No Surprises Just A Few Changes

There is one thing you can always count on with this blog, just like life, there is going to be changes. Sometimes those changes are not announced until after they are completed, others in the past were thought about outloud and sometimes they never happened. It's only been a couple of days since my last post but there have been a few changes taken place. Some of you will see them on my sidebar if you are not reading this from your phone. Nothing major, just put all the blog archives in a dropdown menu format. Moved some things around. Added a 'Followers" gadget.

It wasn't until I was clicking different links in the dashboard behind the scenes that Blogger told me to take a look at "the new and improved" blogger under the Stats section. I am assuming over these next few months they will complete their changes to Blogger without any announcement to blog users. It will be interesting to see what the new improvements offer. Maybe a blog design that I really like?

Doesn't bother me, I'll stay and float the way Google wants me to. Speaking of Google, I decided in my retirement years they could not find out much more of where I go or what I do on the internet. I have been stumbling around the 'world wide web' since the mid 1990's when I bought WebTV. I exported all of my bookmarks from Safari to my desktop in an html file, then made Google Chrome my default browser and imported the bookmarks from my desktop. Yes, I know I could click the link "import from the browser name" but that has never worked out as well as the way I do it.

I told you the other day how tired I felt on Sunday after riding my bike Saturday morning then hiking on Saturday afternoon and I would stop doing that. I'd do one or the other in one day but not both. I have followed that this week and feel good. Of course that cuts down on the blogging and "Other Adventures" because my thing is riding a bicycle. I enjoy that more than anything and as my fitness improves the further and longer I ride. You can read about those on my bike blog which is located on the sidebar or click here.

You have to look up in the upper left corner for the drop down menu to the sidebar choices and where the rides are captured in detail by a free app called Strava.

We are into the 4th morning of the new black lab puppy next door. Stella is still somewhat confused by what she hears. I've caught her a few times over by the fence sniffing the air and pulling in that smell of a puppy. He is adapting to spending his days outside. They have decide to keep their old pug outside with him and the doggie door locked shut. He is getting better but man that is a lot of alone time for a 8 week old puppy.

Another thing that has changed for most of you but not me ... is Daylight Savings Time. We in Arizona do not change time and although my longtime Phoenix resident friend tells me I am now on Arizona Standard time but all I know is when I look for game times on the ESPN website that equates to my games starting on Mountain Time. I also know that our walks in the morning are much later than sunrise. We need to get to warm up first, as the hounds no longer do cold weather.

Games?  You would not believe how much my tv viewing of games has changed since I moved here. Just as I suspected my addiction to watching game after game after game on weekends is basically over. The great weather almost every day, having sunshine, pulls me outside every day. Thus I find it hard to take the time to watch games live on tv as I am also finding it harder to blog every day at a certain time. So the "blog when you feel like it" is in full force and a great idea from blog readers.

Most to the times when I go out riding my bike which is now up to one and a half hours, or when I have errands in town to do, I have left Stella in her crate. But when it's perfect weather outside why not let her stay there with Heidi, put their water in the shade and they can enjoy outside instead of being inside. Then hope she doesn't howl to long or bother the neighbors that might be home as there are just a couple nearby.

When I left Stella this morning around 10am she was sound to sleep in the sunshine. I was gone for almost two hours and by the time I returned, Heidi was sleeping in the corner of the fence in the shade and Stella was standing at the door waiting for me to open it for her.

She had not only been sleeping, it got to hot for her and she did what all dogs do when they want to cool off ... dig until they hit dirt, circle around it then lay down and sleep. I am going to sweep off the patio but I am going to let that patch of dirt stay where it is. That is one spot that is always cleared out to sleep even when a dog bed or blankets are left in the shaded patio. As I walk behind the hounds along my fence line the majority of dog owners leave their dogs outside or they have doggie doors.

The water bowl did show that they had plenty of water to consume while I was gone. So again, a little change here and there. My sleeping habits have changed this past week. Heidi is having an upset stomach waking me up every two hours to go outside. It's good exercise for my hip to move quickly in the dark in the middle of the night to spring out of bed and catch up to her walking down the hallway. I need to get to the patio door first to let her out.

She hears the lab puppy next door.

I tried the old white rice and cottage cheese. That didn't work this time. Then I tried white rice and plain unflavored yogurt. That didn't work this time. I tried 50/50 kibble/white rice. That didn't work this time. I remembered back in 2015 my vet shocked me by writing "Famotidine 10mg" on a piece of paper and telling me to buy the generic brand at the drug store. THAT WORKED THEN AND IS WORKING NOW!!!

After a lot of thought I sold the road bike I crashed on. I did not sell it because I wrecked it in fact I tried selling it on Craig's List before I moved because I have never liked it. It always felt too big. Consequently I was never enthused too much about riding it. It didn't take long once I mentioned I was selling it on a bicycling Facebook group here in this area. I had offers that night. Monday I took it for a ride out to the roads I used before my surgery to see if I felt like keeping it.

Wednesday morning I had a gentleman stop by to pay me and also give me a letter to show the IRS of my additional donation to his non-profit disabled vets group here in town. We had a great 30 minute talk, swapping bike stores and injury stories. He has 11 bikes, is still happily married and has had a knee replacement on the same knee that had an ACL surgery 30 years ago. Still rides more than I have this year and will as soon as he recovers from his recent shoulder surgery.

I have a group of new friends in my age range, all have had hip or knees replaced, a cancer survivor and another older than I riding with a pacemaker. So slowly but surely I am coming out of my 'loner' shell and meeting new people with the same interests and increasing my group of friends. It's happening but not quite as fast as I expected it would.

While I was flipping through Twitter today catching up on all my sports news, OSDaily had a photo of the new watch face now available for Apple Watches. I picked up my iPhone and added this watch face to mine. I changed the four corner with what I wanted ... heart rate, temperature, strava icon for my bike rides and an activity icon to start my hound walks. It's also cool to see how much daylight I have left, which might come in handy on bike rides or late afternoon hikes. BTW I fixed the heart icon to where it shows my heart rate at all times.

The red dot at the top is letting me know I have new email or a new text.

Checking Heidi's bed the other day for any signs of her being sick I found this laying on top of her bed in the open. It didn't fall out of her blanket because she had that rolled up into ball. She doesn't have long hair so it's not something she picked up outside. The strange thing is, between the time I spend picking up hound poop and the number of laps I did during hip rehab I know my yard pretty good ... I've seen nothing like this in the backyard.

Any ideas? To me it looks like a bullet. Did she try to eat it and bring it back inside without me seeing her do it? I don't know.

Without taking hikes and not able to carry a camera with me on the hound walks because now Heidi goes with us almost every day. (another good change) .. I find that I don't have a lot of photos to use for the blog posts. So today I tried something different. Since I am a organizer freak and within my 100,000 photos in my Apple Photos Library file ... I have separate folders for each dog, each trip, each car past and present, etc ... you get the picture. (no pun intended) ... for each of of the categories every day I name the first photo of each ... such as Heidi and Stella ... yyyy mmm dd. IE: 2019 Nov 14

So when I do a search for just Nov 14 it pulls out 196 photos taken on that day in any year. So tonight to fill in some photo space, possibly bring up some past memories or favorites I have posted those photos below in no special order. I will say the range between the years 2012-2018, all taken on November 14th.

I admit that after September 15, 2018 the field in back never seemed right with just one bloodhound no matter how many walks Stella and I took.

Heidi has changed a little with the move to Arizona. She walks DAILY now that the temps are cooler. She had three favorite spots in the house that she likes to spend time sleeping and she loves the new bed I bought her. She likes to sleep in the sunshine on the patio and is exploring the yard more. Change has been good for her.

The doctor told me on October 22nd that I would start feeling better every day. There would be a bad day mixed on on occasion not because of something I had done but just part of the healing process. So far 22 days later that has been the case and this morning was the best I have felt yet. That comes after my longest bike ride since the surgery yesterday afternoon. I see him again on November 20th, hopefully for the last time until my year anniversary.

It would not be right not to tell you that I have too many cars but just the right number for me. So with a two car garage and two spaces in the driveway, things are pretty tight if I don't want to put two cars inside the garage. So I play what I call "Musical Cars". Today I moved the Mini Cooper out and put the FJ back inside. The new car sits out in front of the house at the curb like my neighbors do with the truck in the driveway.

I'll be using my truck on Saturday to load tables, 15 gallons of water, Gatorade and Lemonade in separate 5 gallon containers. There will be food for the bicyclist that make it to the top of Carr Canyon ... I'll take photos once I get up there. This two day ride totals 150 miles, three major mountain climbs then riding the gradual climb I talk about sometimes on Ramsey Canyon Road 10 TIMES for each rider .... It's a dedication to a young rider that was killed last December when the truck she was driving hit some black ice over by Elfrida AZ.

So all the bikes and all the cars are being used just as I planned. The hounds are happy where they live, love their residential walk, love their stone yard and the sounds of coyotes in the early morning hours before dawn. Yet Stella didn't know what to do about that owl sitting on our fence staring at her as he walked out this morning. By the time I grabbed the camera to get back outside the owl had flown away.

Things have or are changing for the better here in the 'Wild West'. 

(Late tonight I redirected my old domain name "houndsandotherstuff.com" to this blog.) You should NOT have to change any bookmarks but let me know if www.bhounds3.blogspot.com does not work for you. That should automatically redirect to the domain name. Since it is always good to have the Blog Title matching the domain name ... I'll be changing the title to his blog back to where it use to be and will change my "parked" blog on Wordpress to it's original name ... if I don't delete it.

Some Saturday Morning Rambling

If you thought my blog was boring yesterday you will hate it today ... it feels worse. It's to the point that I decided to write one of my "rambling" posts that I do from time to time.

As you can tell from the blog appearance I was a little bored this morning and did a little redesign work. I was about to change to a totally different template and colors but after spending time looking at the different options and playing around with colors and different fonts on this template ... I deiced to make a minor change to the date color so it would show my different posts a little better. I also added a little gray to the sidebars so they would not run into the posting part of the blog ... separate them a little.

I like to write so that is one reason I write these "rambling" posts every once in a while and writing is another reason I have two other blogs that are set to the private setting. Some say even that is not safe so I had to ask myself when I decided to go that direction, "is there anything here that I would not want the public to see?" ... the answer is always no.

If you feel like reading on, I have some photos of Heidi's skin and my thoughts as we start Day 4 of the Wounded Warrior Ointment. I don't have any photos of the hounds except this one of Stella ... because we have not done anything outside and it's already 12:30pm as I write this.

So ... for those that want to cut this post short and not waste your time, I may have something more in depth tonight and with more photos. I do know I have the 'itch' to do something today that involves driving, I just don't know yet what that might be or where it will lead us.

As you can see Stella wasn't much more enthused about this morning as I was.

I noticed on our late evening walk we ended up taking last night after I posted it was not going to happen, Sadie was having some digestive problems. Nothing had changed in her food so it hopefully is just a 24 hour bug. Still at 3am I can't say that I was happy about getting up to take her outside.

My little LED camping flashlight wasn't strong enough to see her in the field but the sky was bright enough that I could barely catch her as a dark figure roaming the field. She has never requested to go outside at that time of morning except when she was a 12 week old puppy and we were house training.

I couldn't see if she was dumping tanks or just locked onto a scent ... she was trotting fast all over the field but she also does that at times when she is looking for her perfect spot to relieve herself. She must be okay today since she has been sleeping all morning. At least there have been no accidents in the house.

Consequently after waking up and getting up in the middle of the night I needed coffee and I needed it bad this morning when the hounds finally woke up. They let me sleep in until 8:30 am. I did wake up on my own when I THOUGHT I felt something crawling on me ... like one of those small ticks.

As you see in the upper left corner, our tick count continues to increase at a rapid rate. They seem to love Stella's ears, they don't like Sadie and Heidi isn't out enough to collect them. Most of mine if not all of mine are caught crawling before they attach themselves.

I emailed Stella's previous owner last night asking her what she used for tick prevention on her outdoor herding dogs that live on a Kentucky horse farm. What a better place to have a tick problem. She said she had great results with this collar, the Bayer Seresto Flea and Tick collar. She didn't see a tick on her dogs or Stella at all during the summer or about 6 months total time.

Remember that all my links I put in my posts are not affiliate links, only links that provide information. They are safe to click.

Somewhere during my coffee I decided I was going to get online and look for a game store locally where I could by the old board game Strat-O-Matic Baseball. I knew it had gone to an online game or a computer game ... but I want the board game. Actually while reading Greg's story about his puzzle last night ... that was when I started thinking about the board game.

I mean I can't sit all day at the kitchen table, while looking out the large window at the traffic passing by ... playing Mahjong all the time. I use to love playing that baseball game, keeping score and then writing out the stats for the Top 10 in different categories like the newspapers use to do.

So took most of my morning, looking online then calling a lot of game shops in central Indiana trying to find the board game that I could bring home today. After hours of doing that, wanting to drive somewhere in the back of my mind ... I'll have to buy the game online and have it shipped. In the meantime I'll give it a day or two to see if I really want to start playing that game again or try my hand at putting puzzles together.

Now on to Heidi. I've been taking photos at different times so I can see any differences in her skin as we use the Wounded Warrior Ointment. Yesterday around 2pm I had a scare when I looked at her stomach and noticed it was not a smooth texture but each little piece had it's own boundary.

Because of this plus it was a little more red than the photo shows ... I did not apply the ointment for the rest of the night.

 
This morning around 8:45 am when I looked at that same side of her stomach a lot of those, what I called "individual" pieces had moved back to a smoother texture although still evident. In the area on the far left, the skin was dried out and rough ... I took that as her skin is healing from the use of the ointment. I cannot explain what was going on yesterday in the first photo.

I wanted to wait until now to see what her skin looked like before applying any ointment today. We have had only 5 doses since it arrived on Wednesday afternoon in the mail.

There is another possibility ... most of the time she sleeps curled up on that side of her stomach. That skin is always hidden underneath her and not exposed to the air. The opposite side of her stomach is normal with a smooth texture. Did the confined ointment make her skin react that way? I don't know.

Sadie and Stella have passed their normal time for their lunch. No begging, no howling for food ... both sound to sleep. That proves today is not lined up correctly with the moon and stars. The whole day is out of whack.

I had other things on my mind to write about in my next "rambling" post and now I sit here trying to remember them. I hate it when that happens to my memory and it seems to be happening more and more.

I saw on one of the news sites that more and more consumers are moving back from smart phones to flip phones. I did that for the first time last November. So far so good but I do miss a couple of things from the iPhone ... the camera capability for those unexpected shots. Also the "note" program that helped me during the times my memory lapsed.

Still when I can see after a year I will have saved $444, I am still quite hesitant in going back to the new iPhone SE. Of course Verizon sent me an email yesterday telling me "you can buy the new iPhone SE at FULL retail price" ... 2 months before my upgrade month.

On one  of the pages I follow on Facebook, called Juicing for Life, it had an article about drinking water decreased your chances of a heart attack. I read on. After figuring out how much water I needed to drink every day to reap those benefits I realized they don't know how my bladder now operates ... LOL ... no way can I drink that much water every day.

How much do you need?  Take your weight and divide it by two. That number is the amount of ounces of water you need to drink every day. Take that number and divide my eight and see how many glasses that amounts to. Good luck!

I don't need two vehicles since I am barely driving either of them since being retired. Yet, I like having a different car to drive at times when I need a change. Is that a bad thing?

Well I need to get going. It's already past 1pm ... the hounds are eating ... I want to go somewhere but don't know where ... it feels cold today with the temps in the 50's. ... none of the hounds have ever lost their appetite.

It's a cold, damp, dreary day here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.