Heidi Attacks The Walk At Sunrise

It might look like a normal sunrise but there were a couple of things happen in the background that made this day so much different. It started in the middle of the night, the bedroom lit up by the full moon and a whining bloodhound ... Stella. It was hard to tell what time of night it was because everything was so bright ... but it didn't look and didn't feel anything like it was time for sunrise.

It was 3:00am ... THREE O'CLOCK AM ... 3am !!!!

She wasn't going to give up on her request either. Time meant nothing to her and of course once Heidi woke up to Stella's tail wagging against the chest of drawers (on purpose) she was sure it was time to get up and of course have breakfast. After 15 minutes of telling them to go back to sleep I was the one that gave up. I flipped the light on and the three of us marched down the hallway, around the corner and into the kitchen.

Of course they always go outside first thing in the morning so out they went. I must admit the sky was awesome with the full moon making it feel like daytime. I poured the kibble out quick, shut the back door as they walked in, flipped off the light and headed back to bed by 3:30am while they ate their kibble.

What did they do when they were finished?

They came back to the bedroom, Heidi to her dog bed and Stella over against the opposite wall ... AND WENT BACK TO SLEEP !!!!  LOL

That did not mean all three of us would sleep late. We were still up by 5:30am witnessing another beautiful sky to start the day. Before coffee was even made I was putting on shoes to take the daily morning walk. Only things were different this time.

Instead of being back in one of her many sleeping spots in the house, Heidi was wide awake and standing next to Stella waiting for me to get the retractable leashes right after I pull a new poop bag off the roll and stick it in my pocket. I could not believe Heidi was wanting to take the walk with Stella and I.

By the time we got back and I had finished my cup of coffee I could tell by this view it was going to be another beautiful day, all depending on when I wanted to get started.

With both hounds on their respectable leashes inside the house, a safety feature in case other kids or other dogs are taking their walks in front of the house, we headed outside with Heidi leading the way. Stella always like to stop a few steps outside to sniff the air to see whats up ... but not Heidi. She was practically sprinting for the sidewalk.

With only two hands, two leashes and a possible used poop bag, there just isn't enough room to take the camera. Heidi was in a 'trot' mode and wouldn't slow down for a walk. At first I thought she was trying to keep up with Stella who was leisurely strolling out in the street along with me ... it's a neighborhood and few if any cars are out at that time of day. I prefer to walk out away from people's yards as we head to the vacant land down the street.

Then I thought Heidi was rushing to a spot to pee but that wasn't it either ... she was in a fast walking trot ... as fast as those short basset legs would take her. After about a 1/4 mile and no let up on her fast pace ... it occurred to me ... before I picked her up from GABR 8 years ago she was known as a 'runner' ... breaking away from the house and running the streets and sidewalks until the local animal shelter would catch her.

I had to wonder if the surface under her paws brought back those distant memories of running away or away from someone chasing her and that is why she would not slow down to a leisurely walk like she use to do in the field. She did stop a few times after we got to the vacant land to sniff things and she eventually slowed her pace down to a walk, then to a very very slow walk. The watch said .6 of a mile by the time we finished.

Stella thought the best thing to do when she got back was to take a quick nap outside while I got ready to do my morning bike ride. It was actually cool this time of day so those cold stones also felt good to her.

Heidi on the other hand got no further than the love seat after she walked inside the house and found the best place to sleep. She was still sleeping in that same spot when I returned an hour and a half later after my bike ride. It will be a few days or weeks before she has the motivation for another morning walk.

I didn't do any hiking today ... just a normal day around the house with a short visit to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned. After that it was to Fry's Market for some fruit, sour cream for the burritos tonight and a stop by their gas station to fill the gas tank up. Based on my awards for shopping at Fry's Market they were giving me 20 cents off per gallon of gas. Not a bad deal.

Like I said it is full moon time as all of you know. I did nothing for this photo last night except switch to a night time automatic setting and held the D3200 still in my hand. I'm surprised it came out as good as it did.

I changed the setting to full automatic, no flash and held the camera steady in my hand. That moon is about as full as you can get. I expect tonight to be much of the same and I can only hope the hounds try to sleep through the 3am hour and start bothering me around 4:30am or 5am.

That is the thing though ... IF I don't hear or respond to Stella's whining on any morning, then her next option to wake me up is to start wagging her tail of steel against the chest of drawers knowing that will be loud enough to wake me up and hopefully not the neighbors.

Awake too early but still another fine day here in the Wild West.

Stella Boycotts Morning Walk

This is Stella's new morning routine. She will whine that she wants to take the walk in the morning but that has turned out to let me know she just wants to go outside. Again on Wednesday morning she wasn't going anywhere. Afternoon walks are also in question, some days yes, some days no. It's funny how she comes up with these changes.

A few minutes before 6am this morning I glanced outside and there was a light fog hovering over the top of the hay. I headed outside as fast as possible to take a picture while the hounds were chowing down on their morning kibble. (It's raining again at 7pm)

This morning she stood there doing nothing and it was about the time I started walking back to the house when she started slowly walking to the field. Only to eat wet grass.

I thought the Azalea was dead but some signs of life. The other three are growing like gangbusters and are the same position under the roof overhang.

Heidi came out right after lunch but she wasn't going anywhere either. Although she ended up spending most of the afternoon outside alone, wandering, taking a walk in the grass and then sleeping in the backyard under the sunshine.

Once Stella saw that I was walking away in the field she decided a Thursday morning walk might be a good idea.

She was running so fast she ran right past the camera.

The race was on to see who would get into the house first

When I didn't see Heidi for an hour or so outside I started walking to the field and there she was. She was just returning from her own walk and exploration.

I am getting a lot done. I am very tired by the time I finish and the nights are not long enough. All is good though in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

What A STRANGE Morning

For the second day in a row I am up and awake at some ungodly hour, sometime after 2:05am. The first question that came out of my brain was "can I transfer data from my food tracker MyFitnessPal to Cronometer. It was a program I used before and breaks down the food in much more detail. Although today I may have gotten up that early for another reason but I just didn't know it ... Stella. Within 15 minutes that I was up, on the computer to find the answer to my question, she was standing by the entry way of the computer room and her stomach was 'growling' ... not the hunger pain kind of growl but the upset stomach kind of growl.

So still in a t-shirt and gym shorts, I grabbed my GoLite jacket and put on my snow/rain boots with no socks, grabbed the flashlight and we headed outside. It was really warm at 36° and a light sprinkle of rain. She went right to the field to find tall wet grass to eat. She moved from spot to spot with my small LED flashlight pointed right on her. She never did get sick and after 10 minutes or so, walked calmly back to the yard, peed and came back inside. She wasn't finished though. I'm in the dark house again, on the computer and about the time I think she has gone back to the bedroom to sleep, I hear her stomach again and there she is ... standing in the dark looking in the computer room at me. She wasn't whining but when I got up to go back outside with her, she didn't move. She didn't want outside.

You guessed it ... she wanted to eat.

I thought, why not? That might settle her stomach. I had yogurt or cottage cheese that I could give her but I thought I'd try her normal dog food. It worked. As soon as she finished eating, she was in back in the dark bedroom sound to sleep on the floor, like nothing had happened.

So here I was, still not even 4am yet and I am wide awake. I didn't fix coffee because I had high hopes of going back to bed and sleep longer than the hour and 50 minutes I had accumulated so far today. I found out that Cronometer does not list my Apple Watch as a 'device' like it did with my Garmin VivoSport, but there was another way to do the connection. I did that by connecting it electronically to the app Apple Health, which pulls data from my Apple Watch. As of this morning it is doing exactly that, giving me more details on my food intake than the MyFitnessPal app did. What might those additions be? A breakdown of vitamins, mineral, and micro nutrients. I would have had to buy MyFitnessPal's monthly subscription to do that same breakdown.

Since I was still awake I kept doing my normal reading online that I do every morning plus I had a couple of more questions on my mind. I 'googled' them (with DuckDuckGo) and found out what I needed within two or three clicks. By this time it's 4:45am and I am still wide awake. I wanted to get back to bed for some sleep and not have to rely on a nap this afternoon to catch up. I was needing coffee but knew if I went in that direction, then all hope was lost of getting more sleep this morning. The free app SleepWatch I downloaded for my Apple Watch WILL TRACK the sleep time when you take a siesta. That is something the GarminConnect app would not do.

The hounds?  Both were sleeping soundly where they normally do in a very dark bedroom.

I thought more about waking up so early, extremely early today and what was the cause. Stella was not standing by the side of the bed, whining or nudging my hand with her nose when I woke up, she was sound to sleep. As was Heidi. THEN I REMEMBERED .... I was too hot and my sinuses were plugged!!!!

Late last night I felt it getting much colder when Stella and I stepped outside one final time. I wanted to try something different with the forecasted drop in temperatures. I closed all the mini blinds for each window but did a quarter turn more to close the steel mini blinds tight as possible. That is something I rarely do, not turning a quarter of a turn more to tighten them. I left all of the thermostats the same in each room. To my surprise just less than two hours later when I woke up, the whole house was much warmer than normal that time of night. The temperature outside was the same, low 30's but the thermometers inside were saying no less than 70° (way too hot) and in the living room it was 72°. My sinuses were plugged up too.

THAT was the cause of me waking up at 2:05am !!!!

For some unknown reason, by 5:30am I was tired, sleepy ... a welcomed feeling. With the house still quite dark and the hounds still sleeping, I went back to bed and didn't hear anything the rest of the morning. Finally at 9:05am I was awake, feeling much better but a little confused and wanting coffee. Of course these last seven hours have thrown the daily routines out the window. How would the hounds react?

I fed Heidi immediately ... of course that meant Stella wanted to eat too but she had a normal amount of kibble a little after 2am. I was happy to see she was more than satisfied with the two pieces of GlycoFlex Plus that she gets every morning. THEN we all went outside but with no walks planned. I could hear it raining very lightly. Heidi thought about it and then proceeded as close to the side of the house as possible for a full lap around the house. As you see, Stella took a different path but a familiar one for when she has to dump her tanks and knows the walk of the day has been postponed due to rain.

It was funny now that I remember it. Earlier when she and I were outside sometime between 2am - 2:30am, when she was finished eating wet grass to settle her stomach, then peed ... she followed the same path you see here and headed back to the side of the house as close as possible for her return back inside. I guess if I didn't mind getting Stella completely wet, we could do the walk this morning. It's not raining that hard but after 16 - 20 minutes of solid drizzle she would be drenched based on how wet she was this morning after the short time she was out in in the field.

All Heidi wanted was to get back inside, jump up on the chair that Sadie gave her, scratch her blankets in a pile, do three circles and lay down to sleep the morning away. I've mentioned it before, but I cannot wait to strip that green paint off the steps and then paint them gray with the floor sealant I am going to apply to the carport floor this spring. I'll have to retrain the hounds for the day or two it will take to dry that application on the concrete floor, and have them go out the front door when we go outside. That will really scramble their braincells as well as mine.

It was just last Sunday that the ~4" of snow was melting with temperatures hovering around 40°. Then today I have light rain all day that started last night and will spend the late afternoon and night into a drizzle, if the forecast is right. Yet by Saturday night we have more snow on the way and a 'front' behind it that will lower the temps into the teens and single digits after midnight. Back and forth. Up and down ... typical weather in Southern Indiana.

Just last Sunday.

And the plans for the next few days.

With the pantry and refrigerator full of good healthy food, a tv schedule of college basketball and NFL Playoff games, a couple of books, and enough coats and thermals ... the hounds and I will make it with no problems. After all it's only for a day or two. The hounds always sleep based on 'outside' temperatures NOT what it feels like inside ... otherwise it looks as if I am freezing them out of their house with them curled tightly in a ball to sleep as well as close to each other.

Can you tell which pictures were taken by each camera I have?

I've added another show about roughing it in Alaska to my DishNetwork DVR Timer ... a schedule of automatic recording of programs, movies or ballgames. A few things I have noticed among the two shows I've been watching about Alaska ... even if the sky is clear above their roof of their small houses or cabins, none of them have any kind of solar panel system to produce electricity. Why not? Also for the few people that have teams of dogs for their dogsled, used to either check traps or race ... they feed their dogs salmon that that they had caught just to feed their dog teams. One team of dogs will eat over 500 salmon during the winter!!!!

Compare that to all the different kinds of expensive dog food on the market, those dog survive in much more extreme living conditions on just the protein of salmon and at times meat organs. There isn't any fruit and veggies added, no added vitamins, no fish or meat meals, no rice, etc ... just straight meat or fish. I also noticed as a family or couple, they don't sit down to a meal type of dinner with everything on the 'food pyramid' ... they might only have some moose or caribou they shot that day or just some cooked salmon they caught that day. They rarely eat fruit because they live in the wilderness and few will grow a garden during the summer months to grow vegetables. I know they live a much different lifestyle but to me it's interesting to see the diets they and their dogs follow while surviving extreme living conditions.

I normally like to have all my window blinds open during the day, even in cold weather ... but after finding out just how much heat is retained with the additional quarter turn to close the blinds tight, I don't want to open them today or any day until it gets warmer. I can open them on sunny days I guess because the western sun really warms up the living room in the afternoons. I've turned the thermostats down and the house is staying at 65°, just like the hounds and I prefer.

I guess the question of the day will be ... do I add the widgets back to my blog footer instead of just showing a couple of bits of information. I am not sure with the current design if many readers get to the bottom to see the list of blogs I follow, or the top posts or pages, maybe click on a category or look through the archives back to November 2017 ... so they may not be needed. A big difference in this theme that I really like and is called the most popular theme on WordPress, is the 'sidebar' on the post page, is NOT on the side but below each post BEFORE the comment section. I don't like that arrangement after testing to see what it looked like a few days ago.

Between now and the end of the day Stella and I will still check on weather conditions to see if we can fit in a quick walk. IF that happens I will write another post like I did yesterday with only a paragraph of content and all pictures of the walk. Do you prefer that style compared to my rambling?

It's warm, foggy, overcast and wet this morning in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.