The Hounds Still Get Two Walks Around A Thunderstorm

Stella decided to protest this morning when I caught her veering off in the direction of the neighbor's field. When I yelled her name, she stopped walking and stared at me. When I said "over here", words that she has been responding to very well these past few weeks ... she sat down and wouldn't move.

You may have noticed my front page to the blog has changed a little. Instead of one page with the latest post and 18-27 pictures all included ... I have manually added a page break. Then I changed my settings back to 7 posts per page.

I like the look of it and I am getting favorable feedback from a few readers that not only like the format but also tell me my blog loads faster and uses less data. 

I really think I will stay with this new format. I just wish there was a different way to add the page break to pasts post all at once instead of one at a time. With that process I have done 21 posts or 3 pages worth and may not do any more previous posts. The current or future posts will slowly push the older format further back in the blog.

I also think with the new format, it will be easier to see when I make more than one post per day. Sometimes there are more pictures in a day that can fit on one post or more topics floating in my head than can fit in one post. So be sure to check for multiple posts per day sometimes.

For some reason this morning I was more anxious to get the morning walk started than even Sadie. I had to asked both of them if they wanted to go for a walk, instead of the norm of Sadie standing and staring at me.

What a change it is to start your morning walk with temperatures in the mid 70's instead of the high 20's. Yes, I know that was months ago but I always remember those freezing walks. I am not a fan of cold weather.

Stella decided to take it slower than normal this morning. I did not bring the 6' leash and in fact it is no longer thought about when we start to go outside. Like I said yesterday, most of the time she has been walking with us instead of her making trips to the neighbor's woods.

Again, Sadie was always too close for pictures. I think I found out why as we made the final turn home.

Parts of the field are growing by the hour it seems, while other parts have grass that is no taller than an inch high. I forget that it's only April and we will still have plenty of time before the hay gets tall enough to where the hounds are hard to see.

When I turned around and didn't see Stella, I assumed that she had gone past her boundary and was either heading down into the gully or close to the edge of the bank. I couldn't see her anywhere until I downloaded the picture, made it larger. Then I could barely see some of that bloodhound red hair dead center in the picture.

I was happy to see when I called her name, she came trotting out of the thick brush.

As we made the final turn home, I noticed a tick on top of her hair on her neck. Then after closer inspection found one digging into her ear. Last April was so much worse for ticks that I had a counter up in the left corner of the blog with a current count of ticks pulled off the hounds and me.

If they were on one hound, Sadie probably had one too. She always acts different when she has multiple ticks on her. I think that is why she kept walking so close to me this morning that I could take pictures of her.

I don't know how I missed these ticks on her ears, but two of them on the outside of her ears had been there long enough to be a little full. The two inside her ears had not even dug in yet. When we got back home and I could use my "tick off" tool, I found 3 ticks on one spot outside of her ear.

She was more than happy after I pulled them off.

I decided to sneak out to Walmart before the hounds started howling for lunch. The rain/storms were not due until around 2pm and I wanted to make sure I was home when they happened so Stella had zero chances of freaking out. She has not made any damages while I have been gone in a little over 4 months !!!!

I made it back in plenty of time. The sun was out and I drove the Z4 over with with the top down. The more west I went the darker the clouds were getting. I was wondering if I was going to make it to the parking lot so I could put the top back up before it rained. I was only in the store long enough to make an exchange but when I came outside it had poured rain.

The further east I went the sun came back out and based on what I was seeing on the roads, it had not rained at all. Radar showed spots of storms in the Midwest. I just happened to hit one.

It was a different story at 1:30pm. The winds picked up, the smell of rain filled the air and Stella moved her sleeping spot over next to the big kitchen island to sleep under cover on the inboard side away from the windows. That seems to be a consistent storm spot for her.

The rain was hard, it came down sideways and was gone within 15 minutes. Cold air followed it and it was cold enough to put on a sweatshirt for a short period of time. It still looked like it was possible for a fairly dry late afternoon walk ... in the meantime I wasted my afternoon away playing Mahjong and enjoying my view from the kitchen table.

With every container of cottage cheese or yogurt, the hounds get to lick out what is left of the container and Sadie always gets the last chance. Sometimes she has to put the container in the prime spot to get the very last drop of cottage cheese.

By late afternoon the sunshine was out and it felt hot outside. The backyard grass didn't see that wet so we took off for our 2nd walk of the day. Sadie took off from the start with all of that added protein she finished an hour earlier.

Stella did many stops to either investigate or to scratch. I am not sure there is anything to scratch and that it might be a habit. I think the habit option might be real because she will stop in the exact same places in the walk to scratch.

She was moving all over the field this afternoon and at no time did I have to give her a verbal command to follow us, catch up with us or move our direction.

She slow trotted into the backyard, stepped on my foot as she ran past me and met me at the door wanting back inside. LOL ... she doesn't realize just how heavy that one foot of hers feels when being stepped on.

I can't see much more happening tonight but a little Cincinnati Reds baseball on FoxSports Ohio/Cin and more cold ice tea. We've had a good thunderstorm, two hound walks, lunches and a short trip to WallyWorld ... quite a day.

Retirement is good here in 'the tropics' of southern Indiana.

What??? 64° This Morning

I knew when I opened my eyes for the first time this morning and heard the wind howling outside that the weather experts has been accurate.

Along with some rain though were going to be 64° temperatures the day after Christmas, which is extremely hard to believe. Yet, no worries, it will be back with a high in the low 40's to high 30's by Tuesday morning. My iPhone weather showed 64° at 7am and the air that hit my face when I opened the door confirmed it.

There are always some immediate signs when I open the door for the first time to let the hounds outside. Yes, Heidi is up for that trip in the morning. The first sign was the amount of wind pressing against my door as I tried to open it. The next was a fully soaked and wet carport floor.

When there are small tree limbs from the Sycamore tree then you know the winds were strong while we slept last night.

I've always wondered if the low wet area in the back of the neighbors yard hinders their chance in selling the house. It does not always have standing water of coarse, just after heavy rains, but the ground does stay pretty soft in that area year round.

BTW ... the 'Picture Of The Day' award goes to the very last on in this post.

With a 100% chance of rain by noon and Intellicast radar showing the storm front about 100 miles to the west of us I decided it was time to get our walk in, since it might be the only one we will be able to take today due to rain and extremely wet field later this afternoon.

On the initial trip outside I checked the ground to see how wet it was and surprisingly it was not as saturated as yesterday because there wasn't any water rising to ground level when I walked. So I headed back inside for the camera and to change into the hiking boots in case it was wetter in back of the field. Sadie was thrilled with that decision and sat right next to me while I changed shoes.

In that picture above Sadie has crawled under a wild bush stem full of thorns pressing into her skin ... doesn't feel a thing. She did that a couple of times today and as usual, she just charged through any brush that got in her way. She is a very strong hound.

With the winds around 20mph, luckily it was blowing warm air. What a nice change that is. No jacket was needed today, just a sweatshirt.

Stella once again stays pretty close to Sadie for the walk this morning. They acted as if they had a lot of things to get done on this walk ... a purpose. They were in their 'serious' mode.

It never fails during these walks, where I wonder what actually had been in these places they are so interested in. What time of day was the deer or other animal around. With the soft ground it is much easier to see the fresh prints in the ground from a hoof of a deer.

While Sadie sprinted for the far right corner, Stella made a straight line sprint without making the sharp right turn.

As I walked over to see what Stella had found that was so interesting, there was nothing there to eat, she was just moving her nose under all the wet leaves.

They decided two noses were more powerful than just one nose in today's expedition.

Sadie powers through another stem of thorns.

Back to some teamwork.

It still amazes me that I have an AT&T tower this close to my house but they cannot offer me wireless internet service due to my location. Being a Directv customer, and with AT&T purchasing them last summer ... they are offering unlimited data where I could stream all my tv shows and games through Directv for free.

They do have a price for different packages but from the way it was explained to me, based on the package I pay Directv my AT&T wireless UNLIMITED data would be a no cost to me.

The hounds had just turned to me because they were sure there were deer in the cornfield behind them, but didn't see any. That is where I might see 10-15 deer at times grazing. Luckily the hounds have not seen them since Sadie was a puppy in the middle of deep snow. She scaled that fence and was sprinting through snow as deep as her chest after the deer she saw.

That tree line is where the hounds took off a few days ago that I blogged about yesterday. There is a fence that runs the full length of the tree line. You can see the camera did not capture all of it. It's good to see the past few walks they have not shown any tendency to go back to the new area they found.

Here come the rains.

It was not raining yet but the hounds were fairly anxious to get back to the house.

This afternoon I will return to my detailed house cleaning. Later tonight I will be going back to scanning old photos. I did 139 pictures yesterday but got off track in subject matter after I opened an album looking for any stray hound photos. It was mostly old people pics. I scanned them so I could send them out to those in the picture, if I had a phone number or email address.

I don't have 1,000's of pictures like some of you have scanned when you were downsizing but I found a few other packages, and a large Kodak box full of them last night ... so I have more pictures to scan than I had planned on and definitely in the mid 100's.

This issue is, I have packages, undated and in no specific order. I also have the small picture size, hard backed albums that are in some sort of date sequence. As I scanned 3-6 pictures at a time, I was trying to decide whether to scan all the hounds in the order as they came in the albums or scan by each hound individually after I sorted the loose pictures.

I do know one thing. For blogging purposes I will go through the stacks of each hound and the albums that contain all the hounds and pick out some of the best ones and upload them to the blog.

I mentioned yesterday I had a basset hound mixed up between Arthur in Washington and Barney. Once I ran into some other pictures where Barney and Harry had stayed a few months with my sister's kids in Indiana then were flown out to Seattle for me to pick up, then I knew it was Barney that was pictured with Harry the other day in my Whidbey Island post, and not Arthur.

Over the 29 years I've had hounds some of the names have been used over again. So in this case for naming my folders that are kept in my computer's Apple Photos, as well as Google Photos and Flickr ... Arthur has a state initial by their name, while Max and Sadie have either 'basset' or 'bloodhound' by their names.

I am not scanning these pictures to downsize and to throw away the paper copy. In fact my scanned copy is not nearly as good as that 35mm picture nor as good quality as that 35mm slide I have. I am only digitizing them to use on the blog plus I tend to look at pictures more on my computers, iPad or iPhone than I do looking through an album.

I plan to keep blogging about Heidi, Sadie and Stella but on occasion I'll add a 2nd post of the day to show and blog about some of the past hounds I've had.

I will say that looking back through all of these pictures, even the non-hound ones, brings back some memories I had not thought of in a long time. They were interesting to see and surprising just how much detail of that time can be remembered by just looking at a photograph.

I even found a couple of more cars I forgot that I had ... so the number of cars I've owned over the years still out numbers the number of hounds I've lived with. LOL

I can hear it raining outside, plus Stella is telling me to get off the computer because it's time for her to eat ... here is the reaction I got yesterday when I asked them "are you ready to eat"??  Stella was just beginning her howl.

A very warm day here in 'the tropics' of southern Indiana.