It's Great To Feel Warm Again

We had two surprises when we started today. There was just a little snow last night and yesterday was not Friday. The snow covered the driveway and our path, showing us the way to go and I spent all day plus last night thinking it was Friday instead of Thursday. Hard to believe I didn't realize what day it was after looking at my watch multiple times during the day yesterday.

It felt nice and warm this morning with no wind, no sunshine, and not a lot of highway noise. Stella started leading the walk but the further we went the more I felt she wasn't feeling good today. She had a lack of energy and as you will see, rarely veered from the path.

When I started the walk I thought of just letting her go on her own today for the first time in many months. Then it occurred to me that if I were to do that I would have very few photos for this blog post.

Once I saw she wasn't going to move, I gave up on the idea of total freedom for her and backtracked to go get her. I zoomed in to get this photo so she wasn't that close to me.

This is a pretty good indicator showing just how little snow we got last night. It is still in the mid 20's as I write this but that is still around 20° warmer than yesterday morning and that's a huge difference in my comfort level. It feels so warm this morning that Heidi might even make an appearance outside later today, just in time for the next blog post

Finally I can show you the deer path they use between the woods that borders the field to the woods behind my neighbor's house. It's hard to show it with mashed green grass but with the snow, their path shows up pretty clearly. It's interesting how curvy their path is.

I was surprised by the lack of activity from Stella at this point in the walk. Maybe there just wasn't that much deer scent to track. She seemed like she was not that interested in the walk this morning. She was looking more like she does on the afternoon walks.

I even stopped her a couple of times to ask her if she was okay. Every time I asked she would barely wag her tail, then walk around me.

Lately every walk we take, she will stop to scratch herself while sitting on the path and that gives me a chance to get pretty far ahead of her. It's the only way I can catch her running but the delay between photos doesn't give me a lot of time to take continuous running photos.

That is the same deer path I showed earlier, only from a different part of our walk.

We took the 'old' way home this morning. She waited on me to catch up with her, showing no signs of wandering away. She headed straight to the door once I caught up to her.

Before it was 8:30am I had completed five things off of my 'Reminder' list and that included a short trip to town for dog food. I bought some lamb and rice this time with hopes that might make a difference in Stella's scratching. I've looked everywhere on her for fleas and have found nothing like that.

Since I now know it's Friday and not Saturday I can't say that will make much of a difference really. In fact being the football addict I claim to be, at least for college football, I had forgotten the Super Bowl will be played on Sunday. I have not decided if I will tune into the game or not.

I never watch pregame stuff, nor the halftime. For some reason this year I am just not too interested in seeing the game. Maybe it's the teams that are playing that has decreased my interest. Sports talk show has been saying there isn't the normal excitement around Super Bowl Week like in the past.

I stopped by the library on my way home to check their 'New Books' shelf or other books of interest they set out on display. For the millionth time I found out, they don't open until 10am and it was 8:20am as I pulled into an empty parking lot.

I received a long email last night from the WordPress Support and Development Team. They had actually looked into my problem of their new dashboard gobbling up 800Mb of data or more at one time. It never did that until they started the redesign of their dashboard. It also does not do it if I use their old 'wp-admin' dashboard, by their suggestion.

They looked at my photo file, which they call the 'media library' and was aware that it was loading images each time I would open a browser for the first time that day and that it was using an abnormal amount of data.

I tested it this morning during my free data period and all three browsers used tons of data loading that same library. I even closed each browser after they were finished, and reopened each one to see the same data usage as they reloaded the library.

They claim the reason for it is the cache file space of the browser I use. Anymore you can barely find where to see the browser cache files and when you do find it, they will not let you increase the size of the cache files or at least override their default size.

Blogger does not take a lot of data each time you go into your account to post or to load new photos. I doubt that I ever go back to Blogger because I like this blog much better in the way it looks plus the way things are done in the background. Towards the end of my Blogger use, it was always hanging up while uploading only 20 or so images for the post, sometimes with less than 20 photos.

Sometimes those photos would not load at all and I'd close the browser, reopen it and start over. Too frustrating to work with and of course their Blogger Support email responses are like a huge black hole in space. You might send them a question but you will never get an answer.

It's nice to look at the calendar and realize there is really only one more month of extreme winter weather possibilities. Sure it can and will snow in March, maybe April but that is in weather much like today, not the kind we just experienced and some are still experiencing in the Polar Vortex.

It's warmer this morning in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana and that's a GREAT thing !!!!

The Hounds Overslept!!

Something was different. It was not only daylight but bright daylight. Instead of a warm house it was really cold after a night of warmer outdoor temps in the 20s. Both hounds were passed out, sleeping soundly. For once they were not waking me up but I would wake them up once they heard me.  Is this a dream?

Tapping my watch face confirmed what I was seeing or feeling was true. It should be bright daylight because it was 8:35am !!!! The app "SleepWatch" loved it. All kinds of exciting icons for getting more than 8 hours sleep in one session. It was the first time in months that sleep was more than 8 hours. I have no idea what happened since there were no warning signs from any of us that we would oversleep.

Consequently the schedule slid a little. Nothing planned, nothing needing done, made it quite easy to slide that schedule a few hours. The hounds still enjoyed their food later than normal and they had the same exact routine after eating ... they went back to sleep.

I had my normal two cups of coffee, read the latest internet news and sports, answered a few emails and traded a few texts. Stella came into the room about an hour later to see if we were walking today or not. It was nice to feel warmer outside. The snow was still deep but it was 30° which meant there was a really good chance that Stella would complete the half mile walk.

She had a 'bounce to her step' this morning ... energized.

Little did I know that as she trotted in front of me that she would not stop. I just passed the first turn and she was already in back of the field !!

I called her name from a distance just to see if she would hear me. I had no plans of running to catch up, nor walking any faster. It didn't look like she was into eating deer scat today, just exploring ... so she did her thing and I walked my pace.

You can tell by her legs that the snow is fairly deep but still probably not more than 3" or 4".

She was right on track with the deer tracks. With Sadie I would have heard her jowls making noise as she inhaled each breath and her tail would have been up and curled at the scent she was collecting. Stella is more relaxed when she tracks. It's just a stroll to her.

Any bare spot in the grass was ice covered. It's hard to imagine by tonight around 8pm it's going to start raining and not stop until sometime on Thursday. By tomorrow morning's walk Stella may need rain boots because this field is going to be one big saturated mess.

It wasn't the dog barking this morning that caught Stella's attention. In a driveway fairly far away, a school bus was pulling into their parking spot behind a house. Schools must have opened a little later today due to weather. Hilly country roads around here take time to get cleared for safe travel by school buses.

Facing the East, it looked like good weather.

It took a while for Stella to move from the north yard to house. I didn't see any prints in the snow that were not ours but she seemed to feel she needed to sniff every inch along the yard and field border before turning for home.

With the temperature reaching the low 40's today, this is not going to be around much longer.

Waking up late and sliding the daily schedule a few hours kind of puts me into the middle of no man's land when it comes to blogging. I don't know why I've been blogging twice per day but there always seems to be more than enough photos to include for two posts and too many for one post.

I guess it falls into my blog plan I spoke of last month, "blogging when I feel like  it."  So instead of waiting to post this tonight, I am going to post what I have now then see what the afternoon brings. Heidi is still sleeping in that same position you see her in at the top of the page. She's adaptable when it comes to routines.

It's nice to feel warmer in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.