We Are Back To Blogging Publicly

I cannot really go into why we are back blogging publicly since it's too in depth to explain, would take too many pages and I still might not have all the answers to the question 'why' ... but here we are back to blogging publicly with plans to continue. I am not sure about the frequency though but this is a start. I will say before I get started that all the hounds are doing fantastic and I think you will see that Sadie has not changed, Stella has gained all of her lost weight back as has Heidi. These photos were taken this morning, and Heidi's were taken in the past 10 days as she prepares for wintertime hibernation.

I can't say there are any drastic news announcements since our daily activity is about the same. The weather is trying to stay cool but it's still humid most days. We get 2-3 walks in per day yet Heidi is back to boycotting any kind of activity that takes that long to complete the walk. She is not into counting how many steps she takes besides from her couch to her food dish.

Sadie as usual leads most of the walks while I have been letting Stella do her own walk, letting her go where she wants as Sadie and I pick her up on our way back. As far as deer go ... their noses need calibrated. Last Thursday on our afternoon walk, with both of their noses to the ground I heard tree limbs breaking only to see as I glanced into the woods a large deer turning and heading away from us down into the gully.

The hounds never knew how close the one deer was to them.

ATV traffic has continued but mostly only one neighbor riding late afternoon after school. I have a feeling that he has mounted some new field cameras that he checks daily.

I feel really good about Stella regaining her lost weight. I think if you look at them from the side it is a little hard to tell which is Sadie and Stella ... only the collar shows it's Stella. Nothing has changed since February as far as kind of dog food and not too much of an increase in quantity.

I can't say that I have finished and marked off many things off of my 'to do' list since we last blogged on the Wordpress blog sometime early September. When I went to reconstruct this blog, evidently I did not do a backup of that Wordpress blog that I was using as my main blog from August 1st until the middle of September.

I did have a backup .xml file of my old Blogger blog that was dated September 15 ... yet that was only posts, comments and pages ... not the template nor settings. So I have tried to rebuild the template into the same Blogger blog I had before deleting it. I'll slowly be making more adjustments, getting it as close to the old format as possible. I have added the Blog List with as many blogs as I can remember that I was following. I'll more of them as I find their url's or remember them.

A few weeks ago they removed those 8 rolls of hay that were parked in back of the field. Sadie is checkout those parking spaces in this photo. There is never a walk, no matter how many per day where she searches and explores most of the field.

While we were walking along the back of the field, Stella was way behind us ... in the middle of the lower part of the field.

After a couple of days of rain and overcast skies, you can see we are not having a lot of fall colors yet.

We have an alternate path on the way back now. I might have mentioned before, but it angles toward my north property pole. Luckily today when I called Stella's name, she turned around and headed our way to actually walk with us back to the yard.

She went from this pose of ignoring me to trotting into the yard without me calling her. I was facing the opposite direction when she ran past me ....

For the first time in 8 months ... she played, and wrestled with Sadie. Sadie may have felt it was time because as soon as Stella's front paws hit the yard Sadie rushed at her wanting to play. Stella returned the favor and they were off for a short period of time. I had to look back through the blog 'topics' of "Bloodhounds Playing" to see the last time I had blogged about her wrestling ... it was in February.

The high winds from last night cleaned up a lot of the yard that was full of leaves, although very few have fallen from the trees.

With my old Central Air Conditioner going on the repair list during the hottest days a few weeks ago ... I had to add a small window AC for my computer room. That small air conditioner pumped out more cold air than my older central air unit. Estimates are telling me it's around $3,000 for replacement. I'll have the fall and winter's cooler temps to come up with my next plan before next summer.

Since I was up too late last night watching college football from the west coast .. we woke up late and the hounds were more than excited to stop playing when they heard the question "do you want to eat" ... they stopped immediately and ran to the door of the house.

These next three pictures of Heidi were taken the past 7-10 days. She enjoys time outside by herself and will spend almost 1 hour outside before she stands in front of the door to let her know she is reading to come back inside. She never barks to let me know but knows that I am checking on her to see where she's at.

I have not taken her over to the vet to get her weighed but the times I have lifted her into the FJ, she 'feels' like 45 pounds, her normal weight from 2015.

With a lack of sleep, another full day of NFL football and trying to rebuild this blog ... I'm a little tired. I'll add more information from the 3-4 weeks we were offline (blogs deleted) but really ... you didn't miss much ... daily routine stays the same.

All is good for all of us here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

More Rain On The Way

This small bird did not mind Stella being about 5' away from her and Stella didn't mind the bird being on her driveway. Luckily Sadie was out in the field eliminating any chances of a bird chase.

It doesn't look good for this field with another inch of rain predicted by the end of this afternoon and even more tomorrow. Luckily the yard was dry enough to mow yesterday and much earlier than planned. I was finished by 1:30pm and spent the rest of the afternoon with ice tea and a good book.

I don't know, maybe it's because my 'free' data period has changed with the move to HughesNet to the hours between 2am - 8am. I don't have unlimited data like I did with Exede's 'free' period which took place between midnight and 5am but I do get an additional 50Gb of data per month. Whatever the reason, lately I've been asleep before midnight and up and moving by 6:30am.

With that earlier than normal wake up time, Sadie was at my desk an hour earlier this morning wanting her morning walk. Or maybe she knew the weather forecast. Stella was still asleep and Heidi is never walking that early nor with the field grass that wet. We took off a little past 8am.

Sadie took off right from the start of the walk. She wasn't waiting for me or Stella today. With it being this early, the field was extremely wet and my hiking boots were soaked only a short distance into the field.

It was nice to see Stella trotting past me up and heading up the path. It might be just my wishful thinking but I can tell a difference this week on top of her back and between her shoulders, where it is filling in where her spine and shoulder blades are not as visible as before, if at all.

She was in continues motion this morning with her nose to the ground all the way around the first turn. She only stopped once for less than a minute and moved on.

Sadie was the same way. Where she had stopped a few days ago deep in the green bushes after the first turn, she didn't today. She was on that deer path with her nose to the ground locked in.

Then they both picked up something pretty strong and they were off ... running full speed around the far right corner. I wasn't able to catch them on camera until after they made the turn.

With them moving this fast, I was concerned they were heading into the gully or back into those woods, which also drops in a steep drop off.

You have to wonder just how strong that scent is for them to take off like that and then imagine what they are thinking it is. From what I have read in different books, all of this scent tracking they do is their way of identifying what and who has been in the area.

Sadie went toward the gully and stopped, only to look back at me to see if I was coming after her. She did not move from that spot. She had found something to eat.

Stella headed the opposite direction, with both of them chowing down on some natural protein.

This morning I wanted to see what they would do if I did not go after them. As usual, once Sadie realized that I was walking away she came running full-speed to catch me.

She never stopped running and blew by me to the back edge of the field.

Stella was not moving. I thought briefly that it might be one of those days where I walk all the way home and then drive the Mini Countryman back to this location to have her run back to the house, following the car. I did that last year with the Toyota FJ.

I kept walking and used the zoom lens at 200mm to look through the view finder to keep track of her. You can barely see her in the center of the picture.

This is shot at 50mm, which is the view that my eyes are looking at. She is still there in the center of the picture next to the edge of the woods. Sadie was looking in that direction waiting for me to give her the command to "go get Stella" but I wanted to keep walking and see if Stella would run full-speed to catch us.

Sadie and I had made the last turn home and when I glanced over I didn't see Stella. I started my slow walk in that direction calling her name. It was then I saw her at the edge of the field and woods behind the tall grass.

The three pictures I took of that walk and finding her were not in focus ... so this picture shows where she thinks she is going to continue the walk in the normal direction instead of walking back with me to the path we were on.

Again, it wasn't warm this morning, mid 40's and as you can see that rain is coming from the southwest. Radar was showing the storm front was about 200 miles away when we started the walk.

That is Stella in the lead and her sly way of quietly sneaking off to the right toward the neighbor's woods as if I cannot see her. She actually thinks every time that she is going to get away with it. She seems to like the words "over here" and returns to the path when I say that to her.

Before going inside Sadie needed to checkout my lawn mowing from yesterday, one more time.

Stella slowly returned to the yard following every inch of the path and not veering off. She was back to sleep behind my desk chair within minutes after coming inside.

I am now on the clock so to speak with HughesNet. I'll still be using my Excel spreadsheet to log in my daily data use. With the graph I inserted I can tell if I am using too much data as the month progresses. After their 20 days of free data for new customers, I will get my full allotment of 20Gb for the last 10 days of my billing period.

Their webpage that shows my data is much better than I had with Exede and shows the balances on my monthly allotment and the 50Gb's I get every month between 2am-8am. It also tells me how many days/hours/minutes before the next reset.

As it gets darker outside as I type this, it looks like it will be another afternoon inside reading while the rain pours outside. It's typical spring weather with a good chance of rain every day until Sunday and then six days of nice sunshine.

I have finalized my 'to do' list on a Word Document and a lot of items will be completed once the temperature are up in the 70's. Nothing hard but time consuming, regular annual maintenance that goes with house ownership.

I am adding a new blog to the sidebar, from an online friend of mine. Who would have ever thought of pelicans spending time in Minnesota while it's still cold, but here they are ... click here.

I have realized that most of the things I put off doing around here isn't really procrastination like I thought. I looked back through my blog and found that I like doing the 'to do' items when it's hot weather day after day. The hotter the better. That's my excuse and I am sticking to it.

Dark and dreary this morning in 'the tropics' of southern Indiana.

What's Wrong With Stella ??

One of the features of Facebook and Google Photos is, they will automatically show you a picture from 1 year ago, sometimes 3 years and even 5 years ago. It's nice to look back at those pictures most of the time, other times not so much.

As long as the pictures are on file, they will remind me with pictures of Winston and other past hounds that have passed on. In Stella's case, today's Facebook reminder showed me just how much different her health was just one year ago today.

I started noticing a change in her coat last December along with a loss of weight. Her ribs were starting to show. She was always near the color of Sadie and same texture of hair. Except on her lower tail was a coarse black and tan. In the middle of December her overall coat started changing to the that coarse texture with a few black hairs showing up.

She also started scratching a lot, which was something she never did. What was more concerning to me was her loss of weight. Nothing had changed in her diet, lifestyle or her appetite. She howls daily at lunch time when it's time to eat. She still is a happy go lucky personality ... but two things have been different.

The two pictures of her running were taken one year ago today. That is one thing she no longer does and she use to LOVE to run ... she ran every chance she got. The picture below is from this morning's walk and is the new normal for her. She might trot at times but she never runs like before.

The second thing she stopped doing these past four months is playing with Sadie. When cabin fever would hit in the winter, she would nudge Sadie to see if a wrestling match was in order. Not this winter nor this spring so far.

There is a lot of difference in her energy level in one years time. Sure, she is getting older and will be 8 years old this July but I have never had a basset hound nor a bloodhound change their activity this much just because they are getting older.

The picture above is one year ago, the one below was taken this morning. She does more of this slow walking than anything else.

Again, a year ago her color was a lot like Sadie's and she was much more muscular. At times it was hard to tell them apart.

The picture below was take last week, even after showing signs that she is gaining her weight back slowly but surely. If it wasn't the weight loss, I'd think that she was only having old age issues with her joints hurting, which is part of being a large breed.

With the weight loss starting in the middle of December (confirmed by photos) I decided it was just not a joint problem. With her annual check up not due until August, I didn't wait and took her in to see the vet. They did blood work ... all levels normal. No sign of worms, nor heart worms.

They gave her some antibiotics and approved of the joint supplement I had bought online. So far, after a little more than a month, I've seen no changes except for the slight weight gain. She has not ran full speed but has trotted a little more since the weather is warmer.

With the bloodhound normal expression it is hard at times to tell if they are felling bad in some way. Like any other dog, they don't let on if they are in a lot of pain. They mask it quite well.

I will keep you posted with any updates but I'll admit I am and have been concerned with the changes in her.