It's Cold & Rainy

After the great weekend of weather, the hounds and I have been on a gentle slope toward snow tomorrow. It's been a slow process, first the temps dropped, a day later the sun disappeared, last night it started raining and today it's been 'freezing' around 40° and a constant rain.

It's reminded me of my time in the PNW, experiencing the winters on Whidbey Island for ten years ... cold, dark and rainy. Therefore, I've had more than my normal two cups of coffee today. I have read all kinds of new blogs on new topics. I've looked at houses on Zillow, checked a few old neighborhoods on Google Satellite Maps ... basically have just hung out inside.

The hounds haven't done much at all and certainly nothing to blog about. Heidi will only go out twice on a day like this. Remember she has a threshold of 70° for a lot of outdoor activity. She is older and she knows when to let me know when she needs to go outside. Otherwise I can find her hidden in blankets in her spot on the bed.

Stella and Sadie went outside numerous times but never stayed long even when I was willing to let them roam. They did what they had to do and came running back to the house. They napped most of the day. Those times they wrestled inside my favorite camera ... the Nikon D3200 ... failed to work again to get the photo of them.

I am not sure if it is the lens or the camera but I do know that I am tired of trying to figure it out. NO, I will not send it back in to the repair center. They had their chance, it worked for a short time. Plus I read on the Nikon D3200 forums that I am not the only operator that has this problem. Not sure what my next camera will be nor when I'll buy it ... I might go an entirely different direction this time in choosing one.

Heidi's skin has improved today, after I wrote about how red it was yesterday. It's a very light pink and I am not sure if that is even an accurate description. Let's say it's close to a normal skin color with just a little tint of faded red. My attempt to capture that photo to show the color was a failed attempt with the Nikon 18mm-55mm lens.

So by the time I grabbed a different lens, lock and loaded the camera ... Stella and Sadie were willing to pose for a photo.

The other day while finding new blogs or articles to read I came across a different way of budgeting. Currently I have the 8-9 different categories that Dave Ramsey recommends, filled out on my spreadsheet where I have been tracking my expenditures since 1999. The different kind of budgeting recommended only 3 categories and percentages 50/20/30 of your take home pay.

I follow a pretty tight budget because basically I am probably what some have called me ... cheap. At least I know where it went and I always have some money left over every month ... so it's good. These new categories gave me some breathing room. In areas I thought I was spending max amounts under Dave Ramsey's ideas, I was well within range of the 50/20/30 percentages. It didn't matter if I was eating out or buying groceries, it was just food.

If you have read this far and someone interested in budgets ... Let me explain more in detail.

Do not include or count any of your income that goes to investments, 401Ks or IRAs that are taken out of your pay check before taxes. Do not count anything that is withdrawn from your gross income, such as medical, taxes or social security. Just take your net income and work with that amount. The 50/20/30 are max spending limits.

50% is for "Fixed Spending" -- these are monthly payments that will not change until they are paid.

• Mortgage, Auto Loans, Insurance, Utilities, Water, Phone, Internet Provider, Trash Pickup, HOA Fees, Rent

20% is for "Financial Goals" -- only 3 categories here, pay off credit card debt, saving for emergency fund or retirement

30% is for "Flexible Spending" -- Other stuff you buy during the month where spending amounts are different.

• Groceries, Dining Out, Gas, Hobbies, Shopping, Other Fun Stuff

I found that once I sat up a spreadsheet and plugged in that information, I found out that I was better off than I had been thinking I was. It gave me a little more flexibility financially ... some breathing room. I guess I can go back to the Casino and put my money played on the craps table in the "Other Fun Stuff" category and still be under my 30% limit.  :)

Also a little side note. For those that have this site bookmarked with the .net domain ... stop, don't do it anymore. Due to the large amount of uncontrollable hacking attempts on that domain, I have changed the settings of that .net domain to "park"... it will not bring you to this site anymore in the next few hours once the servers are reset.

On Wordpress I was getting a large amount of spam hits on the domain even after being online just a day. In that case I was able to install a WordPress plug-in to block them and their comments. On blogger I have yet to find a way to block ALL spam attempts. My Blogger traffic reports show the .net is the source of a huge amount of hits, outside the normal numbers. Based on the countries those hits are coming from, I know they are spam attacks.

So ... you can bookmark or add to your blog side bar the .com domain but delete the .net domain. I have no plans to renew either domain this year so this blog will eventually go back to www.bhounds.blogspot.com. If you want to just bookmark that url, that will work also.

So ... really not much went out today in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Sadie & Stella Have a Burst of Energy

It’s been one of those days here in the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana. Too warm to snow, cold enough to have to wear a coat, and the ground is too wet/soggy to go for a walk … but the bloodhounds had a sudden burst of energy this morning. I’ll let the photos do the talking.

I’m not sure they will get much more done today … they have been sleeping every since.

If you want to read about my efforts this morning or the 1st half of the day, to move Heidi’s blog and hopefully the other blogs to her(their) new dot com site, hosted by DreamHost then read from here on. There is some humor, a little frustration, few questions, a lot of head scratching and 2nd guessing.

First of all when I talked to a friend about this a few weeks ago, even before moving to WordPress, she told me “if you are not going to make money off of a site then why pay for a domain and a host for that site.” Estimated depending where you buy the domain and hosting service .. but a $100 – $125 per year.

So I decided to move my blogger blog to the free WordPress side. I liked the dashboard, all of the themes. I even found 4 different themes that I really liked for each blog. They all seemed to fit, if you know what I mean. In this story I am about to tell it will be important that you remember what I just said about ‘themes’.  :)

I had some good sleep Thursday night. No health issues like the night before. Stella wakes me Friday morning, I feel rested, a couple of cups of coffee and I am ready to move some blogs from here to their new domains, onto a host and publish online. Should be easy.

Over the years since I last did this type of work at home, everything seemed to be a one-click operation. I had Heidi’s blog moved within minutes. Her domain showed up online within 30 minutes which I thought was extremely fast. DreamHost had a WordPress app where with one-click it installed Heidi’s blog without an issue.

Luckily last week when I was uploading photos from my computer to WordPress’s “Media Library” I had made a folder for each hound. I did not find out until today why I did that.

I followed the steps furnished to me by DreamHost. Heidi now had a new WordPress.org site, hosted by DreamHost and showing up online with her .com domain. Once I uploaded the photos again from my computer, Heidi’s folder to her new WordPress “media library”, all the photos matched up with the imported blog posts and were correctly installed.

All of her posts were there, the categories, the tags, about page, contact page … EVERYTHING … but … the theme.

Remember what I said a few paragraphs ago about ‘themes’?

Sure they only showed 20 different themes to use in the default setting but after I clicked that “add more”, I had 2,168 themes to chose from and as I scrolled through not even a 1/3 of them I notice my data counter is spinning like you would see dollar/cents on a gas pump. When you only have 15Gb per month on your internet service plan and only had 700 Mb left for the month with 5 days to go …. data spinning out of control is NOT want you want to see happening!!!

The bottom line was, out of 2,168 themes available, NONE of the themes I am using on the free side of WordPress were available on the .org side of WordPress. They didn’t show up when I searched them, they didn’t get answers back when I asked on the support forums.

By the time I had noticed and shut off my browser due to data usage going out of control, I received an email from my internet service provider that I had used my monthly allotment of 15Gb’s. Of course there are options and that is an expensive option in my book … I can buy more Gig’s at $10 per 1Gb until my new billing cycle starts on the 27th.

Now that I have ran over my limit, I still have internet access but at “dial-up” speeds … if the page loads at all.

Or I can stay up from Midnight until 5am and use all the data I want, like I always can between those times of night. High speed will be the norm during those 5 hours, it’s called their “free data” on my plan.

Let’s get back to the blog issue and a domain name.

So I have a blog with it’s own domain name and that makes it look so official, yet there is not one theme that I want to use. I like the theme that Heidi has on her blog now, on the free side of WordPress.

I’m not sure I want to move forward on moving everything to a .com domain. Really what is the reason? Those words of my friend a few weeks ago, echo in my brain. I basically have 4 blogs set up the way I want them. All I have to do from now on is post, answer comments and “let it ride”.

Oh, I thought about all of this before and even from what I read I might have to rebuild some of the blogs that I would transfer to WordPress’s .org side of the house. Other writers kept saying it was just soooooo important that I own my own blogs, not letting a ‘free’ host keep control of them.

I just received an email from my forum question about my theme or the three themes. It’s sad that the solution is so simple. It is something I saw when I chose that theme early this week. The maker of the theme, WordPress.com has a “download” button on theirs to where all I need to do is download the them to my computer, upload to Heidi’s .com site. How easy is that … and how brain dead I am at times. LOL

So with that answer you can tell where this is going … back to Heidi’s site to get her theme uploaded. If that goes smooth then I will be able to move Stella’s, Sadie’s and even mine by the end of today.

Of course that changes all the domains again. I will will post them here and on the hound blogs once I know for sure that each site works.

Back to my Exede Internet provider. Due to my location I don’t have any other choice but satellite internet. Believe me I looked and called every possible provider in June 2014. This is it. My speeds will eventually trickle to where I can’t even load an email or a website, even though they tell me that’s not possible because I will always have access, just not high speed access.

It will become so slow I will have no choice but to buy more data or have to stay off the internet until January 27th. That might actually be a good thing … lol … a little vacation.

Now I’m headed back to some computer work and it should go fairly fast now that I know how to get those themes loaded. Will I have the internet speed to do it??

The Weed Pulling Project Has Been Completed

That's A Lot of Weeds - Pile Over 3' Tall

Before I get started writing about the project today, I was up at 6:10am to let the dogs outside, while Heidi continued to sleep as usual ... that's way too early for her to get up by her rules. The sun was perfect for some picture taking so I went back inside to grab the camera. You know the one, the Nikon D3200 that I just had repaired a couple of months ago????

Well once again, I press the shutter button ... no auto focus. It tells me "lens is not attached". Okay, I can play that game, so I took that lens off and with my computer lint free cloth wiped the silver edge that connects or rubs against the back of the lens when it is connected and attached a different lens.

Same result ... "lens not attached".

Now I know I have claimed to be a night person, that I am not a fan of getting up early .... and not having any coffee in my system yet, I must admit I could feel my blood pressure rising at a rapid rate ... I had a split second visual of throwing that camera as far as I could ... which wouldn't be far with a bad shoulder for pitching. Add on the fact that I am not a fan of a camera that doesn't work again. Let's just say that I wasn't real happy at 6:15am, and leave it political correct.

I decided as I slowly twisted the lens off the camera, that first thing on Friday morning I would take the camera back in to Best Buy so they could send it to the Nikon service center for warranty work again. I had a feeling of calmness come over me with that thought. Just to make sure, I put the 18mm-55mm lens back on the camera and tried it one more time ....

It worked perfect and has continued to work perfect since then. Blood pressure immediately dropped.

Well after close to 20 hours of labor, spread over 5 days, the project of pulling weeds is over. The rain last night and during the morning before sunrise, worked out perfect for a final day of pulling weeds. Without that rain I am not sure I could have finished due to the right side of the driveway having a foundation of hard packed old driveway gravel. It would've been hard pulling weeds out of that hard packed soil.

Starting Point of Thursday

Finishing Point of Thursday

The difference today was getting some sleep last night. I was in bed before midnight and pulling my first weed of today at 9:30am. Email, sports news and a few blogs were read by then and topped off with two cups of coffee.

With the rains last night the highest temp today was 74° so I spent most of my day pulling weeds in temperatures below 70°. Even though it was easier pulling most of the time, I still wondered at times if this project was a lot like painting the Golden Gate Bridge ... by the time you finish it's time to start over ...

I had noticed walking around today on the drive there were new sprouts of grass, crabgrass etc. What I don't want is this to turn into is a daily thing ... but I have a slight obsession now. Even when the hounds were outside after I finished the driveway, I walked where I pulled weeds a few days ago and found new sprouts.

I have a Plan B for the future though. Twenty hours was okay, gave me something to do and it certainly looks much better than when I started last Friday ... but I'm not sure it is something I want to do on a regular basis. Mowing the yard close to every week is enough fun when it comes to yard work.

In the meantime the house next door that is for sale after 13 months of being on the market, had their yard crew of one person riding along the edge of their property on a ATV with their weed killer on the back and the spray nozzle in hand. She said my work looked great, she noticed the progress each day as she drove by ... but said ... "they will always come back, you need to spray".

So maybe tonight or tomorrow morning over coffee, I will be searching on Google for "chemical free weed killer". Feel free to leave comments if you have something that works.

The last part of the project was that section of gravel in back of the driveway, where I use to park my 1994 Chevy truck. I didn't think it would take long, it didn't. So I went inside and asked Heidi and Winston if they wanted to come outside ... they both ran for the door, while Sadie stayed outside as the Project Supervisor.

Before

After

I was happy to see Heidi laying the sun. Winston of course took only a minute to lay on the warm concrete and was snoring soon after. I have a feeling that warm concrete makes his old back feel good. He sleeps in the sun a lot out there and at times refuses to come inside if the sun is out.

Always On The Prowl

Legs Look Bad Today But At Least She Stayed Outside With Us

Nothing Bothers Him ... Nothing

The trash can that is from just from the driveway below. I had that completed a little after noon.

Thursday's Catch of The Day

With the next ten days of sunshine ... I think I'll only mow the backyard on Friday but before I do that, I can wait for the grass to dry from the morning dew by washing the Mini Cooper S.

I don't know the exact date for the renewal of my domain name, I'll have to check because I think it is in September. Reason being I am not sure I am going to renew the domain name this year. It's not the cost, it's the name. "rvs".

When I think of "RV", I only picture Class A or Class C's .. I do not picture travel trailers or 5th wheels. The largest number of searches are a result of people looking for information on the Lil Snoozy Trailer that I almost bought in September 2013. When I started this blog in October 2011 I thought at that time I was going to buy a Class A, then it moved to a Class C ... then starting last year in 2014 I lost the urge to buy either and wanted to buy a trailer.

So over time, I am not sure the domain name of "houndsandrvs dot com" is accurate for the direction of this blog. It is very likely I will just go back to the Blogspot name that I had when I signed up to blog on Blogger.

You might want to bookmark this site with www.bhounds.blogspot dot com. (don't use spaces, those are to keep the spiders away).

I will have time to think more about that change. IF I do decided to make that change I will remind all the readers 5-10 posts before the change is made.

Once again as it has proven most every late summer to early fall ... I become quite content at the house. The weather is great, one of the best times to live in Indiana. Yet by December and January I am wanting to get somewhere warm. We will see what happens but if I were to travel I don't believe I will be going anywhere until November.

I still don't know what to try to fix Heidi's skin problems. Today was one of her worst days. I have always noticed though when she wakes up for the first time of the day, her skin looks really good, nothing red, nothing raw. She gets a couple of handfuls of dog food, grain free, as her treat for the day.  In the morning she will go outside for a couple of minutes but only on the driveway gravel. By noon she is back to chewing again, no matter what cream, liquid zinc, K9 cream or just plain warm water is applied.

We will keep trying to keep her skin clean, keep applying K9 cream and wipe her with warm water after she comes back inside. Of course if the allergens are in the carpet, maybe her blankets, or the air ... then all bets are off on it being an outside environmental cause.

No matter what ... it's a beautiful day here in "the tropics".

Domain is Working & Ramblings

It looks like my blogging vacation lasted a couple of weeks. I wasn't off the internet and spent more time than I would have preferred online but I'll discuss that later in this post. I can't shut my mind off so I am always thinking about different decisions and solutions.

First of all, I am going to renew the domain name of this blog. I just checked it and it did work. So all should be operable at www.houndsandrvs.com as well as www.bhounds.blogspot.com Yesterday I took down the domain name and was just using my blogger address, so for those that tried to visit the blog and got the blank page saying your browser could not find the blog ... that was the reason for it.

This blog is almost three years old, I have close to or a little over 100,000 page views and regular readers that come back looking for either new information, see if I'm breathing, what the hounds are doing and what kind of travel plans I have, if any.

So, I decided to stay "open for business", renew my domain name and continue to blog. I have a lot of online friends here and that's always a good thing being a self proclaimed loner. I know being on the side of a "blog reader" it's always disappointing after following a blog to either have the author stop blogging and tells you or the blogger that quietly disappears and never comes back to their blog.

I didn't feel it was right to stop blogging, even about every day routine living as long as I had followers and I still had the urge to write. Which I have both.

While I didn't write about anything I did do some rearranging. As you could see I moved some things from the right sidebar to the left sidebar. I removed some blogs from my list only to make it shorter. I still follow the removed blogs on my Feedly account. I deleted photos of the hounds and my Toyota. I might put the photos of the hounds back on the sidebar. I'll probably continue to move things around and may add those blog links back to my sidebar even though the list was long.

During my absence I continued to read my list of RV blogs as well as other retirement blogs and found that I was not the only one questioning whether to continue blogging or what subjects to write about. Lloyd posted yesterday that he was finding little to write about since he has come off the road, doing the same hike everyday and now living in one spot. He had also gone through all of the social media options and is reverting back to just blogger as his writing platform.

Bob Lowry and his wife over at A Satisfying Retirement just returned home from a trip to the upper Midwest in a Class C and found that 43% of his expenses were going into the fuel tank. While Curtis over at Poor Mans RV Life has found out that after using a Class C, a Jeep Cherokee towing a trailer and a Van over the years, that his older diesel pusher, a Pace Arrow is the best rig he has traveled in, getting 10mpg and spending roughly $500 per month in fuel as he starts his fulltime RV lifestyle.

Both of those percentages and dollars are more than I had budgeted in my estimates. I also knew or expected I would spend more than I have budgeted for fuel, food, etc.

As I mentioned above, I've been spending more time than I have wanted on the internet. It's just the rut I've been in longer than I want to admit. I do a lot of online reading during the day from the blogs I follow, to sports news and forums, forums for the FJ Cruiser and Mini Cooper as well as computers. I trying to stay away from reading the news, still it is very easy to spend hours and hours reading before you realize just how much time you have spent ... which feels like wasted time to me.

That is not the way I want to spend everyday ... so today I am making changes.

It's beautiful outside AGAIN today, so I am definitely going to be spending some time outside with the hounds. The Mini Cooper needs washed and it's finally cool enough to do that. With the recent storms and high winds I will be getting on the roof since the temps have decreased and clear off some broken tree branches.

I admit I like this time of year in the "tropics" of southern Indiana. With the clear skies you can see a million stars at night and the low humidity you can do things outside and still breath. For some reason this summer, bugs and mosquitoes have not been a problem. At night I am smelling more and more camp fires in the air.

Al talked about his three hobbies he has had over the years and how they have came together in the way he travels and his daily photography. That got me thinking and asking myself what were my hobbies past and present. Some of them I have always had for as long as I remember while I found a few that I no longer did but had possible interest in starting again.

Back in the 80's I was into photography. I had all the different sized lenses, the different filters and the bags to carry the equipment in. I have photographs I took while traveling throughout the world and 99% of those photographs are on 35mm slides. At that time 35mm slides was the preferred option for taking photographs. I have some older photos from a small 110 camera that I took with me on my cross country bicycle trip and those can be scanned, I just need to take the time to do it.

So photography is something I might start doing again. I realized I have a lot of neat things to take photos of around here but like most everyone else ... we take those shots for granted since they are a part of our daily life and end up not taking pictures. Many of the photos I am seeing from bloggers this summer from Whidbey Island and surrounding areas, I don't have a lot of photos of but have ten years worth of them in my mind. I think I'd rather have the photos.

Sports have been a hobby of mine since my first breath. My dad was a high school basketball and baseball coach so our life was geared around sports 12 months a year. In the summers he would have two to three weeks off and unlike many of the current RV bloggers, we did NOT take camping trips .. we would travel but would stay in motels that had a pool. We also tried to tie those vacations to major league baseball games if possible. So, no matter what happens I doubt my love of watching sports will ever change.

Another hobby I like doing is riding either a road bicycle or my mountain bike, even if its only for a few miles. When I do travel I will take the mountain bike with me and leave the road bikes at home.

Like Al, I have always enjoyed driving ... yes driving.  I cannot count the number of times I have made trips from California to Indiana and back or Washington to Indiana and back but every time I loved driving cross country. Yet on all of those trips I either didn't have time or didn't take time to stop and look at the beautiful country I was traveling through. At times I did take the older highways but only stopped for food, gas and an occasional nap.

From the list of hobbies I wrote down just out of curiosity, I found that I could do most if not all of them traveling.

That leads me to the subject of traveling.

At this time I cannot make that commitment. Basically after more thinking the past two weeks and even coming close to purchasing a trailer I have decided not at this time. I also enjoy this time of the year in Indiana. Also the hounds ... every time I think about them traveling, I think of their comfortable life here. Winston is getting older, hind legs are getting weaker, and when I look into his old eyes as I pet him ... I hear the words "stay here". Heidi is getting treatments for her skin issues which have not changed even with cooler temps and even keeping her off grass for two weeks ... they got worse. Sadie is just Sadie ... big and needs room when inside.

After a few recent tests traveling with the hounds there are still issues that I wrote about here last September. They do better in the FJ than in the H3 Hummer I had. It's a little bit smaller inside so less room for stuff and us. I just feel the best time for me to do any traveling is when I am down to one hound, not three. It doesn't matter how much I want to travel in a small trailer towed by my FJ 4x4, I know that is not enough room for me and the hounds.

Of course you never know what lays ahead in life, what could change to take away that chance to travel but I am willing to live with my decision and I'll have no regrets if something happens to prevent me from traveling. I have traveled a lot and seen a lot of places recorded in photos in the past just not in an RV, so if something happens before I can travel it's ok.

I will still take short trips with the hounds but I cannot say that I'll make the commitment to travel for the reasons explained above.

Today I am making some subtle changes to my daily routine to enjoy what's outside around me and also to get out of my recent rut. I know I am early into my retirement phase but I think I need some sort of structure instead of floating aimlessly through my days. I'm not talking major changes, just things that will put me back into some sort of routine, without spending all my time in front of a computer monitor.

My traveling plans may change when the temperature get to the point that I hate being here and that might be enough to shove me out the door, hounds and all.

Even with little to no travel at this time, I will continue to blog about retirement living and if anything changes in the travel plans.

My Domain Name Update

GoDaddy reactivated my account today and had my domain name in the "terminal" status....which basically means I needed to pay $80 for a redemption fee to load the domain name back to this blog. I wasn't going to pay that. So in a few months I will buy the name when it comes available and then redirect the old domain name to this blog.

In the meantime, my blog domain name is:  www.bhounds.blogspot.com

Domain Change

Problem solved on the Domain redirect from GoDaddy to the blog.

Over a cup of coffee this morning I was looking on Blogger's notables and saw a recent "Buzz" where it was easy to transfer your domain name from GoDaddy to Blogger. In the past when I was selling sports memorabilia online, I use to transfer domains all the time but each time I had to go through the step by step process....it was confusing each time. So I was happy to see that BlogSpot had found a way to make this process easy.

Well...maybe not.

I had bought my new domain about a month ago for a couple of reasons. That domain is www.houndsandrvs.com

It goes to my blog when typing that into the address bar...good
It also loads if I leave the www off...good
All looks normal EXCEPT...my list of blogs I read does not show up...bad

Working on little computer things like this is not on my "to do" list today, so hopefully as the domain grows today that list of blogs I read will show up.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Oh, Saturday was another day of looking at different RV Sales websites. Through the emails and comments I have received it sounds like I am not the only one that took time to sort through this maze of RV full-timing information.  I found a couple of new blogs that I will mention later, that is great information for a "RV Newbie" and also a couple of blogs where Murphy's Law had kicked in as soon as they drove their newly purchased RV off the lot. Some amazing stories between those two blogs....almost made me wonder for a second if RVing was really the direction I wanted to go.

Yet, the more blogs I read of the travel, the pictures and the freedom to move RVing gives....I haven't changed my mind about hitting the road.

More RV posting later....now its back to laundry, blog reading, and preparing for a day of NFL football.