Winston Loves the Camera & Sadie is Starting To

Yet, Heidi doesn't go back outside after she gets back from her walk ... so I didn't get any pics of her. I will either have to start walking the hounds later for better camera light or take pictures of her earlier when she is outside.

Sadie may not like the iPhone because it's a phone. She has always ran away when I pointed the iPhone at her and likes to bother me the few times I am talking on the phone. When I point the new camera at her, she will face the camera when I call her name. Can you see a dog that size living in a 17' Casita trailer, with a 6'x14' living space? Plus two other long hounds.

Winston has always liked the camera, I'm not sure if there is anything he does not like ... he is just a very mellow basset hound.

He is actually sitting down in the top picture. Not a lot of clearance between the ground and the bottom of his stomach.

There are more weeds than grass in my yard, but it's green and cool once the sun goes down. He would lay there all night if I didn't call him to come inside. Due to Winston having some lower back problems that come with the basset breed, he doesn't play with Sadie as much as he use to but they are still pretty good pals.

Not quite the sunsets like the western states but you can tell it's fall by the way it looks, although the weather temps are not cool at sundown. It's continues to be great weather and not sure when it's going to end. Interesting.

That's it for today ... but I have a lot of ideas of where I want to explore around here. I'm going to try to take all three hounds with me and hopefully the more they ride the better adjusted they will become instead of acting like it's dinner time every time I stop the FJ.

A Camera Has Been Purchased

Maybe a surprise but this is usually my normal process about purchasing decisions ... want something, do some research, and buy it. It usually doesn't take longer than a week for a decision to be made. Why can't it be that simple when it comes to me buying an RV?

After I posted about my interest in buying a new camera, something different than my iPhone 5s and getting back into photography as a hobby, I had answers to my email questions, comments on my blog post, and a phone call from my long time friend of 45yrs. All of these people had taken or are taking great pictures currently. Almost all those that replied are using different model cameras. So I received the feedback I was looking for and by the time I made the 25 mile drive to Bloomington to Best Buy, a decision had been made.

Some of you may be asking "why Best Buy, you could have gotten a better deal". As it turned out, Best Buy was the best deal for me and I'll explain.

First of all to all that commented here on the blog and those that emailed me ... I looked and studied all of your suggestions. There were a lot of positives to sort through but I finally had to ask myself what my plans were for photography. Once I knew what I wanted to do and then built a little buffer into what I wanted, the decision was close to being made.

The camera searches included Amazon, Nikon, Canon, Best Buy, Adorama, Craig's List, eBay, some local camera shops and Walmart, even though I would never buy any electronics from Walmart.

I knew in the future I was going to be needing a zoom lens in the range of 200mm or more. I thought I'd have to buy that separately, so I looked at new and used lenses, recorded their prices. I also knew I wanted to buy more than just a camera body, I wanted at least one lens that came with the camera. When I added costs of buying things needed separately, it was always higher than what I expected to pay.

Tuesday night I called my old friend Ralph. We have known each other and keep in touch on a regular basis since we live an hour from each other. The reason I wanted to call him was to run some of my thoughts by him, Ralph as a teenager had Nikon 35mm camera equipment in the 1960's that he had used during his summer hikes all over the USA. I wasn't sure if he was still into photography. I assumed he might have done what most of us did and that was to buy a smaller, more convenient, automatic point and shoot camera.

Ralph is still using his Nikon D-90 with various lens. I won't go into our discussion but will say that toward the end of our conversation he agreed that I was buying the right camera for what I wanted to do.

I decided to buy the Nikon D3200.

As you see it came as a "Bundled Set" with a bag, a 18-55 and a 55-200 Nikkor lens. Basically it was everything I wanted. I found it at three different places online, all within $3 of each other.

Those places might surprise you.

1. Adorama
2. Best Buy
3. Walmart

Adorama and Walmart had the Nikon D3200 bundle for $546 and Best Buy had it for $549.

Now here is why I used Best buy. Besides being local, there was another big advantage, more than I expected. Since I had bought most, not all, of my Apple computers there I had a few dollars in awards not used that I could use to decrease the total price.

That's not all. In the past few weeks I looked at Gazelle Buy Back to see how much I could get for my two old iPhones, the 3gs and the 4, that have been sitting in my desk drawer after each phone upgrade. Also since Apple was no longer including the 1st generation iPad with their updates and synchronization with their computers and iPhones I had thought about trading that in for a newer model iPad. I remembered those amounts that Gazelle was going to give me for my two iPhones and iPad if I chose to use their buy back system. I did not think of checking what they were worth on Best Buys buy back program while I was on the computer at home. That mistake cost me making two trips to Bloomington.

So I am in the store ready to buy the camera and saw where they had deals on "trade ins", for the iPhone 6 or 6Plus. Long story short, Best Buy was giving more money for my two iPhones and iPad as a buy back than Gazelle was. Plus I could use that amount toward my purchase of the camera bundle and save even more. I didn't have the phones or iPad with me. I would have to drive back home, 25 miles away to pick them up if I were going to use my trade in dollars before I bought the camera.

So as I have the Nikon D3200 in my hands, I get an email from Mark over at Box Canyon Blog telling me he uses a small Canon Digital Elf 110 HS for his great photos while hiking. There was a Elf 135 right behind me. So I started thinking again about which camera to buy. Since I was going back home to get the phones and iPad to trade in before I made any purchase, I decided I could think more about the cameras on the drive home.

When all of the dust settled after using my award dollars on my account, the amount for my trade ins... My Nikon D3200 Bundle was bought for $335. I sprinted to my car and got out of town before they had the chance to change their minds. (j/k)

So this morning while the camera battery was charging and over coffee, I read the manual that came with it. I covered enough material to be able to use the camera. I lot of camera stuff came back to me from my past as I started to take some test pictures. Yes, I could see my hands were shaking just a little bit as I glanced through the viewer. It's great to have modern technology to fix that issue. So here are a few samples, nothing major, just some test photos. I didn't make any enhancement changes to the photos except crop a couple.

WARNING: On the photo of Sadie below you might want to scroll past it to the next picture of Winston, as it will be gross to some people. Otherwise if you choose to look at the next picture of Sadie you will see one of the highlights of owning a Bloodhound ... you might want to duck or turn away if she starts shaking her head. That isn't a white string you are seeing ... that is good old fashion bloodhound drool, stuck to the side of her lip.

What's wrong? she asks

Winston on the other hand has just returned from the daily walk and a little aerobic exercise. He must have been feeling good today because at times he did some trotting through the field. Usually its a very slow walk with him.

After the walk Heidi refused to come back outside for the photo shoot ... so nothing of her on this post. She is stubborn and I am stubborn.

The next shot is one of the older trees still standing in my yard. Someone told me it was a mahogany tree, I'm not sure ... but it's been there a really long time.

I "know just enough to be dangerous" with the camera, I like the clarity of the test pictures I took, something I was wanting even after cropping a couple of them. I ended the day with a short mountain bike ride to town a couple of miles away, about 4 miles round trip I guess. Combine that with mowing the yard today I should be able to sleep hopefully before midnight instead of 3am - 4am. I have decided these past few days as I have tried to decrease my computer time, that my days are going to be spent outside when there's good weather. I have decided to keep my computer time after 6pm. I cannot waste good weather, sitting in front of a computer all day.

For all of those people that contacted me with answers to my camera questions ... thank you.

Cameras

A few months ago on my way to recycling, which our center is located out in the middle of some corn fields, I passed a field of horses. It was a great opportunity to take a neat photograph but all I had with me was my iPhone 5s, I had no way to zoom in on the horses themselves. I took a couple of photos, one of them when they took off running but I was too far away. That was when I had a short mental bolt of wanting a different camera.

Sometime last month I was going through some older boxes of stuff when I had a sudden urge to downsize a little more. I found an old Kodak 8x11.5" box I had forgot I had, full of photographs I had taken close to 30 years ago with my Nikon (can't remember the model) and 70-200mm zoom lens. Some of those were black and white 8x10's, some where 5x8's in color.

A few of the photographs I took as a series on the beach in Hawaii as the sun was setting, not knowing my zoom lens was picking up a kyaker moving in front of the sun. What stood out to me was how sharp they were, even after 25-30 years old. Of course most of my photos were on 35mm slides. There must have been 1,000's of them, too many to look through and the thought of scanning them was overwhelming. I glanced through a lot of them, holding them up to the light and instantly going back in time and could almost feel like I was there.

Once again ... quality was sharp and clear.

In the mid-90's I sold all of my lenses, filters, the bag, tripod and camera body to a neighbor in high school wanting to pursue photography. I am not sure why I decided to sell that stuff, except a few years prior to that for some reason I had stopped using the equipment completely. I may have started taking photos with a smaller camera with a built-in zoom lens. I don't remember the name or model of that camera, but I do have a few photos from that time period.

Maybe the convenience of not carrying a bag of equipment with me? Maybe it was having just one camera and a multiple size lens that made me change my direction in photography? I don't know but I do remember after 1994 I started taking photos a lot less. Hardly at all. My bag of equipment sat in the closet never used until I sold it.

Last month I kept going back to those older photos and looking at how sharp they were. Then I would look at all my digital photos on my blog and in iPhoto on my iMac, trying to compare the difference. I thought my iPhone took pretty good photographs but one thing I noticed was when I would crop the photo and it would zoom into a closer view, the sharpness disappeared. You can see that in yesterday's post with Heidi at the top of the page. The other two photos were not cropped but for some reason were not as sharp as normal. Could it have been my hands, the light ... don't know.

When I mentioned I was looking at different camera equipment on my blog, a few made comments, a couple answered my questions by replying in emails and other's I found out what kind of camera they were using from their websites. All of them have great photography of their travels posted on their blogs. All of them were high quality and reminded me of my older photos that I shot with my 35mm camera years ago.

I knew then I wanted a different camera than my iPhone and the palm sized Nikon Coolpix 3100. I had bought the smaller camera in 2005 to take photos of items I was selling on eBay and my other websites. I've rarely been able to take good photos with that camera without using the tripod ... too small to hold steady.

So the past few weeks I've been spending more time looking at different cameras online, reading suggestions as I get them and just like my rv decisions ... hadn't come up with one.  Still I am much closer today on what to buy than I was a few days ago.

I've looked through all the specs, customer reviews, and even wrote down a list of camera models and lenses used by people that had commented, emailed or blogs I follow. NO ... I have not put that information into a spreadsheet like I have done on everything else, so I am pretty proud of myself that my camera analysis has not gone to that depth.

I was close to buying a Nikon D3200 last week. Since it was an older model, it was on sale. It came with the bag, battery, charger, strap and an 18-55mm lens. I didn't buy it, I wanted to research some more.

Albireo uses a Nikon D3300 and is considering moving up to a heavier, larger camera, the Nikon D810. That is some great equipment but might be more camera than what I am looking for. I don't know how far I want to take this reborn hobby, so I am almost starting over with a camera that a beginner would buy .. maybe 'intermediate' would be a more accurate level.

Al over at The Bayfield Bunch takes fantastic photographs daily. That is his hobby and although he claims he is not a professional photographer, the quality of his photos and the way they are taken are every bit professional. He has different cameras with different size lenses mounted for different shots. They range from a Nikon D3100, a Nikon D-90 and his older camera for backup, a Nikon D-40. He has a Canon SX210iS on his belt at times for the unexpected shot and a Canon A730iS near his chair inside to shoot the Phebe's. I do those kind of inside shots with my iPhone 5s, although Sadie is not a fan of being a photo model.

Chinle at Spotted Dog Ranch takes her landscape photographs of her travels with a Canon EOS Rebel T1i. A lot of her photos are using a larger zoom lens, one that I would need. I would have to buy the new version, a T3i if I went that route, unless I could find a used T1i on Amazon or Craig's list. Yet, there is just something about buying used equipment from those two sites that I don't like. I would buy used equipment from a 'old school' camera store or a friend though. From her photographs from Canada this past summer, I see that I would need 200mm or 300mm zoom capability for what I want to shoot.

Gary Ramsey has some fantastic photography at Travel Small With Ramsey. He uses a Sony NEX 5n. Those cameras are a little out of my price range, although the price for a used Sony NEX 5n is reasonable on Amazon, but you know how I feel about buying used equipment.

Basically I had been looking at different cameras that had interchangeable lenses. I was favoring the Nikon D3200 due to the customer reviews, the price and it was within a short distance from my house. I haven't bought it because I didn't know if I wanted to go back to carrying one camera and then a bag with different sized lenses. I had done that before many years ago when cameras that had multiple range lenses built into the camera were not available.

I kept reading and looking.

Then yesterday I get a comment on my blog post from Lloyd over at Enjoy The Journey. His older blog name was Wanderin Lloyd for those that follow blogs. Either way his photography is also fantastic with different cameras used over his 13 years of traveling. You will see in his comment yesterday that he uses a Canon SX40 for his trips to zoos, museums, etc and uses a Canon SX700 30x lens when hiking.

Those two cameras kind of hit home with me. Great photographs, great consumer reviews and I noticed all the photos taken from a distance were sharp. Just like the cameras I mentioned above but these had just one built in lens with a wide range of different distance. Was the Canon SX40 the camera I had been looking for?

I spent a lot of time last night looking at those types of Canon and Nikon cameras. I am thinking that might be the type of camera I need. 

What I want is one camera, ability to shoot macro shots, landscape, shots of my hounds even in "action", zooming in on the eagle that shows up in back on rare occasions. Then at times I'd like to zoom in on the 10-15 deer that surprise us at times just in back of the house. I also wanted to be able to catch action shots that requires high speed, at sport events, especially when I go to the Indy 500 to watch practice or the times I am sitting on row 53 at a football game wanting to take a shot down at the line of scrimmage or sidelines.

After reading about the Canon SX40 and SX50, I am beginning to think that is the camera I've been looking for. I would have to buy the SX40 on Amazon, everyone locally is selling only the SX50 model with the SX60 coming out in October.

So I will let those thoughts brew for a while, maybe a day, maybe hours ... before I decide what to buy. The Nikon 3100, 3200 and 3300 are available locally as well as the Canon SX50.

In the meantime, the hounds will continue to "sleep on it" before the decision is made.

Not a Lot To Blog About

One thing that has changed since I retired in April, the hounds get to go outside a lot more than when I was working. They also seem to like to go outside at the same times day and night. Just recently Heidi has been going outside every time the other two go outside and that's a good thing. Just this past summer she rarely got off of her dog bed on the floor and usually that was just to move to the couch.

But she is evidently feeling better now because not only does she go outside even for short trips, she is barking at 4pm every day to be fed.

It may take some coaxing to get her to get off the couch and go on the daily walk but once she starts the walk, she insists that she be the leader of the walk and will do anything to keep in front of Sadie to maintain the lead.

Little does she know that Sadie could care less who leads. Sadie is only conscious of what scent is in front of her nose and yesterday it was good I had her on a leash, the deer scents were stronger than normal.

Winston on the other hand is getting older and consequently is needing to go out more times than this time last year. I can tell that his aging process seems to have increased this past year and in a way that is a sad thing.

He will also put his nose to the ground as soon as he steps outside. He is stubborn, will not listen if a scent has him busy and is slow in everything he does. He is on his own clock and will not move faster no matter how much I voice commands.

In this picture around noon today he is enjoying a cool 65°. His favorite position is laying on the concrete in the sun and will spend hours sleeping, at times so long that I forget that he is outside.

Sadie have has never liked having her picture taken. I was able to when she was just a few months old, but after that she would turn her head or take off running. She definitely does not like the camera.

In this case I took eight different photos trying to catch her looking at me and every time at the last split second she would turn her head.

She might not like cameras but she LOVES outdoors. She loves going outside, will stay out for a while or there will be times that she will want to come back inside two minutes after wanting to go outside. She never barks but will just stand still until I come outside to find her.

She will even sit sometimes in the field not moving, thinking she is stuck or her rope is tangled up. The funny thing is, she is not on the rope that is anchored. The one time she was attacked by the neighbor's dog, she just sat down and didn't move while the other dog was moving around her in circles barking.

All of these photos were taken today around noon with an iPhone 5S.

It's another beautiful day here in the 'tropics' of southern Indiana. It was all weekend actually and it is the norm for this time of year, yet it's strange seeing all the different kinds of weather hitting other parts of the USA, the fires in California, flooding in Arizona and tornadoes yesterday in Michigan. Still very nice here and one of the reasons I hardly have the urge to travel in the fall seasons in the Midwest. Plus it's football season.

Saturday was the normal college football marathon. What can I say, I'm addicted to that sport even though there are still things outside the game I don't like about it. I am hesitant to say what I don't like about the current game because it also spreads into the NFL, and society in general. It would take too long to type and discuss all the different aspects of some sad situations and wold only lead to more discussions on subjects I am tired about hearing in the news.

I'll talk about the games only and not the news outside the games.

My local team (IU) had a major upset at Missouri Saturday. They have a little split personality in them the past couple of years, meaning they can play great one weekend and next weekend they might look like they have never played the game. I'll take the win on Saturday though. Those type of wins are very very rare in football.

I only have one tv but flip back and forth to different games during commercials. I also have my remote set up to a set of sports channels on DirecTv. It's amazing how many games are televised at one time. I don't want to see all of the games but a lot of times there are a couple of games going on at the same time, so I'll record one and then watch it later IF it turns out to be a good game. My Saturday viewing starts at noon eastern time and ends after the late Pac12 game usually around 1:30am Sunday morning. I'm a night person, so there is not a problem with the late finish time.

Sunday I watched only a couple of NFL games. The local Colts games and then a Super Bowl rematch where Denver was in Seattle, a game that went into overtime. Great game to watch.

Some might be asking what do the hounds do during all of these football games? They sleep most of the time which is their normal daily activity. Throughout the day they will have me take them outside, more trips during the day since I am retired. We can usually fit those requests to go outside during commercials and we still do the daily walk either at game halftimes or between games.

Their daily routine is not changed just because I am watching football. It's good they have the room to spread out during the day, each hitting their favorite sleeping spots and those spots do change during the day. That is one thing I think about deciding whether to buy a trailer or not ... the available room. The interesting thing is their sleeping spots are the same every day and change by what time of day it is.

Heidi is feeling much better. She is actually going outside every time the other two hounds go out, where she wasn't during the summer. She hardly got off of her dog bed during the summer, only getting up to move to the couch to continue her sleeping marathons. She takes her time deciding whether to go on the daily walk but then will insist she leads the way once the walk starts.

With all the news about Apple's release of the iPhone 6 and the OS upgrade to 8.0, I am seeing today in the blogs I follow that 8.0 seems to be too frustrating so they are showing people how they can revert back to OS 7.2. I usually wait before upgrading operating systems on my phone or computer and I think I'll still follow that until the bugs are worked out. It's tempting but I'm sticking with the 5s I bought in June. I remember when I decided to renew my contract and upgrade my phone, I had decided not to wait for the iPhone 6. I wasn't sure I would like the size of it.

Really, I have no desire to be carrying a small tablet all the time when I am out and about. In fact I have been tempted recently to selling my 1st generation iPad, my iPhone 4 and my new iPhone 5s ... then going to a cheap flip phone to use for emergencies and making the few calls I make every month. When I thought about that, the only thing I could gain by selling the 5s, is part of the cost of the phone. I would still have to have the same monthly plan with Verizon, so I would not be saving anything there. I might as well keep the 5s.

Reading Rick's blog this morning, I started thinking if I should go back to a Google+ account. Unlimited storage for iPhone photographs is a pretty good deal. I have plenty of room on my iMac, so storage is not an issue for photographs, same with my 16Gb iPhone. I have 1,000's of photos on my iPhone and have barely used the amount of storage available. I still remember the reasons I stopped my Google+ account before and still feel the same way about it.

Rick did bring up an interesting point when he was talking about cameras. He said with digital photography and posting photos on blogs, it really didn't make a difference if those blog photos were taken by an iPhone or a bigger digital camera. Recently I've been thinking of buying a bigger digital camera to get back into photography as a hobby. It's been almost 20 years since I had a larger camera and interchangeable lenses. The only other camera I have besides my iPhone is a Nikon CoolPix 3100, that I bought years ago for my online sales business.

Many times I would have to use a tripod with that camera because I was not able to hold the camera still enough when I used two hands. Would it be that way if I were to buy a larger Nikon? I think a larger camera would be easier to hold and less chance of blurred photos that the CoolPix has at times.

That's about it ... nothing really going on ... and I apologize for the lack of excitement in this post. It's just part of the laid back lifestyle outside a small rural town. I'm spending less time on the computer recently, looking and reading about different cameras, and on occasion trailers and camping equipment. I have thought more about traveling this winter. I still don't see traveling is possible with my three hounds and two hands.

Heidi and Her Allergy Update

Heidi may be the one hound that isn't talked about as much as the others but I give her just as much attention as Winston and Sadie. Since I bought her from a rescue service in July 2011, she seems to stay by herself most of the time. Sadie is a little big for her to play with, Winston is at the age where running around and playing is not on his agenda ... so she hangs out kind of on her own. When she is in the house alone she does like to play, will sprint all over the house wanting someone to chase her but will immediately stop if Sadie enters the house. She does sleep with them at night and will also sit on the couch with Winston in the evenings.

Sadie would like to play with her but doesn't realize how big and strong she is. Sadie has clipped blocked me before in the back of my knee, knocked me down various times and it felt like one of the better tackles I remember from high school football, many many years ago.

When I bought Heidi from GABR on July 2011, she came with a reputation of being "a runner" and a file full of medical records where they had treated her for allergies. She now walks leash free on the daily walks with no problems. She has chased an occasional rabbit but will always tire out and stop before getting to far away.

She also goes out and stays outside for short periods of time without a leash. I think it might have something to do with her knowing this is her home since it's the first time she has been at one location for three years after moving from different families and ending up in the dog shelters her first two years.

Walks Leash Free

Walks Leash Free

Walks Leash Free

 When those allergies flare up like they do every summer, they look like the following pictures.

She does not wear a collar except on her walks. The original diagnosis was alopecia on her rear legs. She has been treated at different times over the past three years with Ketoconazole, Medrol, Tribrissen and the latest was a shot of Vetalog.

Most of the pills and shots last a month or so and then the rash will return. This past July I decided I did not want to use the different shots or pills so I tried a food additive called Dinovite. After 60 days of daily use, there was no improvement and in fact the rash became worse.

So a few weeks ago when she was due for her annual check up and annual shots, I had the vet give her a shot for her allergies. Within 24 hours I could tell a difference in not only her rashes but also the way she acted.

With all the time she spent sleeping and not wanting to go outside, she must have been in a lot of pain. I will remember that in the future. I was thinking she was just tired/laidback but the reason I assume she was in pain is the way she has been acting in the past few weeks after getting her shot.

She now goes outside around 7am with the other two hounds, in fact she will get up and go outside anytime they want to go outside. Before when I didn't realize how much pain she was in, she would not go outside hardly at all. The only thing is now she thinks that every time she comes back inside, she get a Milk Bone and starts barking. She has always barked more than the other two hounds, doesn't bark a lot, only when she wants a Milk Bone and it's time to eat in the afternoon.

So I can tell a major difference in the way she acts. I will be returning the empty box of Dinovite for a refund as their policy states. I read their customer comments, both positive and negative, before I made the purchase but I thought it might work even though I had my doubts.

I never really thought it was food allergies. In the past I have fed her Taste of the Wild (no grain), Diamond Naturals 60+ for large bread dogs, Fromm Golden, Nature's Domain (no grain) from Costco, all with no improvement.

To find out if it might be the grass or hay she was allergic to, I kept her out of the yard when she would go outside and no daily walks for two weeks. Some of those walks were canceled because of the temperatures being above 95°. After two weeks there was no improvement in her rashes.

I mentioned all of this to the vet at her annual checkup and she said in past allergy tests she had given to other dogs recently, they were allergic to almost anything, ranging from dust mites, pollen, dog dander, etc. She did not think it was a food allergy based on her experience.

The vet did tell me to use the Antibacterial Antifungal spray I had bought the next time the rashes show up and see if that would work before bringing her back in for shots. 

The vet then trimmed her nails way back. The vet is the only person Heidi will let cut and dremmel her nails, so they are much shorter than what these pictures show.

Winston and Sadie have not shown any kind of allergies living in the same environment and eating the different foods. They will eat anything in dry kibble just as long as they get their dinner by 4pm eastern time every day. When it gets close to that time, Sadie will come and get me if I have not fed them yet.

She is a great dog that has been a house dog from the first minutes she arrived with no accidents or destruction. I am not sure how she kept ending up in the animal shelter, although the GABR did say the last time she was a "owner surrender" to the shelter. It is estimated she will be 6 years old this December 2014.

Previous Post About a New Blog Deleted

Very early this morning I had posted about a new blog I had found and had put on my sidebar. It also had a comment and my reply to that comment. Both comments were good but the more I thought about the blog, I decided it wasn't a good fit here.

I deleted the post and the blog that was on the sidebar.

This biggest issue this morning and yes, it's already 11am ... is coffee filters.

At the local Super Wallyworld they were out of the Braun brand name coffee filters in the black box. I picked up some generic filters that had a list of coffee machines they would work with. Braun was listed. They didn't look right but I trusted the label.

Bad decision on my part ... they don't come close to working.

I guess that is one of the dangers of retirement living.

Sadie and Her Separation Anxiety

Since the first day I brought her home as a twelve week old pup, she has shown separation anxiety. I thought after we moved past year six that it would change. In a way it has, she doesn't destroy things now, just tracks scent and drags it out for her own use and to show me what she has found.

It is always my stuff and not hers. She seems to follow The Bloodhound Laws that you can see here at the bottom of the page.

In the case of the photo on the left, she spent a lot of time hauling her red blanket from the floor to my bed for a little siesta while I was gone. This happened some time ago.

After a couple of years I spoke with a different breeder than whom I bought Sadie from and she explained to me what and why Sadie was doing what she was doing. At the time there was a lot of destruction involved while I was gone anywhere from 10 minutes to hours. While I was at work, she was kenneled for her first four years to keep her safe and my possessions safe. But during short periods of being outside she would get into stuff.

The breeder had acquired Sadie's dad and their personalities were almost identical. The breeder said she gives her puppies a test at forty-five days old to see if they are trackers or couch potatoes. After I answered four out of five questions positive, I found out that Sadie was rated as a tracker and the reason for her nose to always be in the working mode. It was the reason during the times I would be away that she would get into things, drag them out for me to see when I got back and some times destroyed.

The breeder said if I had bought Sadie from her, she would have given me a pup that tested out to be a "couch potato" instead of one that tested high for tracking. She would not have sold me Sadie. I had originally picked out a different bloodhound pup at first but changed to Sadie because she would follow Winston anywhere he went and would try to get him to play. She was the only one of eight pups that did that. Now I found out that when she followed Winston that showed a tracking instinct more than the other pups.

The two basset hounds can stay anywhere in the house while I am gone, no matter how long I am gone without any problems. I found out a couple of years ago the best room in the house to keep Sadie was in the bedroom. She sleeps on the floor at night, had familiar smells and fewer things she could get into. I also put the two bassets in the room with her to keep her company with hopes of preventing any tracking activity. I no longer kept her in a kennel due to her size compared to the largest kennel you could buy for inside use.

Overall things have improved a lot the past few years and now things she does at times are funny stories rather than getting home and pulling what little hair I have out of my head. Of course at all times when I am getting ready to leave, I have to put a baby gate up not to block the door because I shut the door, but to keep her from getting into my closet.

Her "specialty" use to be, get into the closet (sliding doors) and chew just the plastic tip off of the shoestring and only one shoe per pair. Honestly, there was never a time when both shoes had the tips chewed off, just one shoe per pair. There was never a time when the shoestring was chewed up ... just the plastic tip. I wish Nike, New Balance, Merrell would sell the exact same shoestrings for the shoes they sell.

So where this post is going is what happened yesterday. It was time to mow the yard and the normal procedure is to put her in the locked bedroom while I mow the backyard, then bring her outside where she is connected to her 100' climbing rope so she can roam in the field behind my house while I mow the front yard.

For some reason yesterday I decided to let her roam the house with the two basset hounds (they sleep the whole time). After finishing the backyard in about fifteen minutes, I moved to the side yard and glanced into the bedroom window to see if Sadie was sleeping on the floor or bed. No Sadie anywhere.

As I moved by the side window for the living room I glanced inside the window to see if she was in the living room. There were two basset hounds sleeping by the window on the floor, no Sadie anywhere.

In my small downsized house there are not a lot of rooms left to choose where she might be but I knew exactly where where she was. I mowed along the front of the house, shut it off and then as quietly as I could I walked into the house and glanced into the room where I have my computer, desk, dog blankets and the large rubber container full of forty pounds of newly acquired dry dog food. Like she use to do in the past while I was getting ready for work, she had removed or knocked off the lid, TWO 15# dumbbells and moved the lid to the side. This lid also locks to the container once you push down on the edges.

Someway she can get them off. The dumbbells are on the lid to keep her from getting into the food, even if I am inside the house. Usually during the time I am watching ballgames in the living room.

As I glanced into the room I see a wagging bloodhound dog tail and her head inside the container eating dry dog food. Luckily I had caught her soon enough to where she had not eaten a large amount and that would decrease the potential for her bloating. Bloating is common in large breed dogs and luckily she has never experienced that. Eating large amounts of food though could set that off. It didn't look like she had ate that much, still it was only an hour after I had fed her the regular meal.

When she saw me she knew she was in trouble and caught red handed. She took off in a sprint to her dog bed in the corner of the bedroom, laying there like nothing happened. With that bloodhound innocent look like asking me "is something wrong"?

Words were not needed ... she knew.

I babygated the closet doors, shut the bedroom door and then went back outside to finish mowing the front yards. It had been one of those days where she didn't want to be outside and would bark until I would bring her back inside, so this time I left her inside.

I began thinking and wondering what she would do or get into if we were in an RV or trailer and I left all of the hounds inside the trailer while I was out hiking, mountain biking or grocery shopping? There would not be a room I could shut her up in if I had a trailer. Temperatures would determine if I could leave her in the FJ while shopping. In a motorhome I could gate her off into the back bedroom where she could still get into things.

This issue with her and me being gone has always been in the thought process, asking myself if she would ever be a good dog to RV with. Would this separation anxiety also determine what kind of RV I would buy?

Domain is Working & Ramblings

It looks like my blogging vacation lasted a couple of weeks. I wasn't off the internet and spent more time than I would have preferred online but I'll discuss that later in this post. I can't shut my mind off so I am always thinking about different decisions and solutions.

First of all, I am going to renew the domain name of this blog. I just checked it and it did work. So all should be operable at www.houndsandrvs.com as well as www.bhounds.blogspot.com Yesterday I took down the domain name and was just using my blogger address, so for those that tried to visit the blog and got the blank page saying your browser could not find the blog ... that was the reason for it.

This blog is almost three years old, I have close to or a little over 100,000 page views and regular readers that come back looking for either new information, see if I'm breathing, what the hounds are doing and what kind of travel plans I have, if any.

So, I decided to stay "open for business", renew my domain name and continue to blog. I have a lot of online friends here and that's always a good thing being a self proclaimed loner. I know being on the side of a "blog reader" it's always disappointing after following a blog to either have the author stop blogging and tells you or the blogger that quietly disappears and never comes back to their blog.

I didn't feel it was right to stop blogging, even about every day routine living as long as I had followers and I still had the urge to write. Which I have both.

While I didn't write about anything I did do some rearranging. As you could see I moved some things from the right sidebar to the left sidebar. I removed some blogs from my list only to make it shorter. I still follow the removed blogs on my Feedly account. I deleted photos of the hounds and my Toyota. I might put the photos of the hounds back on the sidebar. I'll probably continue to move things around and may add those blog links back to my sidebar even though the list was long.

During my absence I continued to read my list of RV blogs as well as other retirement blogs and found that I was not the only one questioning whether to continue blogging or what subjects to write about. Lloyd posted yesterday that he was finding little to write about since he has come off the road, doing the same hike everyday and now living in one spot. He had also gone through all of the social media options and is reverting back to just blogger as his writing platform.

Bob Lowry and his wife over at A Satisfying Retirement just returned home from a trip to the upper Midwest in a Class C and found that 43% of his expenses were going into the fuel tank. While Curtis over at Poor Mans RV Life has found out that after using a Class C, a Jeep Cherokee towing a trailer and a Van over the years, that his older diesel pusher, a Pace Arrow is the best rig he has traveled in, getting 10mpg and spending roughly $500 per month in fuel as he starts his fulltime RV lifestyle.

Both of those percentages and dollars are more than I had budgeted in my estimates. I also knew or expected I would spend more than I have budgeted for fuel, food, etc.

As I mentioned above, I've been spending more time than I have wanted on the internet. It's just the rut I've been in longer than I want to admit. I do a lot of online reading during the day from the blogs I follow, to sports news and forums, forums for the FJ Cruiser and Mini Cooper as well as computers. I trying to stay away from reading the news, still it is very easy to spend hours and hours reading before you realize just how much time you have spent ... which feels like wasted time to me.

That is not the way I want to spend everyday ... so today I am making changes.

It's beautiful outside AGAIN today, so I am definitely going to be spending some time outside with the hounds. The Mini Cooper needs washed and it's finally cool enough to do that. With the recent storms and high winds I will be getting on the roof since the temps have decreased and clear off some broken tree branches.

I admit I like this time of year in the "tropics" of southern Indiana. With the clear skies you can see a million stars at night and the low humidity you can do things outside and still breath. For some reason this summer, bugs and mosquitoes have not been a problem. At night I am smelling more and more camp fires in the air.

Al talked about his three hobbies he has had over the years and how they have came together in the way he travels and his daily photography. That got me thinking and asking myself what were my hobbies past and present. Some of them I have always had for as long as I remember while I found a few that I no longer did but had possible interest in starting again.

Back in the 80's I was into photography. I had all the different sized lenses, the different filters and the bags to carry the equipment in. I have photographs I took while traveling throughout the world and 99% of those photographs are on 35mm slides. At that time 35mm slides was the preferred option for taking photographs. I have some older photos from a small 110 camera that I took with me on my cross country bicycle trip and those can be scanned, I just need to take the time to do it.

So photography is something I might start doing again. I realized I have a lot of neat things to take photos of around here but like most everyone else ... we take those shots for granted since they are a part of our daily life and end up not taking pictures. Many of the photos I am seeing from bloggers this summer from Whidbey Island and surrounding areas, I don't have a lot of photos of but have ten years worth of them in my mind. I think I'd rather have the photos.

Sports have been a hobby of mine since my first breath. My dad was a high school basketball and baseball coach so our life was geared around sports 12 months a year. In the summers he would have two to three weeks off and unlike many of the current RV bloggers, we did NOT take camping trips .. we would travel but would stay in motels that had a pool. We also tried to tie those vacations to major league baseball games if possible. So, no matter what happens I doubt my love of watching sports will ever change.

Another hobby I like doing is riding either a road bicycle or my mountain bike, even if its only for a few miles. When I do travel I will take the mountain bike with me and leave the road bikes at home.

Like Al, I have always enjoyed driving ... yes driving.  I cannot count the number of times I have made trips from California to Indiana and back or Washington to Indiana and back but every time I loved driving cross country. Yet on all of those trips I either didn't have time or didn't take time to stop and look at the beautiful country I was traveling through. At times I did take the older highways but only stopped for food, gas and an occasional nap.

From the list of hobbies I wrote down just out of curiosity, I found that I could do most if not all of them traveling.

That leads me to the subject of traveling.

At this time I cannot make that commitment. Basically after more thinking the past two weeks and even coming close to purchasing a trailer I have decided not at this time. I also enjoy this time of the year in Indiana. Also the hounds ... every time I think about them traveling, I think of their comfortable life here. Winston is getting older, hind legs are getting weaker, and when I look into his old eyes as I pet him ... I hear the words "stay here". Heidi is getting treatments for her skin issues which have not changed even with cooler temps and even keeping her off grass for two weeks ... they got worse. Sadie is just Sadie ... big and needs room when inside.

After a few recent tests traveling with the hounds there are still issues that I wrote about here last September. They do better in the FJ than in the H3 Hummer I had. It's a little bit smaller inside so less room for stuff and us. I just feel the best time for me to do any traveling is when I am down to one hound, not three. It doesn't matter how much I want to travel in a small trailer towed by my FJ 4x4, I know that is not enough room for me and the hounds.

Of course you never know what lays ahead in life, what could change to take away that chance to travel but I am willing to live with my decision and I'll have no regrets if something happens to prevent me from traveling. I have traveled a lot and seen a lot of places recorded in photos in the past just not in an RV, so if something happens before I can travel it's ok.

I will still take short trips with the hounds but I cannot say that I'll make the commitment to travel for the reasons explained above.

Today I am making some subtle changes to my daily routine to enjoy what's outside around me and also to get out of my recent rut. I know I am early into my retirement phase but I think I need some sort of structure instead of floating aimlessly through my days. I'm not talking major changes, just things that will put me back into some sort of routine, without spending all my time in front of a computer monitor.

My traveling plans may change when the temperature get to the point that I hate being here and that might be enough to shove me out the door, hounds and all.

Even with little to no travel at this time, I will continue to blog about retirement living and if anything changes in the travel plans.

I'm Taking a Vacation From Blogging

A couple of things.

I'm not sure that I am going to renew my current domain name: houndsandrvs.com when it expires sometime in September. Currently it redirects to my original blogspot domain. If you decide you want to continue to follow this blog in case there are changes down the road you will need to change your bookmark address to this domain name:  bhounds.blogspot.com. That will be the blog address if I decide not to renew my current domain name.

There isn't much going on in my life since I have basically finished my research of RVs and currently have no plans to travel. I find it hard to write about everyday living when the intent of the blog was to write about researching RVs and then writing about my travels. I can't honestly say if those travels will take place or not, even after almost three years this October.

I am also finding my retirement life is nothing exciting and definitely not anything to write about to send out for the public to read. It is basically what I expected it would be if I chose to live here after retiring. Things are good but slow. There is really nothing to read here when the highlight of the week is mowing the yard or washing a car.

Because of that I have decided I am going to take a blog vacation.

I Saw The Bad Side of the Economy Today

This post fits more into the "Retirement" side of my blog. It would just graze the edge of the "RV" side of the blog.

By helping a friend today, someone I worked with just a few months ago, I saw for the first time the bad side of the economy in the USA. It's the economy that some say has recovered and everything is great and then there is the side where those people cannot see the light at the end of a dark dark tunnel.

In some news media over the past few years you might have read how the majority of working couples are really just a payday away from disaster. This is based on no savings, living payday to payday, a family to support plus a mortgage. Well, this is kinda like one of those stories.

In this case there was no mortgage lost, but a single mother supporting two boys below the age of 7. Due to some recent contract awards while working for the government as a government contractor, her parent company lost the contract after five years of support, when it came due for new bidding. The new contractor chose not to make an offer to her to keep her job. It is common the new company will make an offer when there is a change in government contracts.

In this case a couple of things have played against her. Those are somewhat private and something I will not discuss here, since I do have some ex coworkers that read this blog on occasion.

Without a job offer to her, to keep her job, what it did was move her and her two boys from a very nice large house that was rented, eliminated a very substantial salary to nothing and a situation where the job market is tight enough in the local area that after a month of job searching she has found herself unemployed. She is also out of money and her unemployment does not start until the week of September 21, 2014. That unemployment payment will be less than half of her salary of a month ago. How many of us could afford to take a 60% pay cut or more?

When I heard the news from a mutual friend the other day, I contacted her to see if she was ok and if there was anything I could do to help. Since I have been out of circulation by being retired, I was not aware of job opportunities as I normally would be. So there was nothing I could do there to help her in finding a job except let her know she could use me as a reference.

What she asked for and told me was the most stressful for her right now was a very surprising answer. It was an answer that showed me just how bad this friend was hurting, withdrawing and not asking for help from any of her friends. She had just moved from that large nice rental house to a small 3 room, not 3 bedroom but a 3 room apartment, where the cost of rent was the deciding factor. This was one of those older large houses that was turned into multiple apartments mostly to attract the rental market of college students years ago, but not now. The house was in good shape, a neighborhood that had remodeled older houses for blocks and blocks ... a nice area to live.

Luckily she had a ground floor apartment, with a nice front porch and yard overlooking a part of the college town and a small backyard and patio but not the type of yard where the two boys could play and burn off some energy. The rooms were good size but with the two young boys the rooms had to be reconfigured to fit them. The bedroom and the living room were reversed to give them the bigger room as a bedroom.

Back to her surprising answer and a look at a Catch-22 when things are not going your way in life.

When I asked if there was anything I could do to help her, she paused and then in almost a whisper ... "I need someone to haul my trash away".

I was somewhat confused by that answer. I was expecting to be asked for a loan, maybe buy some groceries, or fill her car up with gas but no. She said her most stressful thing right now was getting the trash hauled away.

The trash in this case were boxes of stuff she had moved but had no room for. It was things she had not sold on Craig's List or eBay. It was really just stuff you throw away. I thought I knew the answer, but asked her why couldn't she just leave it where it was in back for the weekly trash pickup. Of course one was money, she could not afford that kind of expense but the other reason was .... even though she had bagged a lot of it in large heavy duty black trash bags, the city had their own trash system where their containers had to be used. Also those containers were color coded where the trash was separated as if you were recycling. Those containers also cost extra on top of the pickup fee. I had expected the cost being a reason but not the container requirement.

The stack of empty boxes plus some filled with things not worth giving away were covering the small patio right up to the back door of the apartment. Out by the alley was a stack of large moving boxes and the large black heavy duty bags filled with more stuff not worth giving away. Only the stack by the alley had been sitting there for a month and had been in a couple of heavy thunderstorms. It was not a good situation. The boxes were soggy, the bags had puddles of water on them.

Long story short, in two different trips I was able to fill my Toyota FJ and haul everything away. The empty boxes were broken down and taken to recycling. The bagged trash will go out with my weekly pickup and the large boxes full of junk were burned ... the burning process just finished before the thunderstorm that passed through early this evening.

So the economics side of this story is, she is doesn't have a job, doesn't have enough money to last until September 21, with two young sons to feed. She also needs to buy gas to get to job interviews if she she is called. She has interviewed a few times but I'm sure here past salary keeps her from an offer. She has many resume's out for jobs in a market that will be hard to get a job, especially without a college degree.

I know from personal experience twenty years ago, college graduates some with master degrees are willing to work for less money just to stay in the area. Some have a spouse still finishing a degree, some are graduate degrees. It's a tough market to crack when looking for a job and it's even harder without a college degree ... if you expect to make the amount of salary she was making.

The two unspoken factors will prevent her from being hired in her old department, even though it has been requested she be hired numerous times by different managers, according to her.

Yes, she could have saved more or even some of her salary. The majority of baby boomers nationwide have not saved since life itself does become expensive raising a family, especially as a single parent. She was one of those that never suspected she would ever lose her job, although I mentioned to her last summer about being financially prepared in case the large contract was not renewed. These companies are Fortune 500 companies that work that bid on contracts to support government activities. That environment has naturally changed for everyone with the changes in the last year of worldwide military support and available funding released from D.C.

She was kind of caught in the 'perfect storm' of government work, and now finds herself in a bad situation.

Today was an experience I didn't ever want to witness, especially to a friend with young children.

As far as the RV side of the blog I mentioned, this situation reminded me of some of the blogs I had read over the years where families or even single people had moved into an RV and started the lifestyle due to a loss of job, loss of house due to job loss or storm damages. It also reminded me of just how fragile retirement living is for some based on living on a shoestring budget. Who knows how high the cost of energy, the cost of groceries and medical coverage will be within the next 5 and 10 year periods, let alone gas/diesel prices. Will their retirement incomes keep up with inflation?

I wonder what percent of the millions of RV travelers only do it for economic reasons?