A Weekend Of Resting The Hip

This photo shows about all that happened over the weekend. I wanted to take some time off from walking to rest a little. I took more rest periods and siestas than I did walks. I figured a couple of days off would help the hip heal. No worries, there was no soreness or pain that dictated my decision. I just needed a break. Read books and watched a lot of football games.

Here are some photos scattered through Saturday and ends with two photos of Sunday's sunrise.

Again it was beautiful weather this weekend in the Wild West.

Strange Weather Strange Times

It has been a strange time since my last post. One thing that always changes besides the weather is life, sometimes with devastating news. As you will see in the photos taken over the span of time since our last post on March 15, the weather here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana has been wild and crazy. That continued this morning, but I have not gone outside yet to document the the light snow we had late last night on the 9th of April.

Over the 6 1/2 years I have blogged here the blog has changed from very personal thoughts during my RV research. Then it slowly migrated toward the hounds once I decided in June 2015 that traveling with just one bloodhound and two basset hounds would be too much to handle. At the same time I pulled in a lot of my personal thoughts or what was going on in life and just wrote about the hounds.

Some people can write about everything that is happening in their life, from traveling to depression, health issues, car issues etc. I cannot be that open on a public blog. So as many of you know or could tell over the past year or so most of the blogging has been about the hounds and less about me or what I am doing. It's just the way it is. You will have to fill in the gaps.

Even this morning I can't say if I will continue blogging or not. I am pretty sure I will no longer be blogging on a daily basis. I do know as the weather warms up my 'to do' list feels like it's a mile long and that doesn't give me a lot of computer time. I will just have to see what happens.

I will say that local tv weather experts were right in their forecasts. If they said it was going to rain non-stop for days and nights ... it did. A few times I had the feeling me might slide down the hill house and all or blow away from the strong winds. About the time the ground would be close to dry, it would snow. Dreams of spring weather were nowhere to be found and that stupid groundhog out in Pennsylvania was pretty accurate that winter would be extended this year.

Occasionally we do have some nice sunsets here. Yet, those sunsets that some of you post on your blogs out west are hard to beat. That wide open western sky is fantastic.

Not only were Sadie and Stella confused about the weather and why it was too wet or raining to take our daily walks ... this robin was also confused. The birds showed up normal time in the end of March, not knowing there was more snow on the way a week later.

Stella has been pretty good the past month as far as wondering off during our walks, then ignoring me. She has continued to stay in the general area while Sadie and I complete the walk and she actually walks slowly in our direction when I call her name as we return home.

A year ago she was skin and bones, looking sick ... this year she has gained all of her weight back, her coat is soft and thick. Maybe it's that 'natural protein' she enjoys eating.

Sadie runs whenever she gets the chance in the field. It doesn't matter how wet or saturated the ground is with the large amounts of rain we have had.

It happens every spring but rarely does it happen in March. From back in the field looking this direction you would think we have moved to lakefront property. This was taken a week or two ago, there is even more water than that right now.

The only thing that kept us sane was the bright sunny days although the temperatures were in the low 30's and the field was frozen mud. Thoughts of the town I want to move to was 40° warmer and the cost of housing is bout $40 per square foot more than where I live now. A lot of thinking and a lot of conflict again on what to do.

With less blogging I took less pictures lately. That led to some low quality photos even with the auto focus settings. We still took 1-2 hound walks per day as long as it wasn't raining or the water didn't come up over my boots as I took each step in the field. Many of those walks were with the retractable leash in hand just in case Stella decided to turn stubborn.

Stella decided one morning it was more fun to make the complete walk on her own without a leash, rather than hanging back and supplementing her diet with natural protein left by the deer. She even had a little bounce to her step so I knew she was feeling pretty good.

Many of the morning walks the past 3 weeks have had the sound of crunching frozen grass under our feet. It's just hard to wrap my brain around freezing temperatures in the month of April. I cannot say that I am thrilled about that. I am ready for warm, hot, sunny weather.

After the snow disappeared at the end of March, the robins tried one more time to set up their camp. I guess the 40°'s felt like 60° to them.

I have noticed a lot more deer traffic lately on our walks with fresh hoof prints and Sadie taking more and more trips into the wooded brush area. She spends a lot of time with her nose to the ground and running from spot to spot.

As she turns 10 years old in June I think I am seeing a little more gray hair around that black nose of hers.

Stella is always in deep thought.

After almost two months of Dish Network I can say that I am pretty happy with the change in satellite tv service. Of course like anything else, there are some things I don't like as much as I move around their menu with my remote and other things I like better than Directv. I continue to get the mail from Directv every week telling me to come back with some pretty interesting offers.

They are now willing to give me the same programming that was going to cost me $99.99 per month for $19.99 per month for the next 2 years ... plus ... throw in a $300 gift visa card. Yes, you read that correctly NINETEEN DOLLARS per month.

Here is Stella on March 22nd trying to figure out what happened to her green yard she was in the day before. Not a lot of snow but just weird ... I was mowing my yard a few times a week this time last year.

The only one not confused around here abut the weather or life in general is Heidi. She knows what is going on outside and she wants no part of it. She might do a lap around the house after her lunch but as far as checking out the rain, the snow or high winds ... not going to happen.

Consequently with all the bad weather the past 25 days ... the hounds do a lot of this.

The light snow covering the ground this morning is already disappearing as I write this. I'll be mowing parts of the yard this Thursday as the temps move into the mid 70's for a couple of days and then drop back into the 40's a good 15° - 20° blow average temps for the month of April.

You will notice the comments section is open again.

Basically the hounds and I are doing okay, taking one day at a time here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

A Surprise In Editing Photos

This morning definitely looked better than it did yesterday just after lunch. There was no rain forecasted yesterday for the afternoon and for the next three days.

I took this next picture just a little before 1:00pm yesterday. At the time I had no idea it would be nice enough to take the Z4 out for a drive only two hours later. It was nice to pull off the car cover, warm it up and head down the highway, even with the top up.

It was the normal routine this morning but Sadie was more than excited when I asked if she wanted to go for a walk. Her favorite place over by the burn pile was no longer her focus. She heard the word 'walk' and was ready and so was Stella.

No jacket today, cool breeze and a blue sky. It's hard to believe we are suppose to get snow on Saturday. It will not matter because by that time I will have started watching all of the college basketball conference tournaments on tv. I will not catch all of them but a lot of them. So it can do whatever it wants outside this weekend.

From the start of today's walk Stella seemed pretty interested in following the path of Sadie. Notice her black tail? Her mom was a 'black and tan' bloodhound. Since that black is only on the lower half of her tail, it was the reason her original owner named her "dipstick".

Sadie was in her element with excitement and another walk. How many of these walks has she been on in 8-1/2 years? How many times has she hopped up and down before every one of those walks? She never grows tired of them.

As I turned the first corner and prepared to take Stella's picture I was kinda surprised that she was this close to us. She was right on schedule. That's rare for her.

That is until Sadie saw a bird on the ground up ahead. If you look closely straight ahead of Sadie, near the bush line, you can see a bird just getting airborne. Sadie has never caught a bird, or a falling leaf or even a deer ... but anyone of those three things will set her off in a high speed sprint.

Of course if something is that interesting to sprint after it, then Stella has to catch Sadie and find out what all the excitement is about. By that time the bird was long gone. Still the hounds thought it must be around here somewhere and they continued searching the airstrip of the bird.

I was not quite to the back edge of the field when they each started trotting in different directions. Were they going to get away from me? Sadie had found something in the center of the field.

Stella had thoughts of heading to the 'no fly zone' ... or was it something she smelled in the air?

I think I found the reason for each of them to not bother exploring the back edge of the field. Just as I made the final turn home on the path, I see this. I am not a hunter but if I am not mistaken that looks like a deer hoof print to me and it's pretty recent.

Without saying a word, Stella decided it wasn't what she wanted to do, heading to the 'no fly zone', she had something else on her mind today.

Yet, she had to pace herself. The slower she walks the longer the walk will last. It is a nice morning out so why not enjoy it for as long as possible?

Following the path on a wet and saturated path ... I see two more of what I think are deer hoof prints, while they were running.

Neither bloodhound showed any interest in the prints I had found. They were on their own path, at their own pace. Neither ran out of their invisible boundaries.

Like I said, you can't run all the time because the slower you walk the longer the walk will be. This is a sequence of Stella's final path back to the house.

I mentioned earlier I took the Z4 out for a drive yesterday. Too cool for the top down but it's still a fun car to drive. I decided to take it out to the freeway and head to Bloomington. I wanted to have my friend look at a couple of things I found after washing the car last fall and see what he suggested. I tried to keep it 5 mph over the speed limit but there were times when on long stretches of highway where I could see no cops were up ahead, I accelerated a little bit more.  :)

As soon as I got home from that trip I grabbed the 25' retractable leash. I wanted to walk the hounds for their second time yesterday but I was in a hurry to go downtown for dinner at the Chinese buffet. All you can eat for $8.

I had just let the dogs out when I returned home from dinner and saw one of the best sunsets I had seen in a while. The pictures do not do the sunset justice. It was a lot more beautiful than I could capture with my camera.

I was only going to include this middle picture in today's post. It wasn't until this morning when I was editing all of these pictures I had downloaded from my camera, when I saw two deer in the picture above and only one of them in the second picture below. I was totally focused on trying to take a picture of the clouds.

The hounds were outside but didn't smell or hear the deer across that highway. In all of the years I have lived here, I have had hounds stand up here on the hill and stare back at the deer that are staring at them ... but fortunately I've never had a hound take off running across the highway to chase the deer in that field. When I see deer over there I am either putting the hounds back inside or grabbing their collars if I see they have noticed deer across the highway.

There was the time last year when the hounds and I were outside late, when I see a deer running across the highway toward the neighbors yard ... followed by at least ten more. You could hear the thundering herd as they broke tree limbs while sprinting into the woods south of my burn pile.

The hounds never noticed. They squatted, they peed and returned to the house in the dark like nothing was going on.

With the sunshine out today, I'll take the Z4 out in a different direction. Still not warm enough for putting the top down. It's a nice change of pace just to cruise over the hills and through the trees. It isn't much further west where the land is all flat, few tries and all farmland.

Sadie and Stella have decided they have waited long enough for me to finish this blog post. It is well past their lunch time kibble. Stella is howling ... Heidi is barking ... Sadie is hopping up and down.

It's time to eat!!!

Retirement is pretty good right now in 'the tropics' of southern Indiana.