The Hounds Really Enjoy The Cut Field

I have to admit the daily hound walks are much more enjoyable with the field cut. I no longer get wet from my knees to my feet from heavy morning dew. The hounds are easier to keep track of while they have more room to roam and I have not found one tick on me after a walk since the field was cut.

When the field was taller I would find 3-5 ticks on me after each walk. The one dose of NexGard I gave the hounds in April works so well I have not found any ticks, dead or alive, on the hounds.

Stella trotted out with Sadie into the field but it wasn't long before she was at her own pace and on her own schedule. She had the freedom to do whatever she wanted, go where she wanted and supplement her diet with anything she found.

Sadie started tracking scent as soon as she hit the field and ever stopped.

You can see the differences in interest between Stella and Sadie ... I continued to walk along my path at my normal pace.

As Sadie sprinted along the edge of the field, she was headed for the far right corner. Stella was headed back to a couple of spots that were her favorites the past couple of weeks.

No sparrows to chase today but Sadie had strong scents to chase.

Back to the corner to check out the deer scent. I thought she might head into that wooded area but instead she came sprinting to catch up with me on the back edge of the field.

As you can see, Stella never moved.

As I was on my way back home, I deviated my walk to go over and let Stella it was time to head home. She joined up with Sadie and made the slow trek back to the yard.

The weatherman said that hot temps and high humidity were on the way later today. I am not really looking forward to that change and I have become quite spoiled by the 'perfect' weather this past week.

The rain that was in the forecast on Sunday never showed up and keeps moving out a couple of days further into the week.

This is the only flower that I have see that survived the cutting and baling of hay.

Heidi finally made her appearance after her lunch. She found a good spot to relax while Sadie and Stella did a little exploring.

Stella wasn't sure if she was going to join Sadie. She really liked the strong breeze from the SW bring those temperatures closer to 80°. It looks like she is continuing to gain weight.

This pretty close to where Heidi stayed the other day while Sadie, Stella and I went for a walk. She doesn't seem to energetic lately but I let her do whatever she wants. If she wants to come with us, she will.

The thing about the field being cut, some of those stems from the wild bushes are still pretty stiff and they make a great back scratcher. Sadie has one daily every since they cut the field.

What a difference a year makes in Heidi'd weight. I don't think she was this big when I brought her home 6 years ago.

Sadie was ready for a walk but it was too soon after their lunch. I try to wait after every meal before they get any kind of exercise. That is suppose to help in preventing bloat. I've been very fortunate not having my big chested bloodhounds go through that in past years.

By the time I finished cooking I was either going to have a late lunch or an early supper. It wasn't much, just brown rice and steamed broccoli and carrots. I added a splash of Tamari sauce.

Even I felt like getting out of the house some more on such a nice day, so we headed out for a mid-afternoon walk. This way they will stay quiet and sleep while I sit outside and read books.

Stella let me know without saying a word that it was hotter today than it had been all week. We are not close but the temps are headed back to the high 80's by tomorrow. We will still walk but will wait later in the afternoon, early evening for our 2nd or 3rd walk of the day.

Stella was ready to get back inside to sleep ... Sadie had more things to look at but followed both of us into the house.

It will be another night of watching some Reds baseball and a little reading. Nothing exciting going on here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

The Hounds Stayed Cool Inside

I never did sleep last night. I tried but it wasn't going to happen. Even the hounds woke up earlier then normal when they heard me pouring their breakfast kibble into their stainless steel bowls.

I shut the computer off as planned at 5am with some confusion about Google Photos. I have yet to find the answer on their help forum, although I have learned a lot of good information from that help forum.

Today was one of those days where the winds are higher but they are blowing warm air, humidity was thicker than butter and the energy level for the hounds and I started out low for the month. Yes, I did finally sleep about 5 hours and feel great.

Earlier in the day and afternoon, with a few chances to take off on a walk, Sadie and Stella did not do much more than these two photos show and before they knew it, the day was almost over.

By 6pm the temps were about the same, wind the same but it felt cooler as we stepped outside. We headed out for a walk after all.

There was a lot of butterfly activity today and I'll scatter those photos and of the hounds out in my discussion of Google Photos.

The migration to Google Photos is moving right along but at times I have some real 'head scratching' questions ... just weird stuff. It was a few minutes after midnight when I started the upload of Sadie's folder the had 4, 775 photos. It finished in 2 hours and 40 minutes but that was when the confusion for the night started. The Google program cut out about 800 duplicates it recognized that were already in the system.

Normally after the upload is complete, it would ask whether I wanted to add the photos to a folder but since there were too many it just had an arrow on the small box to view all of the uploaded photos. When I clicked that arrow I arrived at a blank white screen with a spinning arrow telling me it was loading the photos.

With that many I knew it might take a while. After an hour ... no photos. As a test I did a small upload of 65 photos and it worked, they showed up and I moved them into their new album. Two hours later, no photos of the 4,000 that I had uploaded.

Yet, when I clicked a link in the uploader box "view uploaded photos" they were there and I was able to move them into Sadie's album. It didn't go that smooth though due to my lack of knowledge that each album has a limit of 2,000 photos. I guess that is why it kept telling me "trouble with adding photos to album" as I tried time and time again.

Google Search proved to be my best friend sometime around 4am, telling me ... nope ... you have hit the limit of 2,000 and need a new album.

The confusion didn't stop there. Over on my blog I had taken the "RVs" out of my blog title and noticed while reading some blogs on my list that my blog no longer showed up on their list. Strange. Did the blog title change do that ... it shouldn't.

Then I looked at my blog list and noticed something weird that is still there today .... a lot of the blogs I follow were moved to the very bottom of the list, without that little snippet telling us how long ago that blog's post was written. So I went back to the three blogs I looked at, scrolled to the bottom and there I was along with other blogs with current posts, no date of our last post anywhere. Even my WordPress blog was moved to the very bottom of my own blog list and I made a post just last night.

I continued to load smaller files into Google Photos. Those images showed up as they should and were moved into their own album. So I basically have all of those updated and set up the way I want. Stella's upload is tonight with over 6,000 photos and should take less than 4 hours.

You might be asking "what's the rush"???  There isn't one but I'm not wired like that. When I start a project my "workaholic" tendencies come out, along with some other crazy issues I don't know about ... and I work until it is finished. Almost in an obsessed state of mind.

I will say the Google Photo automatic update worked like magic today. I have found a pretty simple way of getting my daily photos from my camera card, through Apple Photos on my hard drive, exported to a folder on my desktop. As soon as 14 photos hit that folder on my computer desktop by my manual effort ... Google Photos updated those 14 photos to my saved data base "in the cloud".

It does not take that much time to move them to albums on Google Photos and is the same process I use on Apple Photos on the computer.

I confused someone and myself on using Flickr. I mentioned that I had read they were now requiring a paid membership to use their desktop uploader. What I failed to see when I read that info was the words "auto uploader". (I know the period needs to be inside the quotation but it looks better the way I do it ... lol)

So I could have used Flickr for all of this backup but that is not the main reason I started using Google Photos. It works with my iPhone and will with any smart phone, automatically uploading photos from your phone and then deleting them on the phone to free up hard drive space.

I have also noticed some processes are easier to do on Google Photos compared to Flickr.

I wonder how much cheaper my iPhone 6S would have been today if I had waited a week or so? With Apple releasing their new iPhone 7 today, I hate to see what the 6S is selling for and will not look. It was also announced today that the  6S model is the most popular smart phone in the world.

As I started to stepped inside the house after our walk, I thought I saw a little movement in the small nest in the corner of the carport. It looks like I am going to have to back the Z4 out of his parking space, shake my can of wasp killer and let'er rip.

A pretty enjoyable day today. I uploaded some photos, tested some stuff on Google Photos and saw more features as I played around. With over 10,000 photos loaded into my account, I did a search for "chevy", hoping to see photos of my 1994 and then I could move it into it's own album. The Google Photos search was so detailed that it pulled up every photo I had with a Chevy in it.

What was interesting, there were photos of my Toyota FJ show up but they were photos I had downloaded from the car dealer when I was thinking about buying it in 2014 ... but in the background were Chevy trucks parked on the car lot for sale.

How's that for a search?

Rain is predicted for the next three days here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

It Was A Scorcher Today

By the time I took the camera outside it was mid-day and HOT!!! That hot air hit me as soon as I stepped outside, telling me not much was going to get done today.

I was wrong.

The front yard needed mowing. It had been 9 days since I cut it last but I did the backyard the other night because it needed it and rain was predicted within that night or the next day. I also raised the mower blade back up one level higher ... my best estimate tells me it cuts at 3", the recommended height for my location and grass by Scott's Lawn Care.

It was near 2pm when I decided to drag everything out of the shed. What you see there is everything I take out of the shed that is stored around the mower, so the mower can roll out. The shed is only a little over 22" wide, but it all fits. Right before the photo was taken Stella was actually laying down about where she is standing ... taking a Sunday nap.

I decided today to let the bloodhounds roam while I cut the front yard. It was hot but I figured if it was that bad for them, they would be at the door wanting back inside. Instead they both disappeared into the field that they love to roam on their own. They were gone the whole time it took to mow the front yard.

In a little over 30 minutes I had finished the front yard, cut a little higher this week so there were no brown spots where the grass was cut too short last time. Sadie and Stella were standing at the corner of the house about the time I finished ... panting, tongues hanging out, wanting to go inside.

Some time last night in between football games the urge to moved back to an iPhone from my LG flip phone hit me, hard enough to look at Best Buy and Verizon websites for prices. I found out they have the same pricing and deals going on. Those deals and pricing were good enough to make the thought of upgrading again pretty strong.

We all came outside around 5:30pm. I was thinking we might take a walk but it was still really really hot and none of the hounds seemed too interested in being outside very long. After I took the photo of Heidi, they all "trotted" to the door to be let back inside.

This weekend brought a lot of dead, BROWN, leaves down to the ground. It's that time of year.

Heidi took a look around but was not interested in moving to the yard ... she likes the AC with the added feature of a fan blowing on her. How do I know that????  She always moves to sleep in front of a fan if I have one turned on.

Here are the iPhone prices that have me very very tempted to upgrade. I don't mind a two year contract, even though they got rid of them ... because I don't plan to change from Verizon.

So an iPhone 5 SE is $1.....ONE DOLLAR ... plus a 2 year contract, $55 per month for one line and 2Gb. Since I wifi off of my home internet, the 2Gb is plenty for me. I survived on 1Gb before.

An iPhone 6s is $49.95 .... total cost ... plus a 2 year contract, the same $55 monthly fee for one line.

Those are not bad deals.

In the meantime, it is still 93° and a heat index of 113° at 6pm here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.