Bloodhound Now Whining To Go On Walk

Stella was ready to go this morning for her walk. It had been raining some overnight but had stopped just in time for me to have a couple of cups of coffee, and breakfast for the hounds. By the time I was ready and stepped into the backyard Stella had started the walk and was in the exploration mode. She seems to be exploring more and more lately.

My hiking boots had not dried out from yesterday morning's walk. No sunshine means no dry boots.

I noticed a lot new spots of grass that had been mashed down overnight and some were showing distinct hoof prints.

She checked a couple of different places that lead into the woods and deep gully.

I think you can see we were in for another dark and overcast day. I had a lot planned for today inside. Clean, sorting and recycling the computer room closet the other day motivated me enough today to look at the hallway closet and two file cabinets packed with paper files back to 1993. The cabinets were only two drawers. The other cabinet had old CD's for Microsoft Office 2000, old printers and scanners I no longer had, back-up files, zip drives, and the old 3/5 floppy disc. Any CD's that had backup information I cut in two and put each half in a different bag of trash.

I tried some different settings on the camera this morning. After seeing the photos I will have to do a little more reading before I start changing settings again. In the meantime I'll go back to no flash auto focus.

I went through almost every sheet of paper in my filing cabinets, checking papers that had my name and social security number. Those went into my stack to be burned this fall with the leaves and brush. I filled a 32 gallon trash can with paper that was be recycled. Other stuff I put in the trash. So by 2pm I had made two different trips to the recycling center for my 2nd container of recyclables and two large bags of trash, costing me $4.

As you can see the field and my boots were pretty wet this morning, not halfway through the walk.

In the drawer with old CD's I found CDs and manuals for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, a F-15 flight simulator,  a F-16 Flight simulator called Falcon 4.0, Microsoft Flight Simulator 1998 and an all-time favorite game ... Sim City 3000. I will either bring out my old Windows PC and use that computer for the simulators and Sim City or I will look on eBay and Craig's List to see if someone is still buying software that old.

It has been a little over a week since I decided I was going to start using my 10 month old iPhone 8+ without a case. I like how it feels without a case. One thing I have noticed the past week is when it's in my hand or I am heading for the car I am more aware of the phone in my hand and also more focused in not dropping it. Yet I will get tired of it eventually and put it back in a case.

All through the walk this morning Stella seem to think there were deer in the area or we had just missed them.

There has been a cat, a squirrel or some sort of animal in her yard while she sleeps at night. Maybe a raccoon.

I even attacked the closet where the washer and dryer are. There are two shelves that have anything from paint, cans of spray paint, quarts of oil, car polish, leather cleaner, WD40, window cleaner, spare light bulbs, etc ... I pulled everything down, put new shelving paper (vinyl) down and then put everything back on the shelf in order with labels facing to the front. A lot of stuff was put in the trash, if empty it went into the recycling bin.

Maybe the red mum is going to make it even with cool temperatures and a little rain.

After lunch I let both hounds outside to wander on their own while I was finishing my last bit of closet sorting. Later Stella was standing at the door looking inside to be let back inside but Heidi was nowhere in the front yard and wasn't waiting with Stella.

I grabbed the camera and found her over in the north part of the yard where I think a field cat has been hanging out at night. Both hounds have the same interest in the same spot, two different times during the day.

I started calling her name but she didn't realize that I was standing by the field taking these photos of her. It looked like she thought I was calling her name from the carport door.

There is some basset hound speed right there.

By the time I was leaving for my second trip to the recycling center she wasn't moving from that blanket and was not interested in riding in the passenger seat.

Mid-afternoon Stella was walking around the house whining. That is the new way of letting me know it's time for a walk. It was a little earlier than we usually take the afternoon walk but if that is what she wanted to do, then we would get it done early. Evidently I understood her whining correctly because she trotted straight to the field.

She ran in a couple of different parts of the walk today.

The ears tell you how fast she is running.

I also took two large plastic tubs of Sports Illustrated magazine to recycling. 13 years ago when I was selling full-time on eBay I was making a pretty good profit selling old sports magazines and game programs. Then overnight a company loaded about 5,000 magazines and game programs with a set price less than $5 each ... the market for mine was gone just like that. I double checked the other day to see of some of them were worth anything. By the time I would take pictures, write the sales ad, load them into eBay, then package them and ship them IF they sold ... wasn't worth my time.

Cleaning out the computer room closet last Friday I found some boxes my mom had given me. She had kept about everything that dealt with my time growing up. In all of that stuff I found a bunch of old felt team pennants but the 1967 Boston Red Sox, the 1968 Detroit Tigers and the 1965 Cincinnati Reds pennants had color team photos built in. I'll list those on eBay.

During all of this cleaning I found photos that I thought I had lost, some of them were prints of Sadie when she was a puppy. Some way this box of photos got separated from the one big box I have with all photos and older 35mm slides.

I guess the next thing I will do is figure out what I am going to do with my 2010 21" iMac that has the bad hard drive and still sitting on my second desk. I would need a tool to take the front of the monitor off so I could install the new hard drive. I am not sure I want to spend the money for the tool and a new hard drive just to resell it. I am not sure I would even break even after shipping costs ... Brand new computers at the store are cheap anymore and it would be hard to beat those prices.

I have a few more things to look through and decide whether to recycle or throw away. The fact is these old family keepsakes would be thrown in the trash most likely once I die ... so why keep them around stored out of sight in a closet??

I got so much done today that I shut it down around 2:30pm today. The hounds slept for the rest of the afternoon. I went back to reading my books and watching some college football games from Saturday that were being played at the same times that I was watching other games. One tv show I really like watching is Dateline on Friday nights. I tape those episodes and usually watch it during the week.

I just remembered to get that old PC working, nothing is wrong with the hard drive, I need a cheap monitor and a keyboard that plugs into the computer. They didn't have wireless capability when I bought that Dell desktop sometime around 2007. Instead of doing all of that, I'll probably just recycle it. I have a lot of electronics to add to the recycle pile ... but everyone seems to be charging money to recycle electronics now, where a few years ago it was free.

It was dark and overcast all day but I got a lot done in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Basset Hound Speed

Heidi took off sprinting this afternoon after I called her name from a different side of the yard. She did not see me standing out by the field, she must have thought I was calling her name from the door. She went back to the same area as a few weeks ago. I am thinking the "middle of the night" cat has been hanging out in that corner while Heidi sleeps.

PNW Weather Hit's "The Tropics"

While sitting outside this morning enjoying my first cup of coffee, the weather reminded me of those when I lived on Whidbey Island NW of Seattle. It was mid 40's, light misty rain and signs it had been raining during the night. Besides being in Indiana and not Washington, the other difference was ... zero wind here. Both Heidi and Stella were back to sleep since they finished their breakfast and I wasn't sure at that time if any walks would be taken today. Rain was in the forecast for most of the day.

Stella is starting to show her independence again after a short period of hanging close to me most of the time since September 15th. We had just started the walk where she found something interesting,  that she never moved. I had to backtrack on the path to talk her into walking.

The dead ragweed really looks bad when it's wet and overcast.

She eventually started her walk back toward me. She is also starting to show more tracking than the past few weeks. Again like yesterday morning, I saw a lot of fresh paths where the grass was mashed down sometime last night or early this morning. Those paths were not there yesterday.

Once she decided it was time to get going, I barely caught her running when I turned to see where she was. She trotted right by me and then veered toward the edge of the woods. There is a single narrow path that follows that edge of the woods where deer go in and out of the woods.

By this time that misty air was turning into a very light rain, so light that I would not call it rain but it was more than a heavy mist. That didn't bother Stella, she kept marching on.

If you look close there is one of those paths I talk about that veers right from our path and heads to the 'far right corner' of the field. It's the mashed down grass that is behind her. She stopped when I told her to "come on". It was too wet for me to be walking through the tall grass to go get her. I was glad she turned around.

She trotted back toward the path and never stopped. In fact she never veered off the path that passes the two rolls of hay and runs parallel to the back edge of the field. She went into a slow walk to make the left turn towards home and I am nowhere near that corner.

I would pay any amount of money to know what she hears or what she smells when she stops and looks like this.

While I follow the path ... she continues over on the old ATV path, where Heidi was walking the other day.

You can see this overcast light rain weather is set in for the day. As long as it's not cold I don't mind a day like this on occasion. Looking at the trees in the distance I didn't see much change in the leaves turning color from last Sunday.

I was never close to Stella on the way home. She stayed out front and trotted away from me a couple of times. There is one area she wants to get to before I get there telling her to move and I think that is why she is always trotting in this part of the walk.

I stopped to wipe some rain drops from my camera. It took no more than a minute. When I looked up I didn't see Stella anywhere. How could she disappear so fast???

Zooming the camera lens closer to the neighbor's woods I still don't see any sign of a tan tail, which is hard to see now with the taller straw that is also tan. About the time I was going to get my jeans wet from that tall grass by walking that direction ....

I took a final scan of the field and barely caught Stella to the left of me ....

She finally agreed it was time to get home and jumped back on the path.
 

There was nothing to see, no sounds out of the ordinary but she was very curious about what was happening toward the highway. She might be smelling a scent that is in the field across the highway. This time of year the deer traffic increases, not on the highway LOL but crossing it from my yard to the field or vise versa.

Heidi continues to be more active than she had in months. She comes to get me to let her outside more times during the day. A lot of those times she will do nothing more than find a sunny spot and sit in the front or back yards.

This morning she decided the two fleece blankets I washed yesterday, didn't need to be on the couch but on the floor, where she could sleep a little before lunch. It took some time for her to drag them off the couch into the perfect positions on the floor. The clothes dryer collects a lot of dog hair from all the fleece and Mexican blankets, but the hair is hard to remove from the fleeced ones.

With my loss of interest in the NFL games, I'll finish another book today and start a new one. Neither Stella or Heidi was too enthused to do anything outside after lunch. Heidi took a lap around the house and Stella never left the carport.

Not raining but still a little cool. I contemplated whether to take a trip to see an old friend today. At the time I wrote this post I wasn't sure what I was going to do today but felt the urge to do something different. I knew the hounds were going to sleep all afternoon and it looked like the rain had moved on with no more expected the rest of the day.

It looks like I might be raking leaves this week. A little at a time instead of waiting until the end with a major project on my hands. There is always hope that strong winds will blow them out of the yard to make my raking job easier. 

A 'non-eventful' day here in 'the tropics' of  Southern Indiana.