It's Cold & Snow Is Close

I am a little late with this post because I did say the other day that I would post something this weekend with the hounds and the dog. It took a while to come up with anything blog worthy because they have not been doing much since it's been very cold today after another night of rain last night. You can see we finally have some snow on the mountains. Looking at the Windy app, it shows the snow will start at ground level late Monday night after midnight and will continue through Tuesday morning. But with temps in the 40s on Tuesday it will not stay around too long. Long enough for photos.

The Hounds Enjoy Monday

Heidi knew as early as last night that it was cold outside. She headed to bed early and borrowed my Marmot sleeping bag, even with a warm room and the heat turned on. With the ballgames over, and I'm not being a big tv watcher, the evening ended pretty early. Sadie and Stella decided they were too comfortable to move from the living room and spent another night sleeping in the same spots they took hours earlier.

The daily routine is slowly stepping back to the one of the past two years. The hounds are still waking me up a little earlier than I like but that seemed to have started with the Daylight Savings time change in November. So they wake me up, they go outside quick for their first trip of the day. They always think breakfast is served when they come back inside, so they do not stay outside long.

At 6:00am or 6:30am, their breakfast is not served ... nor at 5:35am. What is different, recently Heidi is up before any of them, with a full body shake and enough flapping ear noise to wake me up. She has actually been going outside every morning with the other two hounds. That has not happened in months, if not years. She was a sleep until lunch type of basset hound.

We return for about an hour of sleep with breakfast being served around 7:30am. The thing that bothers me is not the hounds waking me up but when I glance out the window and see it is so cold that the storm windows are completely covered in frozen condensation. That means the temps are low teens if not single digits.

With bloodhounds temperature will not make a difference. They don't want to wear jackets, sweaters or shoes ... just nose to the ground or inside the snow and away they go. One thing I have to be really aware of though is Stella is starting to expand her traveling past a "house rule" boundary. One of those "give 'em an inch they take a mile" type of things.

Luckily the couple of times I have had to scream her name as I am running toward the suspected location - she will turn around and come sprinting towards me.

There wasn't much done this morning with the temperature at 9° our first trip outside and 13° at the 9:15am trip outside. Heidi never even opened her eyes when I asked if she wanted to go outside for the 2nd time of the day. She had moved to 'her' other spot, on the chair in the living room.

Sadie and Stella though charged outside for about 15 minutes of searching, sprinting and a little play. Once again my trusty Nikon D3200 failed when trying to focus to take photos of them playing. I cannot say that after a year and some months being a Nikon owner that I am a happy customer. I just realized that in my recent posts this past week I may have said D3100 instead of D3200. The D3200 is my correct model number.

I would go back and edit those posts but I have a fear that Blogger will move that old post to the most recent post after I click "update" ... that seems to be an issue lately. Is it time for me to seriously consider moving the blog to WordPress?

I started making some afternoon coffee with the temps hitting a high today of 24°. I found out I was down to my last cup of grounds so it was off to the store buy some, a 25 mile trip. Maybe I'll start buy coffee online and keep one bag of coffee ahead. Plus, stay warm.

There was still time for some afternoon jogging by Sadie and Stella. About all Heidi did for the afternoon was a quick trip behind the Yews to dump tanks and come back inside.

Sadie had been pretty nice to Stella since she arrived last August, they are great friends ... that is until Sadie has "her" container of The Greek Gods Greek Yogurt to lick out ... I don't think she is into sharing that.

Later on they still wanted to go out one last time for the day and double check that no one had been in their field while the snow flew. They would probably be able to stay outside all the time because they love it so much ... in the end they are always happy to come back inside where it's warm.

Yes, it does feel different without Winston around. He loved the snow and loved licking out the container that had the very last part of  yogurt, cottage cheese  or on a rare occasion ... pudding.

It's heading for the 40's here in a few days in the "tropics" of Southern Indiana .. all that snow will turn to mush and a really wet and soggy backyard / field.

The Greek God Yogurt

Some people may think "yogurt is yogurt" ... but in the 45 years I've been eating yogurt I've never thought that. Like all dairy products over the years the costs have climbed exponentially, even from last week ... yet when it comes to addictions, costs rarely matter. I had noticed this brand on the shelves many month's ago ... the price was much higher than I was going to pay for any kind of yogurt, so I would resist trying it.

I didn't have my current addiction at that time. So today after seeing a 40 cent increase over last week's price, I paid $4.98 for this container of yogurt you see between Sadie's paws. No, she doesn't get spoonfuls or even a spoonful but she does get to lick out what's left inside the container. She also likes to put her teeth marks on the container to let everyone know she's finished. There usually isn't much left but she will sit next to me drooling while she waits for me to finish the container. Maybe she is now addicted?

Ed Frey was mentioning this yogurt so many times on his blog that one day my curiosity got the best of me, so I sprang for the expensive yogurt and could not stop eating it. Months later I will not even consider any other kind of yogurt. I did a test with the yogurt I was eating before this, both are high in sugar content ... but my last yogurt does not taste nearly as good as it use to.

I am not even sure it's the taste that has hooked me. It does taste fantastic but it's also the texture that is nice. I am not sure I will take the next cost hike though, I have my limits. I cannot ever see myself paying over $5 for a container of yogurt. Even though, I do pay almost as much for a smaller container of Ben & Jerry's ice cream on occasion. Of course the yogurt and ice cream are NOT on my diet.

The hounds got some exercise in sprinting and playing before the college football games started at noon on Saturday.

Winston and Heidi were not interested nor are they ever been interested in any kind of aerobic exercise. Heidi was missing during this time and I found her in a new spot she is trying out which is way outside the allowed limits. She refused to move when called ... all I need is another stubborn hound.

The hounds and I survived another long weekend of watching college football for 14 hours straight on Saturday and 2-3 different NFL games on Sunday. We did the daily walks at halftimes of the afternoon games. So while I watched the games, the hounds got their sleeping in and exercise. It got exciting though when Stella found out early Saturday evening that Winston had taken her spot on the couch, plus while she was up drinking water ... Sadie moved into the last spot on the couch and Heidi came out from the dark bedroom to take the chair that Sadie was sitting in.

Stella came back into the living room without a spot to sit except on the floor.

Stella stared for a short time processing what took place. She saw a space on the couch next to Winston not much bigger than her paw. Bloodhounds seem to think the the space 1"x1" can be expanded to fit them stretched out as long as they have a desire. Right after Stella put her paw in the 1"x1" space and had the look in her eyes that she was going to climb on the couch and sit on top of Winston ... I yelled 'no' and she migrated to her spot on the floor.

Hours later during the final game of the night, I made the mistake of leaving my spot on the couch for some water ... only to come back to the living room finding I no longer had a seat anywhere. Luckily the ottoman is large enough that I moved that over to where I could sit and see the game.

Stella, Winston, Sadie

There wasn't a lot of photos taken this week. Saturday was cool, windy with a little rain ... Sunday was just lazy and today was shopping day for dog food and yogurt.

I was wrong in my writeup last Thursday or Friday when I stated the farmer got 4 trailers full of corn ... those same 4 trailers made numerous return trips to fill up and the number I saw were 16 trailers full as of this morning. I didn't see all of them. Not knowing anything about farming or crop production, that seems like a lot of corn produced for such a small field.

The hounds didn't do much today ... Stella and Sadie played again which is now their daily ritual ... while Winston found one of his favorite spots to lay in the sun and watch the traffic on the highway. He later laid down for a full nap but woke up when he heard me with my camera.

It has now been a few days using Apple's new OS El Capitan that I installed last week. I can tell the differences, even those behind the scenes and I like some of the new features. I am not one to jump on all the new features ... I still like backing up to my computer instead of 'the cloud' ... I like plugging my iPhone into my computer to download photos instead if using wifi for that same thing. There will be many features I will never use but they are there if I ever decide to. I'll have to give this OS update an above average rating ... it works well.

The major league baseball playoffs start tomorrow with their wild card game. Those games will carry me through he week nights and some week days between football games. There has always been something about baseball in the fall ... makes it seem like fall is here.

With the recent bag of dog food that Sadie, Stella and Winston eat ... they are consuming 1.833 pounds per day. I can see that Sadie is losing the weight she needed to lose. Winston is maintaining his slim waistline and Stella showed up in very good shape, not to heavy or lean .. just right. Yet all three hounds would eat non stop if I put the food out.

Heidi still eats her own Earthborn Holistic Grain Free food. Her 28# bag is lasting her 50 days. Even though she is communing .56 pounds of dry dog food per day ... she has not gain any of her weight back. In fact this morning and yesterday I could swear that she has lost weight. Yet she is happy, wags her tail, sprints through the house once per day ... and her skin rashes seem to be continuing to improve.

As usual things are pretty slow here in "the tropics" of southern Indiana if you are looking to read about exciting events.