Heidi Explores In The Snow !!

While living retired in the 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana you have to be flexible. Retirement allows me to be very flexible and the weather gives me plenty of chances to prove it. Like today. I was going to take photos every hour to show the progression of our small snow storm. There wasn't enough progression to note with a camera, so plans had to change. This was around 10:30am, about an hour or so after it has started snowing lightly.

A little later Stella and Heidi were not impressed with what they were seeing, smelling or touching. The idea of being warm and back inside the house seemed like the better idea. It wasn't even noon yet and plans are changing at a rapid pace.  :)

Heidi never got off the concrete, she decided she could wait to pee until later.

I sat at the kitchen table looking out the large picture window but it was barely snowing. I wasn't going to miss much if I didn't take photos every hour. Plus that early wake-up time at 5am was beginning to hit. I thought why not? Why wait until later this afternoon for that siesta I spoke of this morning? I was in the state of unconsciousness within minutes and didn't realized it was almost 3 hours later before I woke up.

My sleep app was happy. It didn't hesitate to let me know I had reached "their" goal of me sleeping for 8 hours in the past 24 hours. Remember flexibility is key when retired. :)

Three hours later both hounds were a little more curious than they were earlier. The temps were still borderline freezing so it felt warm. It had snowed an inch or more, maybe two, as the forecast said.

Off topic ... this blog design has a feature setting that helps tablets and phones load the blog faster. Let me know if you notice a difference on your device with my blog. In this post I have 42 photos, more than normal, so it should be a good test for that feature.

I could tell from what Stella was walking through the snow was really heavy and wet. Perfect snow for building a snowman or a snow cave but that wasn't going to happen. I'm a hot weather person if you remember. I am counting down the days until spring and the MLB baseball season starting.

With Stella tried to decide what she wanted to do, I decided I would sneak up on Heidi by walking along the back of the house to the north yard and see what she was doing. I was expecting to see her somewhere in the front yard, and possibly walking back to the carport to be let inside.

I was shocked to see her not only in the north side yard but up on the hill tracking something. There were no rabbits prints in the snow so I am not sure what she was interested in ... but she was focused and was on a mission.

If the snow had been frozen hard with icy conditions, she would have been sliding down the hill by now but since it was a wet and heavy snow she was able to show me her agility walking down what seemed to be a mountain to her.

She had enough fun and decided was time to get back inside.

By the time I turned the corner of the house and walked in the carport, both hounds were waiting for the door to open.

While I ate a low carb snack, caught up on emails, texts from friends and all of the basketball scores for the college games today ... Stella was acting as if she wanted to go for a walk. There was plenty of time to do that since it was just past 4pm. I also needed to get another walk today for some exercise. Snow boots on. Down parka on. We were off to see just how deep the snow was. It wasn't much that's for sure.

A walk is exactly what Stella wanted. She took off to get ahead of me.

This gives you some idea how deep the snow is ... not much. An inch or two of snow.

A very light snow while we walk but it wasn't going to amount too much.

Nothing like stretching a little in the middle of a walk. She was enjoying this walk this afternoon. As you can see the snow is a little deeper as we moved to the back of the field. Of course some of that is caused by the deep thick grass she is walking on.

That is the most energy with fast speed I have seen from her in a long time. Faster than a trot and zoomed right past me, moving my knee out of her way as she sprinted by me.

All this time I saw no signs of any kind of animal traffic since this morning.

Looking east ... that is where the storm is heading.

She was in a hurry to get back home. The photos make her look closer to me than she really was. I thought at first I might have to jog to catch up with her. What was she up to?

She wanted to take the 'old way' home and turned left at the "Y" of our two paths.

That wet snow is sticking to my boots and my jeans. Back inside with a hot cup of coffee was sounding like a good idea.

I heard this tree limb fall while inside my house one February night in 2008. I was watching an IU basketball game. I found out the next morning a small tornado had passed through the area, snapping a power line pole in half just two houses north of me.

Well it's been a pretty good day even while sleeping through three hours of it. I'm going to try again tonight to find a movie or two to watch.

I see while I was having a 'small' snow storm, down south tornadoes have been passing through different states causing damage. The U.S. Tornadoes twitter feed has been extremely busy today filling up my Twitter account with a lot of updates. It will track tornadoes from start to finish. Hard to picture snow storms in the northeast and tornadoes down south at the same time.

With the new blog design you might have noticed I added a few new blogs to the sidebar's "Favorite Links". These are blogs I use to follow and felt like following them again. Good bloggers with great photos and interesting stories whether they are traveling or are stationary like the hounds and I.

I can also see with the new blog design having all the links being more visible on the sidebar, is resulting in more movement around the blog. That sidebar is not only on the homepage but each page there is a post. Readers are clicking more of the blogs to read and more of my past blog posts than before on the other design. That is one reason I made the change this morning to the design. I wanted to make it easier for readers to navigate and see all the information the blog has to offer.

As I glanced around the outside of the house when I was sneaking up on Heidi, I can see this spring I am going to be busy using the high pressure washer on the house siding, the gutter and the fences. That power washer has been one of my better purchases.

Glancing through my Feedly and Flipboard accounts this afternoon I found a couple of interesting articles, related to politics. One is not a surprise and the other is a really long but informative article. She points out what my greatest fear is for this country. What concerns me is the American citizens will not pay attention to what is going on "behind the scenes" just like 9/11 and even as far back as Pearl Harbor. It's one of those situations where they think "it can't happen here" and that is exactly what the Muslims in power or in our government want.

It can happen and will happen if something isn't done !!

Here are the two links of interest:

Creeping Sharia is real

Bernie Sanders is always a surprise

It's normal to have snow in March and even in April here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

The Blog Has Changed !!

It was not too long after I published that post this morning that I sat down with a new cup of coffee and clicked on the WordPress dashboard "Themes" ... I was going to get serious about finding a blog with a sidebar on the right hand side. Should be easy to do with over 300 blog themes to choose from. Anywhere from 60-108 of them had sidebars on the right side of the page. A little over 5 hours later I found myself unsuccessful in the hunt, yet ... I made some drastic blog changes.

Yes, I did sit my my computer for almost all of that time looking through and trying out different themes. A few of them I made some changes and on two of them I had everything modified with my information ... just click on the "publish" button to change it all.

Didn't happen.

The hounds let me know by Stella howling and Heidi barking, that I had worked through lunch, their lunch. They wanted that new lamb and rice kibble right now. It gave me a chance to get away from the computer, fix myself some lunch and walk around. I could go outside and check out the weather. So much for that spring weather lasting until Friday.

Heidi did her lap around the house after relieving herself but it was cold enough that she ran to the door to go back inside. That was the last time we saw Heidi as she hid out in the bedroom on the dog bed sleeping the afternoon away. She's not stupid.

I'll take a break from the hound discussion and get back to the blog and what drastic changes were made. Based on what device you use, nothing will look any different to you UNLESS you scroll to the bottom of the page.

I reduced the rows of photos/posts on the home page from the 4-5 rows on the home page down to just 2 rows. Showing only 8 of my most recent posts. Why?

After I played around for a little over 5 hours, using around 800Mb of data looking at themes, and customizing some of them with my information or stuff I wanted to show ... I realized there was nothing better than what I have here. So why not work with what they gave me for the sidebar.

This theme has the largest photos anywhere on WordPress. In exchange for that wide photo, they give me only two places for sidebars. (1) Below each post, between the post and comment section. (2) In the footer at the bottom of the blog. I chose to make the footer like an additional page.

I see more and more sports websites and local newspaper websites doing that exact same thing. If it's available to be expanded, then the 'footer' of the blog becomes like an additional page added to the homepage.

Of course since I have some deficiencies in my mental make up, such as straight pictures in your house, or straight laps when mowing my yard or even when I make spreadsheets .... things have to be even, straight, and/or balanced.

So when you scroll to the bottom of the blog homepage to check out this 'new' footer (sidebar) I speak of, you will see 21 lines of recent posts only because I had 21 lines of websites that I follow. I put the shorter list in the middle so the outer edges of the links would be even.

For the sidebar under the post I just put the 'follow button' there to make it convenient for those that want to follow the blog after reading their first post as a new reader or first time visitor. First timers, if you make a comment WordPress tells me I have to approve your first comment, then all your other comments will post immediately. So your first comment did not disappear after hit the submit key, it is just waiting for my approval.

On that list of favorite blogs I have added five new links, some you have seen, some have not. I added the link to my old blog with the same name as this blog but only a letter difference, (B). That will give you more history and hundreds of more photos of the hounds plus of Winston and Sadie. If you dig really deep in the archive list, you'll read about my RV research.

Two of the links I added, I told you about the other day and posted their links inside a post. You'll recognize them as the Fraud, Crooks and Criminals and Creeping Sharia. Both of those are filled with good information that you rarely see on tv news. It might be buried online news but you have to dig to find it.

The last two links I added are blogs well written about the political scene or other news in the USA. Kuntsler's Blog and The Market Ticker both do a much better job of writing in a way that all people can understand it and they express the bullshit of Washington DC much better than I have attempted to do. So take a look at them if you are a little curious.

A reminder to my readers from my Blogger blog ... that list will not change when a new post is published. They stay in alphabetical order but I think we are all pretty familiar with who posts daily and those that space out their posts. You can click their sites based on that I guess.

I will be interested to see if this new format shows any changes in the traffic pattern within my blog. All my photos are available for downloading for your own use, as they always have been. On my Blogger blog I could see what photos were downloaded but I cannot on this WordPress blog.

I guess since I have attempted to change this blog design a couple of times in the past 10 days or so but left it the same, then it's the design I really want to use and keep. Wordpress calls this theme one of their most popular if not the most popular theme in their blogging history

So I believe I am set on the blog.

As you could see from the photos this afternoon, Stella was in her afternoon walking mode which means a pretty slow pace and mostly on the path for most of the way. She did test me once by straying away back there when I wasn't paying attention to her but that's just part of walking with a bloodhound. Bloodhounds are in their own little world when they are outside.

As we approached the 'Y' in the path, I veered left to take the old way home. Stella was heading down the newer way home ... then she realized what I had done.

She turned to follow me without me saying anything. Plus she can wonder on her own this way because she always seems to end up in the north yard.

It was interesting to see her still stop and stare over at the neighbor's yard or the woods behind their house. She was pretty far left of the path we normally take.

Once she decides that she is going inside, she doesn't move. She doesn't turn around. She stands and stares, waiting for that door to open. Not once in the three years and five months that I have had her, has she ever barked to come back inside. Nor has she barked at birds, squirrels, rabbits or deer. She never barks and only howls for lunch to be served.

Once spring arrives it will be a busy couple of days with my high pressure washer ... those steps and all of the house foundation will be stripped with the high pressure washer and then repainted with gray concrete paint. I am looking forward to the new look. I might also buy a new Larsen's storm door that would match the front door. My 'to do' list continues to grow for 2019.

It was sad to hear this morning that Tioga George had passed away recently. What an amazing man who influenced many with his travels through Mexico, leading many into RVing and traveling the country. When I would read his blog I found it amazing he was in his mid-80's, doing all that he was doing in the past year or two. He will be missed, like all the other travelers/bloggers who have passed away the past few years.

Well after a full day of work here at home ... It is steak and steamed broccoli night ... then another night of reading, glancing at basketball games on tv with the sound turned down while the rest of the world goes ape shit crazy over the State of the Union speech.

It was another great day here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.