Snow Storm ?

We were warned last night on the local news that the hounds and I were to expect around 3" of snow today. Not only did they tell us the amount and the probability of it happening but stressed that most of the snow would happen south of I-70. That's us. In that case Stella planned to get an early start on the walk this morning before the snow would start.

With a slight wind out of the NW I could tell it was a lot colder than the 31° my weather app was telling me. In fact after a few minutes I was beginning to think I had not worn the right coat. My face was feeling like I should have put on the down parka instead of my lightweight down jacket. None of that bothered Stella though, she was into her routine of dumping her tanks early and then catching up with me.

We were out the door this morning like old times, a few minutes past 8am. With another
7 days to go before we move the clocks forward we will have daylight at 8am until then. What was I thinking ???  LOL Of course it will be bright daylight at 7am (EARLIER) because we are moving the clocks FORWARD !!!

I have a 192 movies recorded on my DVR, another couple of hundred DVD's setting on my shelf and still could not find a movie that interested me enough to watch last night. 250 channels offered on my DishNetwork package and I probably don't watch more than 7 or 8 of them. Instead, I sat for hours reading the book about Steve Jobs, then went to bed with anticipation of a lot of snow when I woke up.

About the time we made the first time I could feel it spitting a little snow. I could see some very small crystals landing on my jacket sleeve and the air is always colder once that turn is made. Stella was into tracking again today and not a lot of verbal herding was needed. I let her go on her own.

I know this is a weird angle for a picture but I was trying to get a picture of the difference in her coat, on top of her spine. My very first bloodhound Max use to do the same thing with his winter coat, where it is a little curly compared to the rest of her coat.

I think she noticed it was snowing a little harder ... she started walking faster with her head up, like she wanted to get home.

Not quite a trot but close. Was she getting colder? She trotted nonstop all the way to the backyard.

By the end of the walk it wasn't snowing that hard.

Of course with a light snow outside and temperatures that are cold enough to make my face and fingers feel frozen by the time we returned, there was no way Heidi was going to wake up to see what was going one.

Maybe that will be my plan for today. Watch the snow fly and take pictures every hour to show the progression. Of course 3" is nothing compared to what the northern states and the east coast got this weekend. No worries though, it is supposed to be back in the 50's by this weekend.

As you see I wanted an old style design for the blog. Basically I wanted a sidebar back on the right hand side on the homepage and the post page so you could see other links to check out without having to scroll to the bottom of the page. Plus I was in the mood for a different blog style. Luckily I was able to use all that data searching with my free data period before 8am. Stella woke me up again at 5am, not wanting out but wanting breakfast. When I finally woke up she was standing by the bed whining.

I already can feel that a siesta will be part of my plan of the day, later this afternoon.

It's only a light snow so far this morning in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Amazing Keto Results

Yes it's only been 6 days since I decided to get 'serious' about cutting carbs. I pulled a Keto grocery list from my files last week and went shopping. There wasn't a lot of difference in what I bought except a few important things were not bought. Things like pasta, oatmeal, sugar, nothing in a package. For a while now I have been eating steak, chicken with the skin on it and salmon. That did not change this week.

Also these numbers are honest numbers. I never cheat when taking my weight or measurements, something I have been doing every month since I retired in April 2015 while escaping from all the soda machines, fast foods and Friday morning pastries.

I also followed Paleo's owner carb limit instead of the low 20g limit by Keto standards. He raised it to 50g per day. My spreadsheet shows me after six days of eating I am averaging 41g of carbs per day. That's good enough for me and a HUGE difference than just a few weeks ago.

Since first thing last Saturday morning to first thing this morning (after the hounds were fed), I've lost 5 pounds !!! I also lost 2" around my stomach. Yes, hard to believe but I'm only comparing what I wrote down last Saturday morning when I felt fat. I know this will not be the normal weekly loss. I know that a lot of it may be just water weight. Yet, the numbers don't lie.

Some slight differences that may have been a factor in this much change ... no sugar in my coffee until Wednesday morning but yesterday and this morning's coffee was back to black, no sugar. No plate full of pasta. No double portions of cooked oatmeal with sugar added for breakfast or a snack. No sugar added to my 1c of frozen berries. No David's organic bread with butter and jam. No bananas or apples. No almonds.

I did finish the book I was reading about a family of four taking a year off from any kind of sugar, with a few days scattered where they could cheat on that plan. Bottom line that after that year they returned to eating foods with sugar in it but at the same time they stayed away from a lot of the foods that contain sugar, especially fructose. Fresh fruit is almost all fructose but with the fiber and micronutrients the fruit has, she said that would balance out the fructose and it would be okay to eat fresh fruit. But they did not and no longer drink any kind of fruit juice.

She found that using dextrose was a great healthy substitute for sugar when she baked cookies, cakes or pies. She did have some good recipes at the end of her book. I will not be so strict but at the same time I will not be eating french fries with ketchup or even plain french fries. I have been craving burritos lately though.  :)

As you will see, Stella decided the longer she walked, climbing that 47' of elevation, the path was getting wetter and she didn't like getting her paws wet. She spent most of the walk next to the path but not on the path after this next photo.

After finishing that book about no sugar, I went back to reading the 600+ page book about Steve Jobs. It was past midnight but I was still wide awake and didn't want to watch tv. It's a long read basically with lots of information and a smaller font so I am only up to his senior year in high school. It was amazing what he was doing with electronics while growing up.

Stella had a little energy this morning. It was a very warm 31° this morning with no wind and a high of 43° by this afternoon. I hope to get some photos of Heidi this afternoon since she has been hibernating the past few days after the temperatures dropped into the 30's.

While she sits in the same spot every walk to scratch herself, I try to get as far in front of her as possible with hopes of getting some photos of her running. No running today though, just a little trot that turned into a walk.

Still maintaining her walk just to the side of the path.

At the bottom of the very gradual hill, the bath feels dryer, so she moved back on it to finish out the walk. As you can see she isn't in a hurry to get home. She is never in a hurry unless she is being fed breakfast, then she sprints around the Mini Cooper from the field, to come back inside.

When I told her "I have to go buy dog food", she stopped and looked at me. I had said that magic word that always gets a response from her ... "food".

I kept reminding her I had "to go" and that is one of two "go's" she will respond to ... when I tell her I have to go buy dog food or I have to buy groceries, lately when she hears that she will go straight to the bedroom and lies on the floor waiting for me to shut the door. I like that habit and I hope she keeps that one.

Today I only shut the door and did not use the cord to tie between door knobs to prevent her from breaking out of the bedroom and escaping. When I returned from the dog food purchase, the bedroom door was still shut and the door knob on the inside was dry ... so she had not tried to open the bedroom door while I was gone.

Looking at my blogs a year ago, we had about as much rain as we have had this year. A couple of inches over our average but the floods of a few weeks ago were taking place now in 2018. The field to the south of me was completely under water. So some things never change. I still think we have had a pretty mild winter here in 'the tropics' this year.

After updating all of my spreadsheets this morning because some of them are updated monthly on the 1st of every month, I see that I am going to have to do some driving this summer. Otherwise at my current pace I will drive less than 3,000 miles for the year.

I saw an interview last night on tv with a scientist that had studied windmills and solar panels for the main source of energy. He was involved with the $150 billion dollar investment that Obama passed out to study those two possible energy sources a few years ago. This scientist said the same thing an engineer at work told me 6 years ago when I asked him about all the windmills I had seen up by Lafayette IN near I-65 and Hwy 431.

Neither solar panels or windmills are efficient enough to supply the USA with full-time energy. He was the second scientist I have heard this month say, "even if the solar panels were efficient enough, there is not enough available land in the USA to build the solar panel farms needed to produce the electricity required by the country." On average the sun shines and the wind blows only 40% of the time across the USA. That percentage is an overall average.

I read something very interesting this morning and I will link that article here. It explained why all of a sudden Michael Cohen has turned against Donald Trump. The reason is something we have not heard on the news or in the online news but it is not surprising. Read through the whole article.

Along with my change in diet, weight and size of my stomach I have been completing a lot of my Mahjong games under 3 minutes. For those games that I don't, I am still completing them between 3:15 and 3:45.  There are a few games that I cannot get any lower than they are, in the three minute fifty seconds range. It just shows you how exciting some of my afternoons are. My goal is to get all 160 games finished under 3 minutes. When I started a few years ago I was trying to get them under 7 minutes.

I am proclaiming right now, my 2019 "to do" list will be the #2 priority this spring and summer, right behind the hounds at #1. So as a warning, my blog posts will most likely be posted around 8pm eastern time once the weather warms up for me to be outside working.

I see I am going to get my junk mail today in the mail from what I see on the USPS email they send. They scan what they are going to deliver. Most of the time I mark my name and address out with a black permanent marker and toss it in the recycling bin but one of them I will call about.

It's a new internet service being offered in my area. I'll find out if they service my location, many offers do not. This offer is unlimited data, faster download speeds and ~$60 cheaper per month. That sounds great to me. That would almost be good enough to pay the hefty fee to break my contract with HughesNet Gen 5 Satellite service.

Well that is it for this morning. I'll hopefully post some  photos of Heidi's day later tonight.

It's warming up and sunny this morning in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Weirdness & Snow

Here is another way of showing you just how fast the weather can change here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana. Bright and sunny yesterday but cold, it was not a day in April like it looked. Then this morning Stella and I started our walk under the largest snow flakes I had seen in a while. They say we might get an inch of snow by noon. So what about the floods? They will continue to move and eventually recede out of the fields ... maybe.

The problem is there is more rain on the way this afternoon and all night tonight. It's times like these that I am glad we live high on a hill. After all that  really is an 'official' floodplain just across the highway. Of course the site I bookmarked a long time ago, where I could find any floodplain by location, I can't find.

I was going to walk again Saturday afternoon, let Heidi spend more time outside, and blog again but right after these photos were taken the "weirdness" hit me like a ton of bricks. My whole life I have had cold in my eyes when I get them. I had that feeling you might recognize ... it feels like you have a cold coming on but don't want to acknowledge it, hoping it will go away. Yet, you know that what you are feeling is cold symptoms.

It didn't go away at first. I tried to read but my right eye was full of tears and kept running. My sinuses were running full steam ahead. Stella was howling and whining each time I sneezed. It certainly felt like a head cold was coming on. I had not be around people for days, almost a week, so where did I get the germs from?

I did my old stand by when I'm desperate and need relief ... I took my small jar of Vick's Vapor Rub and put that on each side of my nose and under my right eye. That stuff works wonders in times of cold symptoms. Plan B was going to be a hot cup of tea but I wanted to see if the Vick's would work first. Since I was even having a hard time watching the basketball games on tv ... I headed to bed. Maybe a short siesta with a lot of Vick's Vapor Rub would knock out the cold that was trying to overtake my eyes.

A couple of hours later as reality came back into focus ... letting the hounds outside, I noticed that feeling of cold activity around my right eye and my sinuses was gone!! Could it be true? I'd find out within the next few hours it was true. Plus Sunday morning confirmed I did not have a cold nor did I have one attempting to take over my life for the next 5-7 days.

I rarely get sick but when I do, it's not a favorite activity and I can't remember if I blog during those times or not. I'd have to look at my old blog to see what happened last winter when I was really sick for about four days

If you are not a sports fan than this next bit of commentary will not mean much but if you are, what do you think of another 'pro' football league? Their first game was last night and they will play once per week until the end of April. By that time MLB will have finished the first month of their 2019 season.

I looked up the league's website early last night and read about what it was all about. Years ago they tried the XFL but for me there were too many gimmicks and I didn't watch after a few minutes of their first game. Last night I watched the whole game and enjoyed it.

I like the three major rule differences than the NFL although the owner, the coaches and players are all NFL based in some way. Even the announcers were the same as I would see on CBS every Sunday this past NFL season.

For football addicts like me, the new AAF is fantastic. For the players, coaches, or referees that have dreams of playing in or getting back to the NFL, the league is a great idea. So what were the three rules that were different from the NFL besides HOW FAST THE GAME WAS PLAYED ????

No kickoffs ... for safety reasons based on NFL stats. Teams started at their 25 yard line, where they would start in the NFL if a fair catch was signaled.

No extra point kicks ... every point after the TD had to be a two point conversion, there were not any successful in the game I watched.

A shorter play clock ... 35 seconds between plays instead or 40 minutes. OR ... the 15 minute halftime. THE BIGGEST CHANGE .... those damn commercials. This AAF League had no more than two and most of the time only one commercial before getting back to the action. They reached their goal of having the game over in less than three hours instead of the NFL games that come close to 4 and are always longer than 3-1/2 hours.

Anyway, the concept is good. Their 5-10 year goals are good. All the players are paid the exact same salary and not by position or fame. Season tickets are only $75 league wide. You can't even buy a good seat in the NFL games at that price.

They do NOT plan nor want to be a replacement to the NFL like many other old disolved leagues tried. They want to be the NFL minor league system, like MLB has. It's all good and I'll tune in again today and tonight at 4pm and 8pm Eastern to watch more AAF League football.

Once again Stella fooled me. She was "path oriented" this morning. She veered, snooped and sniffed a little but not a lot. I think she was enjoying the snow flakes as she walked. Where Sadie would jump and try to eat snow flakes, Stella showed no signs of doing that. She 'pranced' on the path with the snow in her eyes.

With today's forecast of a mixture of rain/snow that will keep me off the roads. The Mini Countryman is very good in the snow but I have no 'need' to go anywhere and why put the salt/sand base under and on the sides of my car. I just heard another snow plow go by laying down that exact mixture on the highway to get their ice melting base set up.

As we walked back into the yard, the highway already was covered with this light snow mixture but it looked slick.

I'll let the photos tell the story of our walk this morning. Or I could ramble between them I guess.

The dingbat AOC's advisor has already been caught lying online about the Green New Deal. They were trying to backtrack what the deal actually said and attempted to put up a revised version showing economic support instead of tearing it apart. I am still amazed that is what we are looking at for the Democratic agenda prior to the next election.

I have an open mind on presidential candidates and always have but I'll tell you, as each one announces their candidacy I just shake my head and wonder "is that the best you can come up with?"

Will society ever get back to normal or what I think of as normal ... or do we just bury our heads in the sand with hopes it will get better or go away, like my head cold?

Trump haters have to hate this headline this morning:  "The AOC-ization of the democrats boots Trump in 2020." I couldn't agree more. Will they give Howard Schultz a chance? Will Bernie's followers make it happen this time? Will Hillary crawl out of her vodka bottle soon enough to declare she is running again? Can you tell me a legitimate Democratic candidate for 2020 .... give me some names.

That light glove has kept my hands warm all winter, even when the temps dropped to the low teens. Last year I have worn ski gloves when it got that cold but with ski gloves on I cannot use the smaller Canon G9 X but can use the Nikon D3200.

While Stella sat and scratched in the same place she does every morning on the walk, I got as far in front of her as I could, hoping I could catch her running. She almost started running hard to catch me but stopped as fast as she started.

I just had that strange numbness feeling across my left collarbone happen again. The same feeling as if you would hit your crazy bone near your elbow. Then it goes away, never lasting too long. Glancing at my Apple Watch during those times, my pulse is 58 bpm. I think all I need is a good chiropractic neck adjustment.

This was about as close as I could get to show you just how a bloodhound tracks scent on the ground. She does not make the sound with her jowls like Sadie and Bertha did but she keeps her nose as close to the ground as possible while she walks.

I saw no deer tracks this morning of any kind.

With having clear eyes and sinuses this morning I will be able to get a little reading in today. The book titled The Deep State is a really good book. It does NOT lean toward a Trump supporter type of book but has opened the vaults showing just how corrupt the government is as a whole. Many things I've read I already knew. It confirms Obama's administration was the most corrupt in history, beating Nixon.

I am thinking of lighting my burn pile on fire this winter instead of waiting until spring. I normally do it in the fall but this year my second 50' water hose had a hole in it so I could not extend the hose system long enough to reach the burn pile to use as a safety measure. This time of year there might be less of a chance of the fire spreading into the woods with the ground covered by dead leaves.

I see where AT&T is trying to move in front of the 5G movement with false advertising. Sprint is now suing them for that exact thing. I was told by a phone sales store rep in December that my iPhone 8+ will not work with 5G capability. I've read a little about it but no matter what I am not going to upgrade my phone just for 5G capability.

(Heidi's up and awake)

With all that the Apple Watch does, and does well, in my short 5 weeks of using it I would get rid of my iPhone if I did not need it to work with the Watch for updates and my wifi connection. With the Canon G9 X taking the same high quality photos in low light like the iPhone does, I rarely take photos with the phone anymore.

I plan on keeping the 8+ until Apple no longer supports it with iOS updates years from now ... but ... never say never.  :)

It was just announced online that "border talks have broken down" with just a few days to go before Congress passes a signed bill to the President. Why is that not a surprise? Congress is about as worthless as a soup sandwich. For so many intelligent men and women, elected by the people ... most are dumbasses with political agendas.

The word 'compromise' is not in either party's dictionary.

When I heard it was snowing in the Seattle area the other day I was reminded of my first or second November living on Whidbey Island. Normally they might get an inch or two of snow annually, sometimes never, sometimes just a dusting. But that one November day it started snowing and didn't stop until 24 hours later, ending up with 27" on the ground.

The Island Country transportation department did not have one snow plow to clear the roads. They never needed one. So to my friends out in Seattle ... enjoy it ... drive safe ... and head for the ski slopes at Stevens Pass and have fun ... call in sick to work and keep skiing. Based on personal experience you will survive doing that. :)

Well my train of thought is gone .. typical crap.

The snow has stopped, the highway is clear, it's a quiet Sunday and another great winter day here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.