Why I Don't Blog Every Day

This was my day today and it will give a visual explanation why I don't have time to blog about the hounds and the dog every day like I did more than three years ago when I lived north of here and had four different hounds. Last May when I high pressure washed the driveway, sidewalk and front porch .... some of the mortar surface on the porch came apart and peeled off the porch. I knew then I had a new project on my list for the fall when the temps were cooler.

Walter Supervises House Maintenance

Walter likes to be in the middle of the action. Today was a good day for him because while he was out front with me supervising my early morning leaf blowing, there were chances for him to bolt to see someone out like Henry would do in an instant. He stayed where he was when I told him to and once we were finished, his ears lay back and he runs like any bulldog to the backyard, up onto the deck and stands at the patio door to get inside. Today was a busy day, a lot done and some answers.

Stella Roams Her Own Route

At first it looked like rain was just a few minutes away when we woke up but I wasn't doing anything before I had my daily two cups of coffee. Especially since it was a brand new bag of Seattle's Best Coffee Portside Blend. It really is better than Starbuck's Coffee. So where did the sun come from?

About the time that Stella and I stepped outside, the sun started breaking through the clouds. I could see some blue and the gray skies were disappearing. That's good because it is Opening Day in Cincinnati today and I need to see some regular season baseball. We will top tonight off with some college basketball in the next round of the NCAA "March Madness" and tomorrow it will be a repeat under a forecast of rain.

I wasn't sure what I had planned for today up to 1pm, when I'll tune into the first baseball game on ESPN. That will lead into 'my' Cincinnati Reds game at 4:15pm. No worries, the hounds will still have their lunch at their regular time as well as an afternoon walk. Although ... we will start that afternoon walk around 3pm, an hour before the Reds game, just in case Heidi decides she needs to tip toe every step of the way. In a half mile that is a LOT of short basset hound steps.  :)

The birds were happy with the warmer weather, their talking filled the air this morning. I loved not wearing gloves, the down parka and sock hat. I think it's getting closer to spring with each passing hour. I just pulled an article off of my Flipboard account that will tell me the 20 Landscaping things I should NOT do this spring. Maybe I can get out of some yard work.

I really don't want to turn this into a diet blog but I would like to give some updated thoughts just in case someone else is curious about making changes to their eating habits or wonder what's happening with me since I have opened the door to my plan.

I wanted to see if the word "go" had Stella responding the same way as yesterday. What do you think?

While I let her walk on her own, with very little verbal herding, I couldn't help but think how the last few days have been since I made some slight changes to my food and the way I am eating. I have found out from reading that I have always eaten pretty good food these past 5 years of retirement. What has not been good have been those times when I don't fight off the urges for junk food and ... the size of portions of good food I eat.

Two things have been discovered just in the last 48 hours. It was nothing new really but things I didn't keep doing in the past because I would cave into those battles for a junk food run or eating a meal from the fast food drive-thru.

(1) Following the serving size on the label I found out yesterday that just a 1/2c dry pasta and a 1/2c of pasta sauce was filling. It was a shock how long that filled feeling lasted after having that for lunch. The norm has always been 1/2 JAR of the sauce and 1/2 BOX of pasta !!!! That would give me about one and half plates of pasta and rarely did I keep some for the next day. I'd eat all of it. Now a 1/2c of dry pasta ??? Interesting.

(2) All of us have cravings for sweets, some more than others. I've read in the past that chocolate cravings are a sign that I need more Vitamin B. My dad use to tell me I got that craving from his family who were always chocolate fans the for the past 100 years. Since I am trying to escape the sugar addiction I forced myself to grab a small apple instead, anytime I had the urge for sweets.

Portion size has always been a problem with me and I have no doubt that just by reducing the portion size of my food will have major benefits in my quest to drop about 20 pounds. I also caught a glimpse on my small white board where last May 22nd I wrote down my weight, fat measurements with calipers and stomach size. IF I did nothing right now and continued that large portion of pasta, chips with salsa, sandwiches, french fries etc .... I have had some great reduction in all of those measurement since last May, but I need more decreases.

I also reduced my breakfast from 3 eggs to 1 egg and I don't eat eggs every day. I rotate between oatmeal with fruit, nothing but fruit and an egg. Yes, those tv commercials during "March Madness" with a stack of pancakes  (IHOP??) are killers ... I quickly change the channel.

So that is it for the food discussion.

The book about Apple and Steve Jobs still seems very interesting but it is really a slow read. I remember the first computer I worked with was in 1977 when La Costa Hotel & Spa in Carlsbad California did their nightly audit on a brand new computer system. I remember the programmers were using a cassette tape that was inserted in the top of their monitor. The disc drives were at least 3' tall. Little did I know that 42 years later my Apple Watch would do more than that computer would.

As we walked I thought about my plan of attack on my 'to do' list this year. A lot of it is annual repeats, a couple of things are required with no excuses this year and some are brand new with hopes of changing the look around the house. Stella will not be able to roam free outside while I work this summer. Sadie use to keep her in the local area but the two times I let Stella outside by herself as a test recently ... I ended up walking to the neighbor's backyard to convince her to get home.

I'll use the 80' tether that is centered out in the field and she can roam the field right behind the house or sleep in the backyard under the sunshine.

I'll leave you with the photos to show the rest of the walk. I am somewhere between finding it hard to write more, losing my train of thought and/or needing to step away from the computer to get some things done.

As you can see Stella took her own way home but a familiar one, as I took the 'old' return path back to the house. She always ends up entering the north backyard upon her return.

What is happening in D.C. today is fantastic.  :)

With baseball, sunshine and March Madness all in one day ... that is a great day in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Is It Laziness ??

At first I thought it was just another morning of heavy dew, so did Sadie, but looking at the fields across the highway and the outer edges of the highway I could see the predicted rain took place sometime after 11pm. It's not often we see fog but when it happens it's pretty nice to look at. As far as 'laziness' I call it 'retirement'. Anything not done today can be pushed to tomorrow or weeks, or months ahead.

I told myself last month I'd dive right into my full page list of things to do this spring and summer. It just needed to get warmer. At the same time I wanted to get all of the things that would happen outside finished before the hot temps in July and August. There is still time but I am going to have to make some drastic changes in my approach. Printing out a list of things to do was a start but that was about all it was.

As I picked up that piece of paper on my computer desk to look at those 26 items staring back at me, I brushed off the dust and found really only 4-5 of that HAS to be done this summer. I think once I get started and marking them off as they are completed, I'll finish most of the 26 items before college football season starting at the end of August ... that is when my world stops until the following April after the NCAA Final 4 in basketball.

As I tip toed out into the field of wet grass in my North Face snow boots, I swear that the grass had grown 6" from yesterday morning. With the days filled with bright sunshine and an occasional rain, the field and my yard grows fast. Luckily with the difference in color we could see what path to follow.

Last week before I noticed anything, Sadie sprinted into the woods and down over the edge heading toward the bottom of the gully. As I got close to the edge of the woods I could hear her breaking small twigs and running over what leaves were left from last fall. This morning I thought she might make the same sprint into the woods but as she looked back at me she knew I had her in my sights.

Yesterday morning the tips of the taller grass were barely visible. It shows you how much difference a day can make.

I was not even to the halfway point between my yard and the corner of the woods where we make our first turn. With the lens turned to the maximum 200mm I barely caught the hounds at the corner of the  woods.

It's interesting how the sun, the shade, and field decide what looks dry and what is still wet from the early morning hours. I can't remember the exact time we took this morning walk but it was probably between 8:30am - 9:00am. As usual both bloodhounds are off the leash roaming at their leisure. Actually that is unheard of in the bloodhound breed.

Yet Sadie and Stella along with Heidi seem to know their limits and rarely take off running away. It was 7 years ago this June when I picked up Heidi that had a note on her adoption paperwork that she was "a runner" and needed to be leashed at all times. I did that for ONE day and realized she wasn't going anywhere.

Stella's previous owner that lived on a large farm in Kentucky told me if Stella did take off that she would always come back. I couldn't take that chance with the highway 80' away. Yet after a week, maybe 5 days, I saw that as long as I was outside with her she was good off the leash. Sadie was on the leash for every walk for her first 5-6 years. I'm not sure what changed my mind but she has never been on a leash in the last 3-4 years and always stays in the back field.

Consequently during our morning walk at least, the hounds roam as they wish. My Garmin watch tells me we walk close to a half mile and the hounds usually take 13-14 minutes before we get back to the house.

I mentioned the other day I had not heard any ATVs in the field as I did a lot late last summer. This ATV path going across the back of the field from the north to south into the gully has almost grown over with lack of traffic. I wonder if the owner of the field (neighbor) put the word out the field needed to grow for them to bale hay in July?

As Sadie and I made our last turn for home, Stella was to the left of us taking her own sweet time to return to our path. Once she saw we might get ahead of her, she came walking slowly towards us.

The farmer in back of us planted his field a couple of weeks before the guys across the highway. I am still guessing it's a field of soybeans. In another few days I'll find out if I am right or not. Remember that I am not a farmer, no background in farming do I don't know anything about planting crops, so anything I say is just a guess on my part.

If anything, in the 2 years and 9 months that I have had Stella, she has taught me one thing ... PATIENCE.

Her afternoon walks are even slower. It's funny because she doesn't roam too much on those afternoon walks and strolls very slowly along the path for most of the way. If I am in front of her, she will walk by me to take the lead, then slow down again. She does not walk around me, but right next to me as if she was trying to move me off the path.

Usually toward the end of the walk I can finally get ahead of them where the camera angle is from in front of them instead of behind them.

All the way to the yard, they will take their time and sniff almost every inch. By this point in the field I am assuming they are smelling the scent of the field cat because I don't see any signs of deer traffic in this part of the field.

Stella would like to pay a visit to the neighbors next door. She will stand facing their house on all the walks. It's not what she sees but what she hears, that has her interest. Or possibly the smell of food.

Well the day is promising, sunny great temperatures outside. I'll take a drive in the Z4 and then try to attack just one thing on the list to see if that will give me some momentum. Of course to do that I will have to break away from my computer Mahjong game which I play daily to see if I can complete more games under 3 minutes.

I use the internet a lot in finding how to do those DIY jobs with house or lawn maintenance. There is a lot of good information out there but also some articles recommend opposite ways of doing things. Such as, are vents in the house foundation left open during the summer and fall to let the crawl space breath ... or closed all the time to keep the area locked tight and dry???

Do you put calk around all the outside edge of the storm windows or leave the bottom edge slightly open so condensation has a way to escape??

I saw a headline in my reading this morning that ticks were going to be bad again this summer. Yet I have not seen nearly as many as we say in 2016? or 2015, when I counted over 100 ticks pulled off of me and the hounds in the month of April. They were so bad I put a counter in the upper left corner of my blog. So far this year I have seen less than 10 on any of us.

With the field of tall grass (hay) so close to our yard plus our multiple walks per day in that field of tall grass, there isn't anyway to miss the ticks. I just have to do an inspection of me and the hounds after each walk. I guess that is the price of living in a rural area.

I got bored yesterday and was in the mood to play around with the blog. I changed some fonts in the title and posts. I tried some different widths, trying to make the page wider. Those went back to the original theme width since most of my readers look at this blog from their tables or phones. So making the blog wider would not have made a difference to most. Maybe the computer experts are right when they say desktop computers are on the way out.

Not only did I go back to Facebook a few weeks ago to follow the groups on my list, yesterday I decided to add back the small group of friends that I had before. I don't think I had more than 15-17 of them listed last time. A few told me they missed seeing the hounds when I would post a picture or two on Facebook. They have no time to visit the blog. Each time those photos I put on Facebook are the same as what is on this blog, just not as many.

Some say that dogs look like their owners ... I am beginning to wonder if the owners (me) don't start adopting the bloodhound lifestyle. After all, about the only thing I do anymore is eat, sleep and take dog walks.

It's been a great spring so far here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.