The Hounds Never Change

It's been a week where most of the days were cold and overcast. Just the past couple days the sunshine has busted through the layers of clouds. Plus it's much warmer by late afternoon. That doesn't mean the pace has changed, as the hounds and I stick with our routines. Stella is showing signs of improvement with the new GlycoFlex Plus supplement and Heidi likes running laps around the living room after her lunch.

We are still getting up earlier than we did this summer, even weeks after the time change. Both hounds are back to sleep in the dark bedroom within minutes finishing their breakfast kibble. Heidi will stay in this position passing up the chance to join Stella and I on our morning walk. She does spend time outside though in the early afternoon.

This morning Stella was running so fast to catch up to me that I barely caught her in this photo.

This past week we have seen signs on the ground of a lot of deer traffic, as most mornings the field has had a frost covering the shaded areas and sometimes the whole field.

Looking back through past blogs on this date or a few days within this date, from 2018 to 2011, there are a lot of similarities in weather, our activity and blogging interest. Some things never change I guess.

A lot of verbal herding has been required this week, to get Stella back to the house. She is back to being a normal bloodhound and very stubborn. She likes sleeping a lot in the daytime, likes to have the second walk finished by 2pm and spends the nights on the couch while I watch ballgames or read a book. Nothing different.

For some reason this morning she followed the return path home and never veered off of it. I knew what she wanted and where she was headed ... over to the left in the 'land of burrs'. There have been a couple of times this week that I did not catch her soon enough. That means I am pulling burrs out of her coat, close to 20 of them. That also means I am getting them on my gloves, my jeans or wool socks, some of the burrs I don't find until later that night.

She was about to step forward when I yelled 'No' ... my camera caught her ears as she was reversing her decision.

Here are some photos below from the past week. Some days were so dreary looking I didn't even take the camera outside so I wasn't able to collect that 4-5 good photos per day like I had planned.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

A lot of food and ballgames will stretch through the weekend here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

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.