Some Rambling To Close The Day

After removing the old thermometer from the wall in the carport a year or so ago, due to swallows building their nest there and then crapping all over my cars ... it's been sitting in the corner giving accurate information while I decide where to put it next. I'm thinking of mounting it on the wall it leans against, yet that is in the corner and would that be a few degrees warmer?

Anymore it's pretty rare that I take the camera with me on the late afternoon walks or the final walk of the day in the early evening. It is a much better time to take photos though due to the light. Sadie kept staring at me for the past two hours, then lying back down when I told her we had to wait for it to get cooler outside. All of us tried our best to sleep the afternoon away so by 5:15pm we were ready to turn on the day again.

I think you will see a better quality of picture this time of day, a little after 7pm. I got to the point of wanting to go outside. It looked hot based on the temps my iPhone app was showing me but with some wind it might be okay. I remembered the other day that after 7pm it wasn't bad even with a temperature of 88°.

With the small worn path leading into an opening that is surround by solid growth, I'm thinking this is one of the ways the deer go to and from the woods into the field. In the past years I have seen up to ten deer at once standing by the edge of this location, until they sense me pointing the camera at them ... then they all sprint back into the woods.

Stella must be feeling like her old self today. More energy, showing a little more activity inside the house. Then tonight she slowly drifted away from me and Sadie towards the woods behind the neighbors house as if I did not see her. She didn't turn our direction until she heard my tone of voice change ... she must have thought I was getting serious.  LOL

This time of day I have caught deer standing in that grassy area at the edge of the woods. While I scanned the horizon for any possible deer, Sadie was looking the opposite direction. If I wasn't mistaken my nose was picking up some very good grilling going on at one of my neighbors. I can't imagine what her nose was telling her.

Just like this morning Stella trotted right past me to catch up with Sadie. I can't remember the last time she trotted 3-4 different times in one day. The norm for her in these afternoon walks is to walk as slow as possible with her tail and head lowered, like she is taking her last steps.

You can barely see it but the leaves of this tree are starting to turn bright red and bright yellow like it does during the heat of the summer. I'm too lazy to look up what kind of tree it is.

With 16mph winds, that didn't keep Sadie from doing her normal investigating work.

Nor did it keep Stella from following her own path on her own schedule.

Once Sadie and I had walked quite a way on the path I turned to see where Stella was and there she was trotting again ... good to see.

It never felt hot on this walk. I never felt a drop of sweat, so I decided when I got back I'd pull up my chair to 'Winston's patio', grab a glass of ice tea and enjoy the good weather. I still had a couple of hours of sunlight left. It was prime time to see any possible deer stepping out of the woods or I might even get lucky enough to see my backyard grass move as moles charged through it gobbling up all the grub worms under the grass surface. They have been relentless this month.

For those that wonder, yes I have thought about digging out some of the yard in back of the house and installing a nice stone patio, instead of being satisfied with just 6 red blocks. With all the underground water in that field that angles down toward my yard I have a huge problem with something I call 'ground surge'.

Of course one of the nice things about installing a bigger patio is that I would have to build a short retaining wall around it to keep the ground from covering the patio every year. Even then that surging ground would attempt to come up from under any installed stones like it does now to my river rock, mulch and those 6 blocks.

I originally put those blocks there because it always flooded there after heavy rains. Every year I'd add more dirt, then more stone on top of it, every spring it would flood out again. Sometimes the water would come from an overflowing gutter right above it.

Once Winston found out just how nice it felt when the sun had shined on it all day, he use to lie on those blocks while scanning the field. I guess the heated stones might have made his back or legs feel better as he got older. So it became known as 'Winston's Patio'.

All of these next photos are taken from me sitting in that chair. Of course after a walk and warmed up again both hounds wanted to sit right next to me. They really wanted to go back inside the air conditioned house.

Here is my viewpoint from the chair. After about an hour of sitting outside, no deer were seen and the hounds had had enough ...

Just about the time I was stepping into the yard on the walk, with both hounds way behind me interested in other things, a rabbit sprinted across the yard from the north and leaped into the tall ragweed that hides my burn pile. The hounds didn't know just how close they were, they never saw the rabbit.

Stella still thinks the best tasting green grass is inside all of the ragweed. It doesn't matter that 7 acres of grass are starting to grow again, this is her favorite spot to find grass to eat.

Sadie also enjoys eating the fresh dirt that moles push above ground level. Just plain good old brown dirt. If you look close enough you'll notice mud on her nose.

If the hounds could speak like a human, with a voice, I have no doubt they would be telling me to take them inside. Since I understand their body language and facial expressions I know they are telling me to take them inside, they've had enough.

Although I wasn't that hot, it was great to open the door and get hit in the face with a rush of cold air. Air conditioning is a great invention.

With about 5 hours to go before my billing cycle ends with HughesNet, I had about 800Mb of data left. I found out a few days ago that YouTube videos, videos from the sports sights soak up a lot of data, like over a gig's worth in a short period of time. But with some data left I thought I'd take a look at Firefox again, get their update and see if websites loaded any faster. I like their online security programs that run in the background but it's always too slow for me.

After an hour of using it I think I'll give it another try full-time and make it my default browser for a while. Their download speed isn't bad.

A might be a movie night tonight. Reds games are on hold with the All-Star Game tomorrow. I am not in the glitz of entertainment for their home run derby tonight. I hate how they have made all televised sports more about entertainment than just the game. They are all competing for the next best show in all sports.

I had another friend tell me last night that if I really do move out to the southwest like I have talked about, I should keep the house here in 'the tropics', and then rent a place out there to see if I can handle all the brown sand, the lack of trees before selling my house. He and his wife think I'm crazy to even think about leaving the location I am in now, even with cold winters. They cannot comprehend all the green trees, grass and fields I have around me.

No moves are planned as long as I have the hounds. This is the perfect place for them.

I mentioned the app Pocket the other day for Google Chrome where you can download websites into Pocket and read them later offline, no internet needed. That feature is already built into the Safari browser that Apple designs. I see that in Firefox it's already added.

I have not used it offline but what I do like about it is once you sign up for an account (free), they email you "Pocket Hits" ... they group interesting articles from media around the world.

For example one of the articles on this afternoon's email was titled "I kicked my smartphone addiction by retraining my brain to enjoy being bored" ... by Jordan Rsenfield at Quartz.

or "What happened when Walmart left" by Ed Pilkington at The Guardian.

Well I am going to try to sneak out of my desk chair and check out the movie selections. I'll have to move slowly since Stella has decided to use the arms and wheel under my chair as her pillow as she sleeps.

Monday flew by here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana today.

Only iPhone 6s Photos This Morning

I have posted some photos on this blog when I first bought my iPhone 6s last year. I did an experiment before that and sold my iPhone 5s then went to the 'old fashion' flip phone, just for phone calls. It had other email, texting, smart phone features but I only wanted the flip phone for phone calls.

After 10 months I realized I missed some of the features of the iPhone and one of those was a good camera. I was not seeing the same quality with my old Nikon Cool Pix 3100. So I bought the iPhone 6s last year for the other missed features but to also have a new camera for inside shooting. Yet, I have rarely taken blog photos with it. This morning that changed.

I was reading Al's post over on the Bayfield Bunch last night about his first trip into a retail store that sold smart phones. You can read his story at the link above "Al's post" but basically he was wanting a smart phone for their camera feature. That lit a bulb in my brain where I asked myself why am I not using the iPhone camera for my blog photos? How does the quality compare to my Nikon D3200 DSLR camera?

So today you get to see what I found on our first walk of the day. After looking at my two choices in size of photos for the blog, the size I normally use is x-large but with the vertical iPhone photos that makes them almost too big. The large size made the photos look to small. So excuse me if the x-large photos are messed up on your phone or tablet.

I only adjusted a couple of the photos with one being cropped and two of them enhanced for color, depth etc. All the other photos are exactly as I downloaded them from the phone to my computer and then to the blog.

Besides it being another beautiful day here in 'the tropics', I found the colors to be better on the iPhone compared to my Nikon D3200. For me I have seen the photos I took when i first bought the Nikon D3200 in September 2014 to be much much better than the photos I take now. I am still searching for the reason for that.

The iPhone 6s camera also took sharper images than the Nikon D3200. I did not have to make any adjustments for the sharpness like I have to at times with the Nikon D3200.

With it being about 10° cooler today after 12 noon it was much nicer to walk today. While local towns were having severe thunderstorms within 25 miles of us last night, we only had hard rain for 15 minutes.

I see now that I should have changed the setting on my iPhone to take "square" pictures instead of the default "photo" setting. If not cropped a lot of these photos are too tall.

I found out today that Stella was the one that was sick in the middle of the night last night while I was sleeping. I found a wet roll of tall grass by the door, so she did try to go outside before she got sick. I didn't hear a thing.

I could have cropped these pictures to cut away some of the ground and sky out of them but as a test I wanted to see just what the iPhone would give me. I was shooting blind basically because with the bright sunshine I could not see what I was taking a picture of on my screen, unless I used my body to block out the sunshine.

This camera is a 12-megapixel, autofocus, optical image stabilization, true tone flash, panorama up to 63 megapixels, timer mode, burst mode, f/2.2 aperture, 5x digital zoom, IR filter, auto image stabilization, noise reduction, face detection and photo geotagging. It will also shoot video which I may have to try sometime once I figure out how to post a video on this blog.

Not only Al's blog post last night but also the new iPhone 7 tv advertisements led me to try the iPhone camera today. I'll not buy a new iPhone for quite a few years but the photo advertisements are pretty good for the iPhone 7.

There are a lot more features on this phone that I don't use. I don't mind learning the ones I don't know but basically I like only certain things on the iPhone or any smartphone and use those.

What do you think of the pictures so far?

I do know it was much easier to carry than the light Nikon D3200 but like I said, in the bright sunshine I could not see what I was taking a picture of.

I have my settings where these photos don't automatically go to the iCloud because I don't have enough memory and I refuse to pay for 'cloud storage'. They will automatically load into Google Photos instantly. I will load them into Flickr manually like I do the photos taken with the Nikon D3200.

My weather app that comes with the iPhone shows this kind of weather for the next 10 days with two to three days of possible light showers. We know those rain days are always flexible and may not happen.

Stella may wander on her own while Sadie and I walk but lately she has been veering toward the return path to meet us as we walk back.

It was another day where it looked like she is gaining weight. You can see some ribs there but her chest is filling back in and looks much bigger than it did just a month ago.

Even as we get closer to the house, that doesn't mean the hounds are in a hurry to get back unless it's above 90°. Even then, Stella is never in a hurry to get back home.

With breakfast being served much later today the hounds will not have their 2nd meal until later this afternoon, a time that I would prefer anyway. I'd like to split their meals 8-10 hours apart but they usually want food again 3 hours after their first meal.

After seeing these pictures I think I will try more with the iPhone on our afternoon/early evening walk today. I am going to change the setting to "square" to see if that makes a difference in size and presentation.

With only 2 days to go until I start a new HughesNet billing cycle and a new 20Gb of data, I am still about 1.5Gb's of unused data off of my daily pace. I'll be using that up by looking at more YouTube videos from fellow bloggers and a trailer that I am looking at.

As many of you do, I follow Tioga George's blog on my sidebar and noticed recently one of his followers that comments a lot seemed interesting. So I added his blog on my sidebar today. If you like adventure you might want to take a look ... it's called Point To Zero.

I also added Gone With The Wynns. I use to follow them years ago but deleted them from the sidebar during one of my past cleaning periods where 53 blogs went to 28 blogs on my sidebar. They use to RV, have lived off grid, but are now in traveling on their sailboat.

Another blog I have been following for a while is JD Finley. He is in the process of converting a large passenger bus into a RV. Some great ideas and he documents all of his work with pictures on his blog. Very talented.

Not much is going to happen today. I might have to head out for some grocery shopping as my food supply is low. I sure wish I had online delivery available for groceries out here in rural America or maybe that Amazon drone delivery idea. Even a maid or personal assistant hire might not be a bad idea. I'm not sure if I am really joking about that last idea, doesn't sound like a bad one.

Nothing is going to be purchased for a while but lately I have been back to looking at trailers, trucks, converted cargo trailers and cargo vans ... I'll continue that research today while staying cool while drinking iced tea.

My internal GPS has calibrated itself ... today feels like a Saturday.

All is good today here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Some Mid-Week Rambling

We were all up early but the day really didn't start until after lunch. It was one of those days where you weren't sure what you wanted to do. The hounds were no help in me making a decision.

So, we kicked back most of the day ... isn't that the norm around here?

Heidi decided to surprise me by going an entirely different direction and was only in that area long enough to dump her tanks and then head back to the door to be let in? Why on such a beautiful day? Winston would have taken off to explore every inch of the yard, maybe lay in the sun but Heidi has a much different personality than he did.

This morning Stella didn't have much interest other than eating that soft dirt pushed up by my yard moles. Over the years I've tried everything suggested to kill the grub worms and prevent yard moles ... all with no success. Anyone have some ideas on what to use?

By the time I read all the internet news on sports, answered emails, read Facebook and Twitter a couple of hours had already passed. I was still curious about my password manager that I use called LastPass so I started more Google searches to find out if any recent news had been released ... maybe some alternatives. I like LastPass and have it on my desktop and laptop for free ... I am too cheap to pay the $12 per year just so I can use it on my iPhone.

It might not just be my way of thinking but I rarely if ever use a site, banking (never), Apple Pay (no yet) on my iPhone where I need a user id and password. I am still not convinced that is secure like a laptop or desktop is. So I continue to use the free version of LastPass.

Plus I aways enjoy doing a Google search on ".... vs ... " when I have something on my mind.

By 4:30pm, Sadie was giving me the 'stare down' to get my butt out of my chair, back away from the computer and get an afternoon walk in ... sounded like a good idea to me. It also felt like rain as soon as we stepped outside.

It was all clear to the north but looking south it was storms showing up on the WeatherBug radar.

It was a day for butterflies and I was able to catch a couple while on the walk.

Sadie and Stella both went their separate ways, finding all these nice spots to bury their noses in the thick grass. During the whole walk, they both spent a lot of time stationary, in different spots, doing what they do.

You can tell how fast the Mist Flower is dying out, more and more by the day. They will return to those ugly dead stems scattered all over the field until they cut the field again, which may not be until next summer.

Ten minutes into the walk it felt like those rain clouds were right over the top of us ... luckily it was only gray clouds and no raindrops. I didn't realized rain was a possibility today.

While I was spending time taking photos of butterflies, adjusting my camera setting to 'no beeps' when in focus, Sadie and Stella had already moved to the very back of the field ... a long way away from me.

I am loving the new Tamron lens I bought a few weeks ago ... it has all the ranges I use on one lens and more important to me .. it focusses first time every time without errors.

By the time I caught up with them, they were back to their own individual tasks of identifying different areas of the field.

I continued my walk and letting them stay on their own schedule. When I was a at a point of the walk where they would be out of sight, I called each of their names one time and they both came running. That is pretty good for hounds, noted for being a stubborn breed and not recommended to be off leash.

Sadie trotted right past me and headed home ... with only a couple of stops along the way.

I didn't want to wait to describe today's walk after my rambling. I like to kind of match the walking details with the photos. During the walk I thought that I had a lot of 'other stuff' on my mind to write about. Nothing important and maybe not even interesting topics to blog about ... but as I mentioned yesterday, it's been hard to write lately so maybe a little rambling was due.

I admit and have many times before, at times I feel this blog is pretty boring and if it feels that way to me, it has to feel that way to some of you. Yet, I like to write and I like taking photos of the hounds even if the path never changes and their routines are consistently the same.

Let me know via email or by commenting here ... any suggestions for what you would like to see on this blog.

I know it's my blog and I can do or write about what I want .... some say "it's your journal and write about whatever you want, readers can choose if they want to read or not". I agree with some of that but not all ... I feel that if you take the time to visit my blog then I have some responsibility to cover information or photograph things that you are interested in  when it comes to "Hounds and Other Stuff".

So I am open to suggestions.

I have a couple of other private blogs on Blogger where I write. It's been less frequently lately but one is a private journal of personal thoughts. Then I kept a private blog with the same colors and template that this blog was back in December 2015. I was using that as my main blog for the hounds and my life here in the tropics when I wasn't posting on the public blog ... mostly as my reference for future use. I have photos of house maintenance, issues, repairs, more photos of Heidi as documentation ... supplementing my memory. It has been quite useful.

I can also import all the new blog posts from this blog to that blog when I feel I want to update it with all my blog pots.

Yesterday I ran onto something that may be hard to imagine but in a way it IS POSSIBLE ... more government control of bloggers. It's toward the bottom of this blog post ... but it made me wonder, what would happen to all our blogs if this were to happen in the future. With all of the current mainstream media censorship plus Facebook and Twitter controlling what content is seen by the public ... that blog post could be fairly accurate.

It would make me want to move my 'personal blog' back to a Word Document on my hard drive ... suggested by one friend of mine years ago when I told her about my new blog. There are a lot of things I like about Blogger over a Microsoft Word document but at the same time ... having those deep thoughts only on my computer sounds like it might be right and time for a change.

As you know last week I spent a large amount of time after midnight so I could use the free data period offered by my internet provider to upload close to 30,000 photos to Google Photos as a backup ... an online backup. Yet the picture quality on Flickr is much better because it will upload all of your photos AFTER you have made any edits on the original photo and they are not compressed into a smaller file size. Google Photos does not and would prefer you do your edits on their program.

A lot of work was put into Google Photos, so I hate to stop using it. It's nice that any photos I take of the hounds with my iPhone (which I keep forgetting to add to the blog) is automatically updated in Google Photos and vice versa. With the automatic setting it's fast for me to upload every photo taken that day (25-100 per day), just by doing a "select all" and then exporting them to a folder on my desk top. Google Photos will upload those automatically as soon as those photos touch that folder.

I've started loading those same daily photos to my Flickr account which I have linked on the left sidebar of this blog in the upper left corner. You can see the sharp quality in the photos. In that case I do the upload manually after midnight to save my data. Since those photos are in the edited original setting and are NOT compressed ... it takes more data to upload but is just as fast.

So I am using both and it really doesn't take that much time. I also don't have to do it every day even if I take photos every day.

I usually post 1-4 photos on Facebook but not all the time. It's for those that do Facebook but never read my blog. I have had very few friends that are local, read my blog but they are addicts of Facebook.

I still like my Wordpress blog a lot. Although it updates on my left sidebar I rarely get a visit to that blog so I guess I'll keep it just for me. It has only a couple of sentences of verbiage and mostly photos. Yes, they are the same as you see on this blog.

As far as blogging ... is it dying out slowly? Are bloggers quitting, moving to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter? I see less updated posts on the blogs I follow here. No big deal but I am just mentioning it because of the trend ... less blogging frequency.

Traveling ??? The urge has slowly disappeared as I feel more and more content where I am. I've done enough analyzing on all the pros and cons of traveling with the hounds, sell or not to sell the house and change my base camp location, and what vehicle to travel in when I do end up traveling. I will, it's just not going to happen with two bloodhounds.

I've tested them here locally. They go on all the short trips with me except the grocery shopping trip. They ride well ... except there was the time a month ago where we were driving the short 3 mile drive home after buying dog food ... I did not realize until I got home, that Stella had tore the bag of dog food open and was eating kibble as fast as she could before we got home. LOL

They ride very well as does Heidi. Yet controlling them with two 6' leashes or two leashes on one splitter doesn't work well with them when tested here in the field. They are both very strong and they like to go different directions, one splitter and two leashes presented a control problem.

I analyzed and decided that before I decided to go get Stella (Dipstick) last August. I was fine with that decision now as I was then.

Should you force yourself to eat when you never feel hungry through out the day? I've been having more days like that.

For some reason I have not been taking my Z4 drives. It is being driven a lot less than the Mini Cooper I had. When I take off in that car I know I like it better than the Mini Cooper and even if it's not driven much, it's a keeper. One of the Z4 forums did a poll to check ages of Z4 owners. Very very surprising that the majority were 65 or older and many over 70 years old.

Oh I almost forgot. In 10 months I have gone full circle after selling my iPhone 5S and my iPad Mini2 last November ... A few weeks ago I went back to an iPhone 6S, a little bigger screen than the 5S, better camera and the updated guts to run it. Great decision in getting back to a smart phone.

A few weeks ago while sitting on the couch with a laptop while watching football ... it's a great way to watch the stats of games you are watching ... I realized I missed the size of the iPad Mini, doing the same thing I was doing with a laptop. Then when I downloaded a few free books to Kindle I once again missed the size and convenience for reading books on the iPad Mini.

So, last night I bought a new one. It was on sale, it's the 2 not the 4 like I had before and only a few dollars more than I sold my old one for last November. I never used it to take photos with, the iPhone is doing that. I didn't buy the one where I can add cellular data because I would rarely use that. I read about the difference in the 2 and the 4's ... not enough for my use of it to pay a little more. It's fast, great for reading e-books ... although I go back and forth between them and books.

Options are always good and I don't see myself ever being a bare bones minimalist. It is good to know though my urges to trade cars, where that at times were obsessive, are gone with the two vehicles I now have.

I'll remember all the stuff I was going to ramble about as soon as I post this ... but this is way too long as it is and it's already past 6pm.

It's been a good summer here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana ... so good, that it's already over.