Stella Starts A New Week

With the cold temperatures settled in Stella has not officially named it winter yet. There are a few days next week she will be back in temperatures of the high 60's. In either kind of weather she is still the best 'beggar for food' that I have ever seen. She is quiet about it and that look you see in the above photo is her patented "I'd like to have that" look.
My curiosity increased enough today that I did a search on Google for the winter weather predictions here in 'the tropics'. I found sites that cut their detail into my zip code. All I will say is, it was good to see no temperatures in single digits. That is good enough for me.

Stella showed once again this morning that she continues to improve from last spring by running more, acting more like her old self inside and outside. I had planned again to let her do her own thing on this walk this morning and she was more than interested in keeping up with Sadie.

Even though ... Sadie was beginning to wonder if Stella and I were ever going to get started on this walk or not.

Once Stella saw how far Sadie was, who had disappeared around the first turn, she took off running to catch up. With Sadie out of view she obviously had found something very good, something that Stella could not ignore.

By the time I reach that first turn whenever the hounds have disappeared, only one of two things normally happened. They have stopped like they did this morning ... or they are running full speed toward the back of the field tracking a deer scent.

No deer this morning though. They had come and gone hours before we made it outside. I am beginning to wonder if the light ATV traffic has scared most of the deer away? I haven't seen one deer since the ATV traffic increased, although it does not happen every day.

I see where a few of the bloggers I follow are doing their annual migration to warmer temps in the Southwest. Some of them have already arrived. I've talked before that when I made the decision to give Stella a new home that my traveling plans would change drastically with two bloodhounds.

We made that trip to Colorado and Utah for a week in June 2015 but that was with two basset hounds and one bloodhound, Stella had not arrived yet. Big difference. It took some work with only two hands and three hounds but overall it was workable with two smaller basset hounds.

Yet Sadie did what any normal bloodhound would do when she smelled an animal near the tent. She dug so hard at the corner of my tent to get out sometime around 4am to see the antelope, it made a hole in the seem right above the floor.

The reason I know it was antelope that was driving her crazy, I saw more than five of them the next morning waving goodbye to us as we left our campsite. Sadie was loud enough trying to get out of the tent that she woke me up, along with Winston and Heidi.

With two large, strong bloodhounds, then Heidi ... I've always thought this field is the best place for them. I've tried walk Sadie and Stella before with two separate 6' standard leashes like I would have to traveling ... it's not possible once they find a scent that makes them take off running.

Stella is a good FJ rider but once she is outside the FJ in a different place than home (the vet) she gets quite skittish and tries to run away. She literally freaked out the last time I took her with me to buy dog food at T&T Feed & Seed.

Due to staying up late last night watching one of the wildest baseball games of the World Series, I see that my mind is all over the place writing this post. Sorry for all the misdirection but I really have no idea what to write about this morning.

So I think I'll stop babbling and post the photos I have left from this mornings walk.

I think this is about all of the fall colors we will get this year.

Haven't moved from the time I approached them, walked past them and made the final turn home. I had to walk back to tug at Stella's collar to get her to move back to the path with us.

They seemed to think it was another successful walk this morning as they trotted ahead. They prefer the alternate path home we started last month.

Stella was looking serious this morning as she finished her walk.

Sadie needed to check out one more thing before she walked into the yard.

Stella hears the St. Bernard barking at her from across the highway. So far in the 26 months I've had Stella, she has never ran across the highway to check out the huge dog barking at her.

Time to get warm, take a short morning nap and wait for lunch to be served.

The time has been flying with baseball, football and now college basketball being on tv almost every night of the week. I can still get a couple of things checked off of my 'to do' list before bad weather arrives. Otherwise, remaining items will be moved to the 2018 To Do list.

I now hear rain outside here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

It's Important To Read Not To Glance

In this post I am going to insert some photos that have nothing to do with the subject of this post. Instead of the individual photos in a row, I am going to use the option of putting them into a tile. Let me know which type you like. You can still click each photo within and enlarge them.

When I started yesterday I was wanting to convert all my WP categories into WP tags. They were like tags in my Blogger blog, but WP has tags and then categories which can also have sub-categories. It looked simple to do, shouldn’t take to long … but what started with my mistake led into an all day affair in WP.

I followed the prompts after seeing a tool called ‘category and tag converter’. As I clicked that link it sent me a page with a list of blog sites. I GLANCED at what it said at the top but did not READ it carefully. I am not sure why but it has happened most of my life. It’s where you glance at page but you don’t read the page. That cost me a LOT of time yesterday.

I glanced at the page, saw ‘WordPress’ and clicked the link. While thinking it was strange the next page was asking me to upload my blog .xml file … I played along, downloaded my .xml file and then uploaded it like the prompts wanted.

Then … coincidence came into play. While checking to see what happened after that uploaded file, making sure my blog was still there. I clicked on one of my photos on the newest blog post. Trouble was I couldn’t click on the photo … something that did work before the upload I thought. That was the wrong thought.

So now my focus went from the hows and whys of converting categories to tags … to why aren’t the photos enlarging like before. Now I didn’t have the option of even clicking them. I emailed a couple of friends that were online to see if they saw the same thing. They did.

So I did what I always do when I need answers for almost anything. I searched on Google. That search listed a lot the same questions that I had, but most of them were dated years ago. Time consuming reading. I finally decided to log into WP forum and check there. Couldn’t find anything that was exactly what I was having problems with.

By now though I am reading and not glancing at the pages of information.

Long story short. I had an answer from a WP tech rep. In 15 minutes she has checked my blog, corrected one of the photos to enlarge when clicked and sent me a file that showed me exactly what to do. How’s that for service?

Of course that led to more time but I had a lot of time on my hands while the snow melted outside. I’ve been needing something to keep my mind busy this past week or so and moving my blog to WP came at the right time. Although it was time consuming, I love that kind of work. Maybe I should go back to a two year college and formally study web design or learn how to build apps. For the past 10-11 years of doing stuff like that off and on, I’ve always enjoyed it.

So I have her instructions. I am not thrilled with what I have to do to fix those photos but it is the process of inserting photos that I did not notice. What is interesting ALL of the posts transferred from Blogger, each photo enlarged with a click … just like I wanted.

The mistake of uploading my blog back up files and installing them over my blog that was already there … had nothing to do with the photos issue!! All of that was self-imposed errors because I glanced at a page and didn’t read the page.

The WP process of inserting photos into blog posts does not and will not enlarge the photos automatically like Blogger does. I was told this morning by the same WP tech rep they are working on that automatic function.

There are a few extra steps that will have to be taken every post with every photo. It IS very time consuming, say if you have 8 or more photos you want to insert into your blog post and have them enlarge to beautiful photos when your readers click them. Yet, there is a visible difference in the quality of the photos on a WordPress blog compared to my blog on Blogger.

I like having that option even for myself. Click any of the photos below to enlarge them.

So things are fixed. I would like to learn more about how WP works, so today I will READ not GLANCE at the pages I look at.

I have to run, Stella is howling for lunch to be served.

Warm this morning in the ‘tropics’ of Southern Indiana with dark gray clouds to the west bringing temps in the teens by Sunday with snow tonight.

Oh … that process to convert Categories to Tags … Took less than 2 minutes