What A Hot Afternoon Walk Looks Like

Sometimes it's best when the hounds don't get their way and a little adult supervision (me) is enforced. I let them have their way most of the time but they are never out of control ... they are actually quiet hounds.

So I followed their lead and what they wanted this afternoon. I think the pictures will show the story why it was probably not a good idea to take a walk at 4pm even with 16mph winds from the southwest.

It was too hot ... even for me.

I tried to tell them it was too hot to take a walk.

The Japanese Yews were a poor choice for shrubs so close to the house. A friend recommended them at that time I was looking for something that stayed green all winter and was soft to touch. After reading more about the size and what these things turn into, I plan on talking them all out. The only decision right now is whether to replant them in the fall on the south edge of the yard to grow and block the view toward the white house ... or take them out now and add them to the burn pile.

Even if I move them they will grow to 10'-20' tall and wide unless I cut them back.

Back to more reading and planning ... and I think we are finished walking the hounds anymore today.  LOL

The Hounds Take A Record Number Of Walks

It was after 5pm before I heard that familiar sound of a tractor right outside my computer room window. They had waited for the daytime sunshine to dry out the hay and flowers that were cut on Saturday, yet rain clouds were overhead and predicted rain was just hours away.

With the day being so nice and it being so much easier to take a hound walk, they took a record number of walks yesterday ... 4 of 'em. I could tell by the amount of hay laying in rows there just wasn't as much as in past years. With all the rain this spring and sunshine that was hard to figure out.

I was standing at the corner of the house taking this zoom'd photo. I didn't see the guys inside the tractor smiling until I downloaded the pictures. Were they joking about something or seeing me with a zoom lens pointed at them? They don't know they are on a blog seen by only a few people but scattered all over the world.

The raker and baler were working pretty well. Intellicast weather radar was showing rain about 50 miles away ... it never showed up nor did it rain after midnight where they said there was a 75% chance of rain. With the warmer than normal winter and the nice weather this spring I find it strange the small amount of hay they were able to bale.

By the time I took my two pictures that I take every day across the highway at the corn field and then from the corner of the house toward the back ... Sadie and Stella were already starting their walk. I decided while putting on my hiking boots that I would let each of them walk on their own ... where ever they wanted to go. With the field cut is is of course so much easier to keep track of them.

It looks so much different when the field is cut and baled. Basically back to being a 'clean' field and less stuff for them to find to eat. Most of their favorites are now inside those rolls of hay.

Back to the 4 walks day ... Sadie likes to walk after their noon lunch for walk #2. I usually wait about an hour after they eat before we do that. Then in late afternoon she and I are ready to take off again after all of them have slept all afternoon. With the weather so nice after 7pm ... that results in a 4th walk.

Of course that gets my number of steps I take per day above the normal range. It equates to almost 4 miles of walking and even at a slow pace my heart rate gets to a level where I get a workout. The days I mow the yard is just an added bonus.

Yet, my 'to-do' list has come to a complete stop. My Apple Reminder app tells me I have 7 of them overdue. All are fairly easy things to do but would be very time consuming. Some of them would take more than 8 labor hours to complete. For some reason, over the years I have been pretty consistent in that I am motivated to do things on that list in early spring and not again until the hottest time of the year ... mid to late August.

With the temps at 50° when we started the walk, it was sweatshirt and shorts weather on this morning walk. It was about at this point in the walk I remember this last winter when it was 9° and a strong cold wind blowing in my face. I prefer this weather to that freezing weather.

With total freedom given to each hound on this walk, they headed in opposite directions. Sadie went to the far right corner of the field and Stella took off toward the middle of the field and possibly to the NW, a direction she had never taken. That is typical for them when I don't 'herd' them during the walk.

Most of the time, even when they bale the field twice in the summer, they normally get 16-18 of these rolls of hay. They normally haul it away after it is rolled but it looks like they will store it here until their next cut in the fall or pull it as they need it next winter.

Once Stella glanced up and saw that Sadie was busy with what she found, she started walking in our direction without me yelling her name. What I missed was her running.

While I was taking a picture of the busted roll of hay, Stella had RAN from the middle of the field to the corner of this hay in the short time I took the picture.

Then it was back to 'noses to the ground' for each of them. I am sure that deer use this path to walk from the gully to the woods on the far north side of the field.

This reminded me of the time times I turn my lawn mower to start a new row and miss part of the taller grass. This is just one of the few spots in 7 acres that he missed with his much larger mower.

Sadie took off almost trotting on a scent she had found. She was not into chasing sparrows today because just outside the left edge of this picture there were 5-10 sparrows on the ground having breakfast. A few days ago Sadie would have sprinted after them but today her interest was somewhere else.

While Sadie and I walked toward the house, Stella was heading for the 'no fly zone'. I was sure she was headed for the woods. If that were to happen I would have had to go get her and lead her back to the house.

Back to my 'to do' list, I never worry about what I get done or don't get done. It will all be completed eventually but only when I feel like doing the type of work I will need to do. I'll have a major rush to get things done before last week of August when a new college football season starts.

It took a while and even longer than I had planned but Sadie and Stella finally made it back to the yard. They spent almost the same amount of time at the end of the walk in the area behind the house as it took for me to complete the walk.

With the fantastic weather we have been having I am back to picking up three different books to read and most of that reading is outside. With the disappearance of gnats, bugs and a few mosquitoes, the hounds have time to roam the field right behind the house and I can keep an eye on them while I read.

I've recently been cutting my time on the computer way below my daily limit of data. That daily limit I set on my spreadsheet stretches that 20Gb of data evenly over the 30-31 day period. Currently I have about 1.2 Gb's in the bank based on my decreased usage.

Besides my normal sports reading, Twitter, Facebook ... I've took a look at houses for sale the other day on Zillow and Realtor sites. There are 4-5 towns out west that have always interested me with 2 of them places I have lived in the past. Nothing excites me too much in the housing market.

Even though I really like my Mini Cooper Countryman I still look at what FJ's are for sale in a radius of 250 miles from home. Many to choose from but very very few have the same options I had with my blue one. I still will not make any trade until I decide when I travel and what I want to use as far as trailers. Nothing has changed my mind about traveling with the hounds.

Traveling with two bassets and one bloodhound wasn't that bad but hard. Two bloodhounds would make that impossible. I knew that and analyzed that before I decided to pick up Stella and bring her home. I could walk Winston and Heidi with a "splitter" and one leash. When I have tried that here with Sadie and Stella ... it didn't work and was a total disaster each time I tried it.

I have a few more weeds to cut along the driveway this afternoon. It is so tempting to buy and spray weed killer and make that all so easy but I don't want any chance of that getting on the paws of the hounds or in the air. So I will continue to cut them as low as possible with my weed eater and let the sun kill them.

Not sure but I might post again tonight after we take some afternoon photos.

I cannot believe how long this fantastic weather has lasted here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Hounds & I Are Loving This Weather

While it was 74° after midnight last night, the hounds were sleeping peacefully. They had a pretty active day yesterday with 3 walks, and numerous other trips outside. This morning the air was filled with the smell of honeysuckle and a cloudy sky of blue. I find it interesting that the rows of corn did not float away while spending days under water. 

I took a cup of coffee outside this morning while keeping an eye on the hounds. They have been wandering off more and more recently. It's to the point that I cannot let them out on their own anymore. Sadie is checking to see if she is the only hound being call back in or does Stella have to follow the rules too.

I didn't get a picture of Stella over by the burn pile, but I did get one of her starting her day in the normal fashion of a good deep itch relieving scratch. This is also after not finding any ticks, fleas, hot spots and anything else that could cause her to scratch like this. She stood inside the bathtub like a statue as she got a bath yesterday.

The bugs were out in formation early. I could hear them buzzing close to my ears and to me there may not be anything worse than having to fight battling insects that fly and dart fast enough to stay out of my reach ... biting me. We headed back inside for that 2nd cup of coffee.

With computer problem solved and operational, the only crisis around here was whether to go back putting the blog post content above the picture it went with instead of below. How's that for having all of the world's problems solved here in 'the tropics'?

With the morning being so nice, Sadie did not hesitate in getting me outside for the hounds first walk of the day. I had not sat in my chair 5 minutes before she was at my elbow telling me "lets go". Her mouth grabbed my left hand leading me to the edge of the field, then she took off running to get ahead.

Stella was back to her slow pace this morning and wasn't going to change much. Although she did trot to catch up with Sadie later on and was even leading the walk at one time.

The new computer set up is working out fantastic and I continue to learn new things by finding small changes to tweak it a little finer. You never know the settings have been changed with the fresh restart, until something doesn't work.

As expected with all the recent rain the field is growing at a fast rate. It might not be as thick in the majority of the field but it is getting taller than my knees. The brush along the sides is thick enough to where you cannot see through it, let alone walk through it.

Sadie was certain there had been deer in the area before the first turn.

Stella was back looking for that rabbit she accidentally stumbled on in the 3rd walk of the day yesterday. Even I heard the rabbit charging through the small brush breaking sticks as she ran to get away.

The noses of the hounds were really active this morning but that did not mean their energy levels increased along with it. I decided I'd let them go where they want, do what they want, just as long as they stayed out of the woods and out of the gully.

When they both made the turn to the far corner I decided to join them. Not only could I keep a better eye on them in case they decided to bolt out of bounds but it would give me a different angle to take some pictures.

Is this what I am smelling? If you are a plant or flower hobbyist, please chime in here to correct me or give me answers. Google images tells me that it's honeysuckle.

For these two partners in crime, there is nothing better than some fresh morning natural protein to add to their diets. They were so stubborn when I called them that I had to walk back and nudge them to get going.

Stella took the short cut again, cutting the corner of the last turn. She stood and looked into the area of the 'no-fly zone', then slowly followed behind me. I still have my suspicions that she is sick. So much change in her in a years time.

They both continued the slow walk home. I wanted to get back to fix some breakfast/brunch before loaded up the Mini Countryman with two 32gl trash containers for a trip to the recycling center. One had my recyclables and the other had bagged trash that I can drop off for a whopping $2.

They tried their best to casually veer right, walking further away from me. Lately in the afternoons, without taking my camera, they have been going too far out of their boundaries when I let them continue their wandering off.

With the recent rains, there is something in the drainage ditch that runs along the edge of the field and the neighbor's yard. Stella is very attracted to that area and it almost takes me grabbing her collar to get her to leave. She was following that ditch toward the highway Monday, so the recent afternoon walks have been without the camera and carrying the 25' retractable leash in case I need it.

I almost stepped on this guy, luckily Sadie nor Stella saw it. I don't see as many of these worms as you would expect. I see a turtle every once in a while but not every year, no snakes and lately no sign of the large blonde field cat.

The flooded water receded a lot over night. The water level can change by the hour. With my trip west of town to the recycling center, I saw a lot more flooding than I have been seeing across the highway. As it should be since the river is in that direction.

Whenever you do a major install of a new computer that you just bought or changing out one like I just did, all of those settings change. Anything from your cursor not able to move to drag and drop cells in Excel to the keyboard not scrolling to the left fast enough when I am trying to delete a sentence.

Yet there was nothing worse than finding out yesterday afternoon that when I did the migration from the iMac to my laptop, it set my Mahjong game back to a brand new start. All of those games I had spent hours playing, achieving my goal sometimes of completing the games under 3 minutes were gone !!!!

A 160 different games were all setting at different times above 4 minutes, just waiting for me to start over on my quest of under 3 minutes to complete. It's harder to play on a screen twice the size. Using the keypad on the laptop was still slower than normal with the larger monitor.

One great thing I found out how to do yesterday ... I can close my lap top and as long as it is on and plugged into my external monitor it works perfect just like a hard drive. So I am back to one monitor instead of two. I'll see how I like that change ... because the results could determine if a possibility could happen months from now.

What is that?

I remember the first time they were set out on display a couple of years ago, the iMacs with the 'retina' display blew me away. The difference in picture quality is indescribable. I told myself then and remind my self to this day ... "STAY AWAY".

So on purpose last night, I surfed the web during commercials of the baseball game I was watching, on my iPad Mini ... that has ... a ... retina display.

My brain cells scrambled, pulse rate went up, ideas, temptations, justifications, and maybe even some slight drooling took place as I looked at the clarity and perfect picture quality ... KNOWING ... an iMac with that retina display was just a 40 minute drive away.

I admit it ... after the game was over, with my Reds beating the powerful first place Yankees, I sat in my desk chair and went straight Best Buy online to take a look a those iMacs with the retina display. It was a tough fight all the way not to change my current path from what I have set up to buying something new ... with that damn retina display.

Other websites, and bloggers who talk about Apple computers almost always warn their readers NOT TO go take a look at them on display because you will never look at your computer monitor the same way again.

With some sound sleep, a bowl of fresh fruit for breakfast ... all of that "retina stuff" had evaporated from my thought process. Sometime overnight I had been drug back into reality and lectured on my lack of focus.

With the yard mowed yesterday, recycling trip this morning, days of salad cut up in advance, a fresh pineapple cut and ready to eat ... there are not any plans for today. I'll continue to live in those '5 minute' windows like a child, led by the decisions of the hounds. (ie: would you prefer I stand on the right or left side of the door as I let you out for the 100th time today?)

I love that I have gone from a work-a-holic to a full blown slacker without any transitional pain. Being 'a slacker' should have been my career path from the start.

It's too quiet in 'the tropics' of southern Indiana today ... just the way I like it.