First Chilly Morning In The 40's

Like all my other hounds, these two and the dog are major sports fans. While I watch they sleep. With MLB playoffs (haven't watched) NFL football, College Football, F1 Racing there are a lot of options IF I take time to sit down. Watson keeps me on the go most of the time as does this house and the yard. A little bit more than I estimated as far as yard work and keeping the place clean. Consequently not much has changed in the last nine days since my last post.

Hip Feels Strong For First Time

It was in the middle of the night when I realized my hip is so much stronger. I had moved my right leg in a way that I couldn't just a few days ago, in the middle of sleeping. There was no discomfort in my hip as I raised the leg a little to change sleeping positions. Always before I could feel "something" inside the hip. As I started the day today I could once again feel improvement from how I felt only 24 hours before.

Heidi has various places to sleep scattered throughout the house. This spot is one of her favorites and it's one of the first places I put a blanket down for her when we moved in. She has not slept yet on the tile floor, always finding a blanket or the carpet piece inside the front door. All the bedrooms are carpeted so she likes that.

Just like today, it was beautiful yesterday where the temps spent most of the day in the 70s and only toward the very end of the afternoon did it creep up to 82°. I knew before I moved here, there was great weather here and it would be sunny 300+ days per year but I didn't realize just how nice the weather really is.

I didn't do much yesterday. I walked close to 6,000 steps and took numerous short walks during the day from five to ten minutes each. I decided to see if that huge dog was living in that house or not, so I walked that way to the end of the street and back ... did it again a few times today. I did not hear nor see that huge dog.

I do a lot of laps around my backyard, that is .02 of a mile per lap and takes 1:12-1:23 in minutes and seconds. You can tell the monsoons have been here, look at all that green.

Luckily Stella is not a barker like other dogs in the neighborhood, especially like the one next door. She will stand and listen to all the noise but never barks or howls back at them. Here she is deciding whether to walk with me or stand and watch me.

The new iPhone 11 Pro talks about taking great photos in the dark. Over the past week I have tested my 8+ taking the same photos in the dark and look what I find sleeping next to my bed at 3:30am. I didn't know she was there but just held the camera up in the air from my position on the bed to see if she might be.  That's not a bad photo in a pitch black room. She started then night sleeping in the walk in closet again.

The hounds were up again at 3am for their pee breaks. Ten minutes later all three of us are back in the bedroom sound asleep. We slept so soundly that I almost missed today's sunrise. I was able to catch it about 20 minutes from the time the sun came up.

At this time of day it is now normal to have low 50s as the temperature to start our day. I like that.

In the short time it took to make coffee, the skies had changed and it looked like a storm front or a fog bank rolling in. No rain in the forecast, so it's hard to say what it was.

For the second day in a row I had a really long phone conversation with an old friend. All of us seemed to be finding out that we are aging whether we want to acknowledge it or not. All of use have had some major health issues this past 6-9 months. We are all the same age, give or take a couple of years, are active with swimming biking running or walking.

Stella does a lot of this during the day and once it reaches to the high 70s outside, she will sleep on the tile with no complaints. Heidi? Still on the living room rug or back in the bedroom on her dog bed.

I am not done walking yet for the day and I have walked a total of 2 miles today and 5,538 steps. Each time I was finished walking I did not feel any kind of weakness or discomfort in my hip or legs. All of that was walking on my own slowly, with short steps, carrying a cane in case I need it.

Mexico is looking good today.

Bisbee is looking good today.

Since there is nothing important delivered in the mail today, I will not be making a trip to the mailbox. I think I have walked about all I need to really and I can spend the rest of the day resting and watching the MLB Wildcard game at 5pm.

As I sat down at the computer desk to put this post together, Stella slid into her normal spot anytime I am on the computer. She seems to like the right side of the desk this this week.

I had another person confused today when she read about the heart report I spoke of. She also had the impression that I was ONLY going to use that report to base my decision on what my next move would be. She also felt she needed to remind me that I needed to see a cardiologist and let him make the decision. What is it with people? Was it that hard to understand what I was saying?

I cannot explain it well enough I am sure but I can feel that the hip is stronger than it was just last week. I have no plans to see just how wide I can move the right leg to the right, nor do I plan to increase my walking ... I'm going to continue the protein and collagen supplements to help the hip heal. I cannot wait to see how good I feel by the time I talk to the surgeon again on October 20th.

The hip just feels stable, sturdy and strong.

No urges to drive yet. I don't need to go anywhere right now and figure the longer I hold off trying to drive the more my hip will be healed.

So a pretty quiet two days. Lots of rest, talking on the phone, watching a little baseball and reading some.

There is some great weather happening in the Wild West.

The Pace Is Fast & Furious

A warning that you will not see until after you load the blog, but there are 44 photos today and the reason for the blog taking a long time to load onto your phone, tablet or computer. Not all of them were taken today but some spread out over the past week, a few from yesterday afternoon and then this morning. Needless to say, as you will see, the pace has been fast and furious here as we adjust to cooler temps and that terrible Daylight Savings Time change.

Last week when I had taken all of these photos of the hounds sleeping during the day while I read a book on the couch or at night while I watch a game or movie ... I thought of just one blog post titled something like "A Night With The Hounds" ... then I thought of making a page at the top with the others and showing all of these sleeping photos in sequence. Then I decided to do neither and to add them to the post this morning. That's what happens when the mind is too active.

Yes it might be a little cold inside the house for some, 60° ... but I like a cooler house and so do my sinuses. Electric heat as always irritated my sinuses.

They trade couch positions at times. Basically Stella decides who sits where, including me.

Nothing like an afternoon siesta ... life is rough with those two walks per day.

All of those photos of the hounds sleeping were taken with my iPhone 8+ camera and most of them were at night in low light, with a no flash setting. None of them were edited.

By noon the temps have been pretty nice in the range of the mid to high 50's. I wouldn't mind staying outside but the hounds would rather get back inside to sleep after a short trip after their lunch to relieve themselves.

Heidi will always concede and let Stella enter the house first. Before it would be a 3 hound race all standing on the step and Sadie would always enter first no matter what. I should have painted my steps concrete gray THIS YEAR like I had planned. The word "distraction" is a terrible thing to say.

This morning's walk started no different than yesterday, only this time I was expecting Stella to do the same thing as she did yesterday, when I had forgotten about those crazy burrs that dead ragweed produces. Yesterday she was covered in them before I saw her. This morning I caught her only a few steps in the large area of burrs and dead ragweed ... luckily when I yelled NO ... she turned around and came walking toward me.

The ragweed will be easier to cut down with my weed eater using the nylon string since their stems are dead. I would have used the gas power weed eater with the steel blade last summer but I have yet to get it started. The local hardware store quoted me a $100 repair bill if it was the carburetor, or around $70 if anything else minor. I passed.

Most of them are not embedded in her coat so they are easy to pull out.

When I saw her turn and then start chewing something (a burr) I decided I would not wait to get back to the house to pull them out of her coat, I'd do it now. She was happy with that decision as she jumped and trotted off when I was finished.

Fall was short lived this year. A chance of snow predicted for Thursday has now been moved out to Monday. Snow ??? Really ??? Hey, it's the Midwest in November and winter is right around the corner, no reason to complain. I told myself if you don't like it that much then move, don't complain.

A lot of leaves were blown off trees the other night but there is still plenty left to extend my leaf removal project out to late November. Maybe I can mow them while it's snowing for the first time ever.

As you can tell, Stella was not in any hurry this morning. It's just another day in retirement for her.

Believe it or not, she wasn't eating deer scat this morning ... only collecting and identifying different scents.

It's going to be another nice day today. As long as the sunshine is out I rarely mind how cold it is.

After a lot of verbal herding this morning, she finally is steps away from the backyard.

She must be waiting for a compliment for finishing the walk ... but that isn't really finished yet. In a way she is just starting a new one, at her pace.

Those photos look much faster than the time she took to go just a few feet in distance.

The Sycamore tree to the south of me, right by the driveway, will keep me mowing leaves for weeks to come.

The Mahogany trees in back will be doing the same ... unless ... I get a couple of days or nights with high winds and the yard is cleared of any leaf left behind. It's happened before so I can only hope.

The routine doesn't change here much once summer is over. If fact it doesn't change much in the summer either does it? The hounds and I are fine with that. It fits in our schedules since we have no schedules. All of us are retired and can do what we want when we want. I fiddle around on the computer a lot, I may read a lot but lately that urge has decreased. No closets to clean out and reorganize, house is clean, dishes down ... so it's pretty slow.

Channel surfing the other night I saw that the Hallmark Channels are showing their movies about Christmas already in the first week of November. Plus the Walmart Garden Center is now full of Christmas decorations and not even a bottle of weed killer is on the shelves. I am not a fan of extremely early marketing for Christmas but I do understand how it happened.

Of course these slow times makes it hard to find something to blog about, unless I do only a paragraph of content and list 40 photos. For me that is hard to do. "Every picture tells a story" (Rod Stewart sing 1970???) and I find it hard not to say something about the photos or at least have them in some sort of sequence. I have said it before, it's hard for me to list a few highlighted photos to decrease the number listed. Plus whenever I take a day or two away from blogging I always seem to come back with too many photos.

The best decision I have made in a while occurred yesterday. After a few days of wearing my new pair of fleece lined jeans,  I decided they were too big. Another wash with hot water and the hottest setting on the dryer did not shrink them. They just didn't feel like they were the right fit. So I exchanged them yesterday for a size smaller. This morning I can tell I made the right decision and they are now working as they were designed too. I didn't have to inhale too much to button the waist.

I guess it's the small things that make a difference when the pace of life is fast and furious.

College basketball has started officially in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana and that's never a bad thing.