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.

Teasing Us With Spring

With it raining most of the day yesterday there just wasn't any chance of taking an afternoon walk, otherwise all three of us might have floated away while walking the path. Heidi came out late afternoon but only to relieve herself and then headed back inside. The warmer afternoon temperatures are nice but those overnight lows make it quite cold first thing in the morning.

So when Stella and I went out for our first morning walk in two days, the "feels like" temperature was 23° !!! The forecast is telling me it will get up to 51° later today and that is fine with me. With the wide range of temperatures in a 12 hour period, Spring is teasing us. I want to feel the heat of the sun, not just see its brightness.

Cold temperatures were not the start to our day though. That happened in the dark bedroom a little after 5am when I thought I heard bloodhound toenails pacing back and forth on the hardwood floor in the bedroom. It's a familiar sound and I knew Stella was wanting to go outside. I could hear her stomach making those gurgling sounds again and figured she would eat some grass to settle her stomach

With it freezing cold outside I wasn't going to accompany her, even with a coat. I wasn't planning on getting dressed to go outside and figured she would be back at the door to come inside within 10-15 minutes. With the announcement of Apple updating their macOS, it was a perfect time to download that 2.5Gb of data while I waited on Stella. It would be a total of 5Gb for my iMac and MacBook Air and with the free data period (2am-8am) it would be the perfect time to do the update.

I have noticed Safari is faster than before after that update. There were some updates to their built-in privacy internet program. I found it interesting that I had to give my computer permission to allow access to Google Mail or the other way arround. I had not seen that before anytime since October 2010. I only use my gmail address to log into my blog on Blogger.

With the moon in the southern sky, I had a passenger plane flying from the north. When I see plane traffic I always wonder what their destination is and what model of plane they are flying. I am around 70 miles south of the Indianapolis airport so I do get to see a lot of air traffic, especially at night.  I forgot to mention that within a few steps of our walk this morning my face and hands were freezing as if the temperatures were in single digits.

One good thing about the freezing temperature this morning, the wet soggy path was frozen hard enough to walk on. Just the little bit of sun you see up ahead turned that frozen path into over saturated softness and as we approached the back of the field there was standing water on the path in the two to three usual places.

When you miss a day of walking due to weather you can count on the strength and number of scents will keep Stella more than busy. Just after she made that first turn I didn't know if we would ever leave that area. To get from this picture to the one below where she was on the right side of the path, looking in her direction, it took half the total time we used to finish the walk. She wasn't eating deer scat, just thoroughly investigating what her nose was picking up.

She darted across the path as if she was onto something but it was a false alarm. Within seconds of the sudden change in direction, she was walking toward me.

I did look at the different WordPress Themes yesterday. They have added quite a few new blog designs, or what Blogger calls templates. I've never gotten use to the word theme that WordPress uses. Either I was too lazy to really look for something different or I had lost my urge to make any changes ... nothing happened and I doubt I looked longer than three or four minutes. I decided a late afternoon siesta was the better option.

My own test with grains, beans and wheat bread continued yesterday. I am still eating some of those foods until they are gone. I hate wasting food and I wanted to see what combination caused indigestion. I have confirmed it does not matter if it is normal Jif Peanut Butter or one that is a different brand with "natural" on the label ... I can no longer eat Peanut Butter of any kind.

David's Bread is a high quality organic wheat bread with grain and seeds ... sometimes I can eat it without issues and other times I am reaching for a Tums. I am cutting out all grains anyway, so that will take care of that problem.

I went to the US News & Word Report where a panel of medical experts test, analyze and rank over 40 different diets. I've looked there before in past years. Their latest review was this past January. They have never had anything good to say about Paleo or Keto. This morning I had a different idea. I wanted to look at three kinds of diet and pull off their macronutrient percentages.

The diets I looked at were Mediterranean, Flexitarian and Paleo. For a man my age the recommended daily calorie intake is 2,200 grams per day. That is an US recommendation not the panel of experts. I wanted to see what percentages were recommended for Protein, Fat and Carbs. After writing them down so I could look at them to compare the three diets, there were some pretty interesting results.

For those that don't know how to convert a percent of those three topics into grams of food allowed per day ... the formula is this:  calories times the percentage, divided by the number of grams for Fat, Protein and Carbs. There are 4 grams of carbs and protein per calorie. There are 9 grams of fat per calorie.

An example for a daily intake of 2,200 calories would be:

2,200 x .29 / 4 = 159.5 grams of Protein per day in the Mediterranean Diet. It did recommend to eat only 1,527 calories per day for a man my age, so the amount of protein would be reduced.

As I looked at the different limits by each type of diet, it all fell in line with the way I have been eating for a year or so. I call it "My Diet" because I take a little from each kind, overall. I have tried enough of these diets since 2014 that I know which veggies to buy, which fruits to eat if I want to lose weight and those I can add back if weight is not an issue. I know that most of my diet has been and will be fresh veggies and fruits with more salmon, trout or halibut than chicken or beef.

Some of those days will be meatless, mixed in, not intentionally but because there will be times I will want to eat some veggie recipes I have used in the past, like Spinach Lasagna. Once or twice per month I'll lean Keto/Paleo where it's only meat and veggies. Pizza or burgers on special occasions I guess.

I was about to give up all dairy products because the short time I have eliminated them, my winter cough has decreased and my sinuses are clear of mucus. Yet, there are too many articles that overlap different diets that consistently mention cottage cheese and greek yogurt as beneficial for gut health.

I have to watch it if I add those two because I am addicted to both cottage cheese and yogurt.

Yesterday was my first day in a long time of getting on my road bicycle that is attached to an indoor trainer, where I can ride inside. I am still feeling the soreness after an easy 30 minute ride. Stella sat and watched me, not sure what was going on. Heidi slept through all the excitement. For a while I plan to ride every other day inside and hopefully be in good enough shape by warmer weather in April to take 25-40 mile rides outside. The 40 mile ride use to be the daily norm after work, then a 100 mile ride one day on the weekend.

I am probably past the days of riding those 100 mile rides.

So things are pretty well set up I think as far as eating. I have some new things I want to do besides the to do list. I need to get in better shape because just the short hour of climbing, leaning around the bank along the driveway cutting small saplings had me sore for a couple of days.

I didn't watch the Apple announcements yesterday. I never do but always read the day after articles to see what they are going to do. Since they don't sell software like Microsoft does they have decided they have to make their billions somewhere else. People like me are not upgrading or buying a new iPhone. Once I read that their new version of Apple TV would not carry prime time sports, there was nothing for me.

From what I have read the past year, Apple TV is the best streaming service of all, but if I cannot use it to watch live games in football, baseball or basketball, then this Apple customer will not buy their Apple TV services.

Speaking of sports, besides a day of bright sunshine I will get to watch a Reds game this afternoon in Atlanta and then an IU basketball game tonight at 7pm. Fit in an afternoon hound walk, some steamed broccoli and baked salmon ... that is almost a perfect day.

It's good to see the tables have turned in D.C. All I can say is, payback is a bitch and I hope they nail every one of them involved. I hope Lindsey Graham gets his request for a special counsel to investigate those involved with the real corruption and those whom directed this mess.

How many of you have lost friends due to politics since pre-election 2016 ??

It's trying to get warmer here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana and that's a good thing.