow over on the left side of this blog. Some of those blogs moved back and forth, off and on that list ... so if there is a blog you use to read that is no longer listed and would like to see it again ... let me know the the name or what it was about and I'll add it back to the list.

As I read those blogs there are fantastic photos of places they are traveling ... I have found I have been to a lot of those places, although not RVing and in some cases I lived in places they blog about. I admit I have lived in some pretty amazing places and some of those are blogged about by other bloggers ... it's quit different compared to the lifestyle here in 'the tropics' of southern Indiana with the hounds.

Iv'e looked back through this post and see that I have only talked about one thing I was planning to write about when I started to "ramble" ... and now can't remember what I was planning to write about ... lol ... typical for getting older.

I'll let this post sit here and simmer a little to see if my brain cells can go out and gather up what I was going to write about. I had other things I wanted to ramble about that would not include religion or politics.

Photos info ... all the photos up to this point were taken by my Nikon D3200 camera with the Tamron 18-200mm lens and none of them were edited, just straight photos with any flaws they may have.

Photos from this point forward were taken by my iPhone 6S. Their new photo program will let me edit them just like I do on my computer but I will keep the original photo format just to so we can compare.

Their football positions.

Hang on ... may memory is coming back!

Why do I have an interest in trading my FJ for another FJ, same year, maybe different options, just to change color to silver to match my silver Z4 ??? Crazy isn't it?

     Or it might be that sound I hear while driving that I cannot determine if it is a maintenance problem, tire noise or just my imagination.

If all my research on dog food over the years, visits to four different vets in 15 months for Heidi's skin issues and discussions with all of those vets about allergies that hounds have ... show there is only a 3% chance those allergies are caused by dog food instead of the environment ....

     Why don't I move to a different location instead of changing dog food to eliminate allergies Heidi has, Sadie licking her leg or Stella scratching where no fleas are present?

Will there ever be a way to get away from Directv or Dish Network's high prices and still see the same number of ballgames that I watch ... without "streaming" those games to my tv? Streaming movies or games is something I cannot do because of my monthly data limit on my home internet service.

     I'm sure there will be. I am getting teasers to try Sling TV to watch certain games but not all games. Apple TV keeps making improvements, does that use internet data? I'll have to check.

Will my location always keep me from the latest in technology ... or does that even matter?

     If there isn't a game on I want to watch or an occasional movie I want to see ... my tv is not turned on. Still, will I be 'squeezed' out by new television technology getting television signals in the future due to what services are available in my area?

Why do I have a 'check engine' light on my FJ dashboard and some other lights here in Indiana but those same lights disappeared while traveling in through Kansas, Colorado and Utah in June 2015?

     I've check that issue with Google searches, FJ forums and tried all of their suggestions to fix the issue. I even talked to the service manager at the Toyota dealership about it. The other day I saw something new .... the gasoline I am using may have too much ethanol in it. Once this tank of gas is used I am changing to a 'top tier' gas station and go back to 91-93 octane instead of 89 octane I've been using.

Deer Highway - Major Traffic

I still wonder at times what keeps Purina dog food in business after 85 years if their dog food is as bad as it is rated? Are all of those positive reviews online just fake?

     Is everything just over analyzed now days ... and I mean everything.

While holding the iPhone camera horizontal I found out if you press the volume adjustment button, the camera will take the photo.

Even with a different camera, Stella still likes to hang back and take the walk on her own pace.

She also still likes to try to sneak off in the neighbor's direction if I am not looking.

She also is not happy when I catch her trying to sneak off and decides it's best to follow Sadie and I home.

Interesting results using the iPhone on the 5pm walk. Depending on the light, the iPhone takes great photos, but I didn't see anything here that would make me want to replace my Nikon D3200 as my main camera.

The iPhone camera is a good camera to substitute for a smaller camera and taking photos inside.

One a final note ... as of today there are only 9 of 32 NFL teams with a winning record.

It's been a great weekend here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana (except for that Hoosiers loss against Nebraska)