Usually with a full moon the energy levels are high around here ... but not the past few days. Even Stella was not waking up at 6 or 6:30am to go outside ... it was Winston but that is normal for him. A few times she would not even go out into the yard, just turned around and headed for the house then back to sleep. All of us were not getting up and active until 9:30 and sometimes not until 10:30am.
Of course Sadie rarely relaxes when she is outside. It's not in her DNA. A different breeder of bloodhounds that I got to know after she bought Sadie's father, told me she gives a test to her puppies at 45 days old and can tell which ones are "couch potatoes" and which ones are "trackers". She asked me 5 questions over the phone and 4 of the 5 were positive answers, showing Sadie was a tracker, not a couch potato.
That is interesting because at the time I had picked a different puppy from the litter. It was only when I took Winston out to see the puppies that I changed my mind about which puppy to take. Sadie was the only puppy out of her eight litter mates, that followed Winston around the yard wanting to play with him. Tia told me a year later during our phone call it was a sure sign that Sadie had strong tracking instincts. She also said if it was her litter, I would have been given a different puppy. Strange how things work out sometimes.
It was great weather until this morning. It was a great weekend of football games, both college and the NFL ... with some great games to watch. At the same time there was a little excitement in the area outside the norm.
A little past my post on Friday I heard some loud semi-truck action out on the highway from my computer room in back of the house. Traffic was backed up both directions so I knew something was going on, hopefully not a wreck of some kind. I could see something huge through the trees. I grabbed my camera and headed out to see what was going on.
There is construction going on just south of my house where they are rebuilding a bridge, so there is only one lane available.
There are plenty of warning with signs posted in advance in both directions but it's amazing the number of cars and trucks that still pass my house at 65+mph heading toward the construction stop light just a few hundred feet further. The local small town police are making a bundle of money this month catching people speeding above the 45mph limit inside the construction zone. You've seen the signs, with warnings of double the fine and possible jail time. The guilty cars usually pull over just past my house where there is room off the highway. I wonder how much those tickets are costing speeding drivers?
That "one lane" is where the problem was and what was causing all of the late Friday afternoon excitement. Luckily the transporter had the typical pickup trucks with the flashing yellow lights way out in front of them ... so they found out in advance the load of the transporter was not going to fit on a one lane bridge. Their last chance to turn around was just a couple of hundred feet past my house or they would have to spend time backing up on the highway.
So where does this large monstrosity turn around? Someway somehow, they turned left onto a small country road, then backed across the highway into the dirt road I took photos from and walked down last spring when I took photos of an old iron bridge. I was amazed the truck and trailer were able to fit on that dirt road just past a small portion of asphalt.
After a lot of slow maneuvering they got the truck turned around and headed back north in the direction of my house. I knew it would be hard to do from my location to get a clear shot but I was able to get a couple of photos of the large load. I am not sure where they were headed because there isn't a body of water around here to handle a small yacht. Their detour was going to be a lot of additional miles out of their way to get back to their original travel plan.
Saturday came and went ... along with Sunday ... with no words coming to mind to blog about, nor a lot of hound activity to take photos to post on the blog. They never stayed outside long, sniffed the yard, and headed back for the house. We did go on the daily walk but they spent most of their time sleeping inside. Monday they didn't do much more than this on a beautiful sunny day.
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| Stella |
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| Sadie |
With the rain today ... their activities haven't changed much.
I've had computer service with the slow speeds I spoke of last week when I had reached my monthly data limit of 15Gb on my home computer. When that had happened in the past I never saw my speeds go as low as they were. So I started checking all of the connections, unplugging them and then plugging them back in, just in case it would help ... what I found on the coax cable that comes from the satellite dish to the modem was almost indescribable ... I still don' t have an answer for it.
The coax cable was barely screwed on the modem connector. I mean barely when I say that. So the question of the day is ... how? How does a coax cable that is originally screwed on with many turns and ends with a 1/4 turn with a adjustable wrench, become so loose that the cable was barely on the connector?
After I screwed the coax cable back on the connector finger tight and then turned it a 1/4 turn with my small adjustable wrench, my internet speed went from .5Mb to 5.35Mb for the rest of the day. I am almost sure I did the same process with the adjustable wrench when it was hooked up in June 2014 because I do that will all the coax connections.
My new billing period started yesterday so I am back to full speed ahead that is normally around 15Mbps ... even as it rains today.
I was motivated yesterday around my short morning internet time, a lot of time playing Mahjong Deluxe (addicted) on my computer, to back away from the computer and get some house cleaning done. The laundry was taken care of on Sunday. Some final touch ups will happen today and I'll be caught up in that department for a while.
Yesterday afternoon while at my laptop on the kitchen table where I have the best view out a very large window ... the farmer was bringing in his equipment to pick corn in his small field. That was a sign that rain must be on the way, I had not checked the weather forecast the past few days. His other field that was full of the yellow weeds I took photos of last spring was washed out by May and June flooding, so he had lost most of his soybean field. It was interesting to watch them get corn out of this small field, one that is not really level.
By the time they finished they had loaded four semi trailers full of small kernels of corn. I don't know how much that much corn is worth but it must be worth it to plant year after year. Of course that small field is just one of his many fields scattered in the area. Just four miles west of here, the fields are flat and are quite large compared to the ones that run along this highway.
I am going to included some photos of the hounds, taken Friday afternoon after I had posted my last blog post. Like I said then, I'm not finding a lot to write about recently. Add in the fact of the hounds low energy levels and it's hard to come up with writing material sometimes.
It's a day of dark skies and continuous light rain in "the tropics" ... a nice change of pace in the weather.
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| Notice The Spider Caught In A Web |
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| The Reason I Added Those 6 Tiles A Few Years Ago |
All is good though being retired ... possibly the best decision I've ever made.