No Surprises In Weather -- It's July

Yes .. you did see this page before it disappeared ... I didn't want to 'publish' until this afternoon or tonight but by mistake hit the 'publish' button instead of 'close' ... so, you are correct, it was here for a few seconds this morning.

As I return to blogging, I am thinking that my normal post time will be late afternoon or early evening around 6pm at the latest. That seems to be the best time not only for me but I am able to capture photos or thoughts that happen that day. Otherwise I leave out what happens that afternoon, photos included. I am still not sure if I'll post daily and am planning to post when I feel like it ... could be daily, could be a few times per week. {A little early today}
When I was blogging back in January with the temperature 7° and a windchill below 0°, I wanted this weather we are having now. Now I am not sure I wanted this extreme heat, but it's much worse in other parts of the USA. It's normal for July yet the 'system' has definitely changed. Stella doesn't mind ... she still tries to head due north every morning ... I call her name, she veers our direction.

For you Mac users I am trying out the Beta version of the macOS Mojave. It's is going to have a much different look for you unless you go into your Apple preferences and change it to 'Light'. I'll keep the surprises under wraps since I hate when people tell me about the whole movie before I see them. One thing I am having trouble with is keeping signed in on Blogger.

I have to go to the laptop that still has the previous macOS High Sierra, to reply to your comments or for me to make comments on other blogs .. because it keeps me signed into Blogger all the time.

Not much has been going on out of the ordinary routine this past month or so. I had a break from doing my 'to do' list when a DYI article fell into my inbox. It listed most of the things I wanted to do, are not to be done in humid weather. I guess 95% or higher on that scale is good enough for me to wait until fall before I attacked a few things out of vengeance as well as required before winter.

You might notice a different collar on Stella. The one I bought for her two years ago became too small for her. I couldn't adjust it to be longer so I looked inside the closet door that has old collars, different 6' leashes and a few bicycle tools hanging on a small rack ... I still had the longer, bigger collar she came with in August 2015 ... a pink collar with John Deere icon on it. With a bumper crop of corn this summer, the John Deere collar seemed appropriate for her.

After a year my neighbor that works the Texas oil fields, decided he needed to move closer to the lake 30 miles away. Luckily his friends decided to buy the house and they moved in a few weeks ago. A young couple that likes to keep the place clean, the yard mowed and the nights quiet. It's good to finally get someone in the house that seems like they will be there long term. The hounds have not realized they have new neighbors and that's a good thing. I like to keep them in the yard and the field if possible ... less chance of them finding something interesting in the highway to inspect.

I am finding out that when electronics get old, they break. They don't last forever, nor should they. It's hard to understand I am sure in this day of 'disposable' electronics but my Yamaha stereo was bought in July 1984 ... yes 34 years ago. My computer speakers, a pair of Bose Companion 2 Series II were bought 8 years ago and needed replaced.

Of course one of my friends that is into music big time, an ex-music store owner, younger than I ... was pushing me to move my large collection to digital. That was a lot like the plan I had in 2014 of moving all my music, photos, filing cabinets of paper files all to digital ... it turned into a huge job and not one I wanted to finish.

I still think my music sounds better in those tall Polk Audio speakers with two 12" woofers, 4-mid-range speakers and 4 or 6 tweeters. Heavy and have moved all over the USA in the past 25 years but they still put out quality sound. With my old Yamaha Control Amp C-40 only playing the right side I needed a new amplifier. Things have changed over the years I found out while I looked for a replacement.

Rare to find separate components so my choice was an integrated amp or a receiver. A home theater did not interest me yet I wouldn't mind plugging my tv into the amp to use those tall speakers for movies, hear the crack of the bat in baseball games or F1 racing moving across my living room. So I found a receiver to buy and it will be here next Tuesday.

With one of my smaller computer speakers sounding scratchy, as if it I had blown it out ... I needed a new set of those. Of course I am old so any young sales rep at Best Buy assumes I know nothing about computers or electronics and he told me a $9 set of audio cables would fix my problem. I was pretty sure that was not the answer but decided to try his way anyway.

I returned those cables a day later and picked up a new set of Bose Companion 2 Series III.

Before they cut the field and rolled the hay, there wasn't a weed to be found anywhere. The seven acres was almost all grass. Now the field is full of what I call 'weeds' ... stuff like this is all over the field and I am sure it's not the healthiest stuff a cow or horse would want to eat if it were baled. I am guessing again this fall they will NOT cut the field a second time and let the winter freeze kill off the weeds before they cut the field in June 2019.

Back to those small computer speakers and digital music ... I did decide to load my CD collection (large) into iTunes so I can play those on my computer or when/if I travel. With all the CDs in iTunes I will be able to access those with my phone or tablet as long as I have an internet connection. That is one thing I don't do at all ... listen to music on my phone. I guess I was not part of the iPod generation when it came out years ago.

I saw the other day that 95% of the US population will have temperatures above 90° this 4th of July weekend. I know it's hot when I hear the AC running in the middle of the night. It's also a sure sign when all the hounds oversleep their normal wake up times.

It's not why I stopped blogging because it had happened a couple of times before. The "Grammar Police" sent me some emails giving me some help on clearing up my use of the English language in grammar and spelling. Obviously they had missed what I had written just months before that the blog will have misspelled words because the Blogger spellchecker can't catch everything and will be confused sometimes. I proof read but obviously not well.

I also explained it was my personal preference on how I use quotation marks with the punctuation OUTSIDE the last quotation mark ... because to me it looks better. But that (just like starting the sentence with But) irritated them enough to email me their advice and corrections ... that I didn't asked for.

It's my blog ... the grammar and spelling errors will continue.

A little after 12 noon the hounds went outside for their after meal trip. Stella did nothing but stand in the middle of the driveway wanting to go back inside where the AC was running full steam. Sadie got no further than the edge of the yard and Heidi inspected the mowing job next door.

As you can tell, we don't do much mid-day and will now keep busy inside until after 8pm or later for the next hound walk in weather like this. I've been in the reading mode lately so soaking up time between walks or ballgames is not a hard thing to do.

With the large amounts of rain this spring, then hot sunshine, with some humidity, its a perfect storm for maximum weeds. After the rain forecasts move out in the next three days I'll try more combinations of natural weed killer. As you can see not many are successful. I am also doing a test along the driveway bank of letting a section grow to see if that helps in preventing erosion but I don't like the look of it.

It was a decision by committee ... all three wanted to come back inside when I asked them.

I decided to post a little early today. It will be ice tea, a Cubs game on tv by 2:10pm and dinner soon after. I didn't see anything else that would be exciting enough to write about.

All is good and it's really really hot here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Summer's Officially Here

The air conditioning was turned on last yesterday afternoon as all three hounds started panting with their tongues hanging out of their mouths ... inside the house. That's the official look to turn on the AC for another summer of high temps and high humidity. Who's complaining? Not I, I love hot muggy weather and will take this over those 7° days just a few months ago.

Again the field looked like it had grown another 6" overnight, but this portion of the field is always the tallest of all 7 acres. All the underground water flows this direction and it has a lot of afternoon sunshine. At least we could still see which way to go.

While Sadie charged out in front, I was reminded that yesterday Stella tried her best to take off to the north woods. It got to the point of no return as I watched her and listened to her ignore my calls. I had to take off sprinting to catch her. She wasn't running but had her head down and was walking at a fast pace, almost past the 2nd house north of us.

So today the focus was to keep her walking with Sadie and I ... but it was hotter than normal this morning. She slowed to her afternoon pace which is almost like me walking in slow motion, yet I wasn't going to let her fake me out today with that ... then attempting to escape.

Do you notice anything different in the picture below?

I did not see any beaten down grass, nor any kind of path but something just barely inside the brush had Sadie and Stella's attention. A lot of verbal commands were needed to get them to move. It was hot, muggy, not even 9am and the gnats were out in force.

Not even halfway through the walk my hiking boots are completely saturated.

I was curious enough to check last year's blog posts to see when we turned on the air conditioning. That is one thing that is good about a blog, it makes it easy to find answers for questions concerning the house, the hounds, the vehicles, weather or myself. It wasn't until the 2nd of June that the AC was turned on and a week later where it seemed to be running full time.

Why does Stella cry like she is in pain ... when I sneeze ??

By the time I turned around Sadie was headed into the brush and Stella was about to follow her. What was leading them out of bounds??

Calling their names and telling them no got both of them back on the walk with each hound going their own separate ways.

After yesterday's escape by Stella, Sadie was going to keep a close eye on her. She did this various times throughout the walk this morning, just to make sure that Stella was still in view.

"After further review" as they like to say in NFL games ... I have decided this morning they planted corn in the back field and not soybeans like I guessed last week.

Can you feel the 'mugginess' in those photos?

What a difference a few months makes in the weather here and the color of the fields.

At this point in time I wasn't sure if Stella was going to make it back to the yard before noon. Each step was deliberate, no signs of being in a rush and no signs of veering off course. Would she make it home by noon?

She made it to the yard about 5 minutes later but still at the same pace. She can tell it's hot and in that case she does nothing fast or normal ... everything is slower for her.

While my mind was daydreaming yesterday I thought that I might start blogging again at the end of the day instead of this time of morning. I know that will not change your reading habits nor is it an attempt to. It's just a warning that new posts may not happened until late afternoons or early evenings. That way I can decrease some of the morning photos, add some afternoon shots that would include Heidi and include a whole day not just the morning walk.

Just because the temperatures are above Heidi's threshold for activity does not mean she wakes up any earlier. She isn't real active and photogenic until after her lunch.

If anyone would like to live in 'the tropics' the house next door is going to be for rent. My neighbor of one year, that works in the Texas oil fields and stays up here a week per month, moved out last week. I knew something was going one when the satellite installers were taking his satellite dish down without replacing it. I also saw some loaded pickup trucks pulling away from the house.

Not sure when it will rain again after a forecast of a 'wetter than normal' summer ... and I don't know if my last place Reds will ever lose again since they are on a 6 game winning streak. (Have I jinxed them?) Besides, I'm back on Facebook and even signed up for an Instagram account last night so I could find some old bloggers that moved to Instagram. I can also follow that 'vanlife' group.

Does it really matter if you try to hide from Google if you have used Blogger for years and have gmail as your email service, both owned by Google ... the lightbulb finally came on inside my head and I realized they already had info on me that would never disappear so back to Google Chrome I came. It uses less data than Apple's Safari does.

I may have finally found an 'in home' pet sitter ...  waiting for a reply from her.

That's about it for this morning from 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana ... air conditioning was a great invention.

Firefox Browser Is A Data Hog

Under overcast skies, sounds of thunder and storms all around us ... we will stay dry for most of the day. There is something about that I-70 corridor as it has thunderstorms and snow storms follow it across the state. It didn't take me long to find out this morning why I stopped using Firefox ... it's a data hog ... I'll discuss it at the end of this post.
As I made coffee I was sure it was going to rain any second and our morning walk might not happen. With my 11pm grocery shopping trip last night I had a new bag of Seattle's Best Coffee and a much needed caffeine boost.

After checking Intellicast radar I could see sever storms to the north and northeast of us but nothing was to the west or southwest of us. It was time for our first walk of the day. With Stella nibbling a little grass before we got started, Sadie and I took off on the path.

I was surprised as I turned to look behind me and didn't see Stella. When I looked to the side and in front of me I didn't see Stella. Holy cow!!!!  She was taking a brand new path and was over on the corner of the yard heading in the direction of her favorite woods ... nowhere near Sadie and I.

As I yelled her name she ignored me and kept walking north, parallel to Sadie and I. No doubt she was smelling the scent of one of the field cats.

While calling her name over and over, she sloooowly turns in our direction.

She started trotting toward Sadie at a fairly fast pace but not quite a run. I cannot describe how good I feel when I see her trotting again more than once per day and multiple days in a row.

Although we had assurances of no rain on the radar, the thunder was loud and in the skies up ahead. The colors of the radar of those storms were those deep reds, browns signifying just how serious the thunderstorms were. They were about 20 miles from us.

After reading last night that a favorite lens of a professional photographer was her Nikon 16mm-35mm lens I thought I'd try a few shots today on the walk with the lens set at 35mm. Here is one of them below, power tower and lines included.

Sadie had other plans and started running in the direction of the far right hand corner of the field, but she had a scent to check out first. That area is a deer lounging area.

This next photo is a good example of why it's so hard to put both bloodhounds on a leash that is connected to a splitter. In that situation they would be 6' away from me and walking right next to each other. They each have their own interests when walking and their noses leading them in different directions. No RVing for them. I would never do that here on our walks, only as a test for possible travel.

Sadie had found some fresh protein supplements this morning. Stella trotted to see if Sadie would share any of it. Of course I had to stroll over and tug on Stella's collar to lead her in our direction. Sadie will always come running when I call her name ... Stella is a different story.

Walking by those rolls of hay and smelling the aroma of hay bales (rolls in this case) reminds me of the summers in high school where I had part time jobs of baling hay for the local farmers, then stacking it in the barns. Extremely hot work, good money. You would have to wear a t-shirt to keep from being scratched by the cut hay ... but the smell of cut hay always brings those memories back to me.

When Stella heard thunder becoming louder she thought it might be to her advantage to get home a little faster this morning. She didn't trot all the way but I couldn't keep up with either hound all the way back to the house.

With everything green around here, I thought I'd add a little color to my blog post this morning.

During the walk I also realized that I don't and probably will never have a set time each day where I post to the blog. I am pretty consistent in posting in the middle of the day after editing our morning walk photos ... but I find it too hard at times to wait until the end of the day to post which adds even more photos.

Two blogs per day are sometimes missed by readers, at least statistics show that. They will alway view the latest blog post of the day but not read the previous one. Yet there will be days I'll blog multiple times per day because my schedule is basically this --- "do what I want when I want, no plans".

Now to the Firefox story ....

I opened it up late yesterday and used only 20Mb of data to get it updated. It seemed faster than it use to be. I liked the look of it. Yet it would open websites up a little slower than Safari (instant) or Google Chrome (2 seconds). It was not until this morning when I tried it, that it reminded me EXACTLY why I don't use it.

Since I have limited data per month for my home computer, no choice based on my location ... I always have Activity Monitor open and on my other monitor so I can catch any unexpected data usage that is more than I can handle to stay within my estimate of 665Mb per day to spread 20Gb out per month.

So this morning I did all of my internet reading on Google Chrome, which uses a data saver in the background. After I returned from the walk I opened up Firefox and went to my blog dashboard to edit last nights post and correct some spelling errors.

That was the only website I had open.

Right before clicking the 'update' button on the blog, I glance over at my Activity Monitor and see that Firefox had used 83Mb of data just on my blog edit. While two hours of internet reading, including my blog and looking at stats from the dashboard had used a total of 38Mb !!!

That probably doesn't mean much to you but when you have limited data 45Mb used doing really nothing is a lot. I can buy more data if I go over the 20Gb limit and luckily with HughesNet any of that additional data I buy but do not used is carried over for future use. Exede Satellite service zero'd it out at the end of the billing period.

Even writing this post and uploading photographs to it, I still have not used as much data as Firefox did this morning and that includes my 2 hours of internet reading while on Google Chrome.

The pace of life will not be out of the ordinary today. I have found an old John Grisham novel on the bookshelf ... it's hard to put down ... yet the hounds will get their 3 walks in today.

Heidi has moved from the couch to the floor right next to the register that has that ice cold air conditioned air flowing out of it ... she is a pretty smart basset hound.

Food supply was replenished late last night ... all is good again here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

The Hounds Take A Record Number Of Walks

It was after 5pm before I heard that familiar sound of a tractor right outside my computer room window. They had waited for the daytime sunshine to dry out the hay and flowers that were cut on Saturday, yet rain clouds were overhead and predicted rain was just hours away.

With the day being so nice and it being so much easier to take a hound walk, they took a record number of walks yesterday ... 4 of 'em. I could tell by the amount of hay laying in rows there just wasn't as much as in past years. With all the rain this spring and sunshine that was hard to figure out.

I was standing at the corner of the house taking this zoom'd photo. I didn't see the guys inside the tractor smiling until I downloaded the pictures. Were they joking about something or seeing me with a zoom lens pointed at them? They don't know they are on a blog seen by only a few people but scattered all over the world.

The raker and baler were working pretty well. Intellicast weather radar was showing rain about 50 miles away ... it never showed up nor did it rain after midnight where they said there was a 75% chance of rain. With the warmer than normal winter and the nice weather this spring I find it strange the small amount of hay they were able to bale.

By the time I took my two pictures that I take every day across the highway at the corn field and then from the corner of the house toward the back ... Sadie and Stella were already starting their walk. I decided while putting on my hiking boots that I would let each of them walk on their own ... where ever they wanted to go. With the field cut is is of course so much easier to keep track of them.

It looks so much different when the field is cut and baled. Basically back to being a 'clean' field and less stuff for them to find to eat. Most of their favorites are now inside those rolls of hay.

Back to the 4 walks day ... Sadie likes to walk after their noon lunch for walk #2. I usually wait about an hour after they eat before we do that. Then in late afternoon she and I are ready to take off again after all of them have slept all afternoon. With the weather so nice after 7pm ... that results in a 4th walk.

Of course that gets my number of steps I take per day above the normal range. It equates to almost 4 miles of walking and even at a slow pace my heart rate gets to a level where I get a workout. The days I mow the yard is just an added bonus.

Yet, my 'to-do' list has come to a complete stop. My Apple Reminder app tells me I have 7 of them overdue. All are fairly easy things to do but would be very time consuming. Some of them would take more than 8 labor hours to complete. For some reason, over the years I have been pretty consistent in that I am motivated to do things on that list in early spring and not again until the hottest time of the year ... mid to late August.

With the temps at 50° when we started the walk, it was sweatshirt and shorts weather on this morning walk. It was about at this point in the walk I remember this last winter when it was 9° and a strong cold wind blowing in my face. I prefer this weather to that freezing weather.

With total freedom given to each hound on this walk, they headed in opposite directions. Sadie went to the far right corner of the field and Stella took off toward the middle of the field and possibly to the NW, a direction she had never taken. That is typical for them when I don't 'herd' them during the walk.

Most of the time, even when they bale the field twice in the summer, they normally get 16-18 of these rolls of hay. They normally haul it away after it is rolled but it looks like they will store it here until their next cut in the fall or pull it as they need it next winter.

Once Stella glanced up and saw that Sadie was busy with what she found, she started walking in our direction without me yelling her name. What I missed was her running.

While I was taking a picture of the busted roll of hay, Stella had RAN from the middle of the field to the corner of this hay in the short time I took the picture.

Then it was back to 'noses to the ground' for each of them. I am sure that deer use this path to walk from the gully to the woods on the far north side of the field.

This reminded me of the time times I turn my lawn mower to start a new row and miss part of the taller grass. This is just one of the few spots in 7 acres that he missed with his much larger mower.

Sadie took off almost trotting on a scent she had found. She was not into chasing sparrows today because just outside the left edge of this picture there were 5-10 sparrows on the ground having breakfast. A few days ago Sadie would have sprinted after them but today her interest was somewhere else.

While Sadie and I walked toward the house, Stella was heading for the 'no fly zone'. I was sure she was headed for the woods. If that were to happen I would have had to go get her and lead her back to the house.

Back to my 'to do' list, I never worry about what I get done or don't get done. It will all be completed eventually but only when I feel like doing the type of work I will need to do. I'll have a major rush to get things done before last week of August when a new college football season starts.

It took a while and even longer than I had planned but Sadie and Stella finally made it back to the yard. They spent almost the same amount of time at the end of the walk in the area behind the house as it took for me to complete the walk.

With the fantastic weather we have been having I am back to picking up three different books to read and most of that reading is outside. With the disappearance of gnats, bugs and a few mosquitoes, the hounds have time to roam the field right behind the house and I can keep an eye on them while I read.

I've recently been cutting my time on the computer way below my daily limit of data. That daily limit I set on my spreadsheet stretches that 20Gb of data evenly over the 30-31 day period. Currently I have about 1.2 Gb's in the bank based on my decreased usage.

Besides my normal sports reading, Twitter, Facebook ... I've took a look at houses for sale the other day on Zillow and Realtor sites. There are 4-5 towns out west that have always interested me with 2 of them places I have lived in the past. Nothing excites me too much in the housing market.

Even though I really like my Mini Cooper Countryman I still look at what FJ's are for sale in a radius of 250 miles from home. Many to choose from but very very few have the same options I had with my blue one. I still will not make any trade until I decide when I travel and what I want to use as far as trailers. Nothing has changed my mind about traveling with the hounds.

Traveling with two bassets and one bloodhound wasn't that bad but hard. Two bloodhounds would make that impossible. I knew that and analyzed that before I decided to pick up Stella and bring her home. I could walk Winston and Heidi with a "splitter" and one leash. When I have tried that here with Sadie and Stella ... it didn't work and was a total disaster each time I tried it.

I have a few more weeds to cut along the driveway this afternoon. It is so tempting to buy and spray weed killer and make that all so easy but I don't want any chance of that getting on the paws of the hounds or in the air. So I will continue to cut them as low as possible with my weed eater and let the sun kill them.

Not sure but I might post again tonight after we take some afternoon photos.

I cannot believe how long this fantastic weather has lasted here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.