Stella Has An Appointment

It wasn't easy but as of yesterday Stella has an appointment, but the earliest she can be seen is June 15th a week from today. I had two vets at the top of my list. I called them as soon as they opened and was told "we are not accepting new clients". Hmmmm, I better start looking. So I went to search for Vets in Evansville Indiana and started at the top of the list on Yelp. 13 calls in a row told me the same thing ... "we are not accepting new clients". A town of 120,000 people, more than 14 vets in the area and not one of them accepting new clients ????

Stella - VWs - Landscaping

I hope to get Stella into the vet on Monday when I call. She is now limping with every step she takes, even on her front legs. Some think she has arthritis. Feeling her stomach I fear she also has a tumor. I have been giving her this supplement for years for her hips. I could see a major difference when I started but now wonder if it makes any difference at all. Her smiles are normal, she wags her tail, her appetite is normal and water intake. One day in the backyard grass she even tried trotting a short distance. One of the vets at the new place I plan on taking all of my dogs, specializes in older dogs with these types of issues and treating with alternative methods. I don't want her to spend the rest of her life living on prednisone. 

Stella Seems Back To Normal

For the second morning in a row Stella is acting normal. She has no signs of of pain getting up and down off the couch or the bed. She likes to take afternoon siestas in the middle of my bed, especially with direct sunlight through the windows. She stays there when I am away from the house on trips or shopping. She ran a little on this morning's walk, where it was a cold 38°. It's a busy day today so a lot of photos and little content.

Good Fall weather here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Stella Starts A New Week

With the cold temperatures settled in Stella has not officially named it winter yet. There are a few days next week she will be back in temperatures of the high 60's. In either kind of weather she is still the best 'beggar for food' that I have ever seen. She is quiet about it and that look you see in the above photo is her patented "I'd like to have that" look.
My curiosity increased enough today that I did a search on Google for the winter weather predictions here in 'the tropics'. I found sites that cut their detail into my zip code. All I will say is, it was good to see no temperatures in single digits. That is good enough for me.

Stella showed once again this morning that she continues to improve from last spring by running more, acting more like her old self inside and outside. I had planned again to let her do her own thing on this walk this morning and she was more than interested in keeping up with Sadie.

Even though ... Sadie was beginning to wonder if Stella and I were ever going to get started on this walk or not.

Once Stella saw how far Sadie was, who had disappeared around the first turn, she took off running to catch up. With Sadie out of view she obviously had found something very good, something that Stella could not ignore.

By the time I reach that first turn whenever the hounds have disappeared, only one of two things normally happened. They have stopped like they did this morning ... or they are running full speed toward the back of the field tracking a deer scent.

No deer this morning though. They had come and gone hours before we made it outside. I am beginning to wonder if the light ATV traffic has scared most of the deer away? I haven't seen one deer since the ATV traffic increased, although it does not happen every day.

I see where a few of the bloggers I follow are doing their annual migration to warmer temps in the Southwest. Some of them have already arrived. I've talked before that when I made the decision to give Stella a new home that my traveling plans would change drastically with two bloodhounds.

We made that trip to Colorado and Utah for a week in June 2015 but that was with two basset hounds and one bloodhound, Stella had not arrived yet. Big difference. It took some work with only two hands and three hounds but overall it was workable with two smaller basset hounds.

Yet Sadie did what any normal bloodhound would do when she smelled an animal near the tent. She dug so hard at the corner of my tent to get out sometime around 4am to see the antelope, it made a hole in the seem right above the floor.

The reason I know it was antelope that was driving her crazy, I saw more than five of them the next morning waving goodbye to us as we left our campsite. Sadie was loud enough trying to get out of the tent that she woke me up, along with Winston and Heidi.

With two large, strong bloodhounds, then Heidi ... I've always thought this field is the best place for them. I've tried walk Sadie and Stella before with two separate 6' standard leashes like I would have to traveling ... it's not possible once they find a scent that makes them take off running.

Stella is a good FJ rider but once she is outside the FJ in a different place than home (the vet) she gets quite skittish and tries to run away. She literally freaked out the last time I took her with me to buy dog food at T&T Feed & Seed.

Due to staying up late last night watching one of the wildest baseball games of the World Series, I see that my mind is all over the place writing this post. Sorry for all the misdirection but I really have no idea what to write about this morning.

So I think I'll stop babbling and post the photos I have left from this mornings walk.

I think this is about all of the fall colors we will get this year.

Haven't moved from the time I approached them, walked past them and made the final turn home. I had to walk back to tug at Stella's collar to get her to move back to the path with us.

They seemed to think it was another successful walk this morning as they trotted ahead. They prefer the alternate path home we started last month.

Stella was looking serious this morning as she finished her walk.

Sadie needed to check out one more thing before she walked into the yard.

Stella hears the St. Bernard barking at her from across the highway. So far in the 26 months I've had Stella, she has never ran across the highway to check out the huge dog barking at her.

Time to get warm, take a short morning nap and wait for lunch to be served.

The time has been flying with baseball, football and now college basketball being on tv almost every night of the week. I can still get a couple of things checked off of my 'to do' list before bad weather arrives. Otherwise, remaining items will be moved to the 2018 To Do list.

I now hear rain outside here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Stella Continues To Improve

With another late night (early morning hours) with MLB Playoff games, computer work and not being able to sleep ... once again our day started about 9am as I felt a wet bloodhound muzzle poking at my hand hanging over the side of the bed. It was Stella standing there letting me know she wanted her breakfast. Whenever Stella wants something or just stops by to say hi ... she pokes you with her nose.

So it was the normal routine that long time readers know ... coffee, internet reading update then the first hound walk of the day. Stella has been starting her walks lately with a nice snack of wet green grass at the edge of the field. Late afternoon yesterday as she and Sadie roamed the field while I walked around mashing down fresh mounds of grass developed by the mole traffic ... both hounds picked up a lot of these small burrs that are on every dead, dark brown weeds you see in my field pictures.

They even stick to my jeans sometimes as well as my fleece gloves when it gets colder. It's one of the hazards in the years they do not mow the field for the second time before winter. The hounds don't mind them but I am not a fan of pulling 3-7 of these out of each hound's coat after each of our 2-3 walk per day. No matter what, with perfect temps this morning at 61° we were off for the first walk of the day.

Stella was going to get all the freedom she wanted this morning but again she was more than happy to follow along with Sadie and I ... just as long as it was at her pace. When you see the excess skin slide down over her forehead she is in deep concentration trying to identify what her nose has picked up. No diet supplements today for either hound ... just straight pure scent tracking and identification.

It's good to see Stella back to her old self. She has not done the full-speed sprint she use to do but it's good enough just to see her have the ability to run faster than a trot. It's hard to think sometimes about how each hound is basically the same age at 8 and 9 years old. It's part of dog ownership but it's always hard to deal with old age issues when they happen.

With her ears flapping and going in directions that few breeds can match, it wasn't long before she ran by me with her non-intentional act of taking out my knee with a 'chop block' or 'clipping' that NFL players are penalized for. There is 7 acres of field around me and she has to run into me ... LOL

While the hounds headed west away from the woods and before the first turn ... I heard something running in the woods to the right of me, something big enough that was breaking tree limbs as they made their escape. Obviously the animal escaping had a better nose than the two hounds pictured below. Maybe they had programed their noses for only certain kinds of animals.

As I walked the normal path I noticed my jaw was not hurting this morning, just like Wednesday but I had the strangest feeling on my lower side of my lip ... on the right side ... same side as the pain on Tuesday. The lower right half of my lip felt like it was in the early stages of numbness after a dentist shooting you with a dose of Novocaine. How strange is that?

There was no need for me to march up into the far right corner of the field to get the hounds moving ... they were on a fairly fast pace along the back edge of the field. No deer in sight but they didn't know that. By the way they acted you would have thought their noses were only a few minutes behind the latest deer.

Sadie trotted though the taller grass.

You could tell she was on to something important and totally focused.

Same thing for Stella but she was gradually heading in a different direction as usual.

She trotted back to the larger path made by the ATV and I was almost certain she was going to try to escape right before my eyes. She hit that path, headed north and picked up her pace.

I had not said a word when she abruptly made a left turn on the path home and was joined by Sadie leading the sprint out in front of me, leaving me behind once again. The weather was so nice I wasn't running anywhere so I continued enjoying my walk.

The picture of this hound compared to last February or March is an amazing difference. No ribs are showing and her hip bones are not prominent, looking as if she was starving. The vet at the time thought she might be having problems processing the protein in her kibble and told me it would take a long time for her to regain the weight, if nothing else was wrong.

They were searching all the way up to the yard and Stella was going to get every last drop of her exploration this morning.

The only bright leaf colors I have seen are the trees right in my yard, just a few feet away from the property pole in the picture above.

I was going to wait to post this but with 21 images I thought I'd go ahead and post it now. I will be getting on the internet searching for a few things after this. I need to find out something about the lip numbness. Obviously somewhere a nerve is being touched on the right side of my face.

I need to search not only the internet but a Mac Forum for some issues a friend is having with her new iMac. She has things going on that I have never experienced before. Computers new or old are nice when they work but so frustrating when out of the blue they decide to ruin your day or night. I guess I am lucky since I have had very few problems with my computers since move from an Windows PC to Apple computer in October 2010.

With cool temps and bright sunshine, the yard I cut twice last week in two different directions on the same day ... is tall enough in spots to mow again. With me losing track of time with all the baseball and football games I watch, I did not know it was Thursday but could see it was the reason for the grass to be blowing in the wind after 6 days. The week has flown by.

I am headed for some self massage and heat treatment on my jaw by the way it feels. Nothing major, no pain but some tightness. I woke up in the middle of the night with the jaw bone hurting so who knows what was taking place while I was in a deep dream state with the strangest dreams I had in a while.

I had a friend tell me some things to do for my jaw. It was good to see that some of the things she (a PT) was suggesting I had done on my own on Tuesday night for no other reason than it relieved the pain I was feeling at the time.

Well I just felt a wet bloodhound nose nudge the back of my arm while I type this. Stella has obviously had a drink of water and now feels it's time for her lunch ... Sadie and Heidi are not hungry yet since both of them are sleeping a few minutes past noon.

I know it sounds like a broken record repeating myself ... but it's another beautiful day here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.