The Pace Is Fast & Furious

A warning that you will not see until after you load the blog, but there are 44 photos today and the reason for the blog taking a long time to load onto your phone, tablet or computer. Not all of them were taken today but some spread out over the past week, a few from yesterday afternoon and then this morning. Needless to say, as you will see, the pace has been fast and furious here as we adjust to cooler temps and that terrible Daylight Savings Time change.

Last week when I had taken all of these photos of the hounds sleeping during the day while I read a book on the couch or at night while I watch a game or movie ... I thought of just one blog post titled something like "A Night With The Hounds" ... then I thought of making a page at the top with the others and showing all of these sleeping photos in sequence. Then I decided to do neither and to add them to the post this morning. That's what happens when the mind is too active.

Yes it might be a little cold inside the house for some, 60° ... but I like a cooler house and so do my sinuses. Electric heat as always irritated my sinuses.

They trade couch positions at times. Basically Stella decides who sits where, including me.

Nothing like an afternoon siesta ... life is rough with those two walks per day.

All of those photos of the hounds sleeping were taken with my iPhone 8+ camera and most of them were at night in low light, with a no flash setting. None of them were edited.

By noon the temps have been pretty nice in the range of the mid to high 50's. I wouldn't mind staying outside but the hounds would rather get back inside to sleep after a short trip after their lunch to relieve themselves.

Heidi will always concede and let Stella enter the house first. Before it would be a 3 hound race all standing on the step and Sadie would always enter first no matter what. I should have painted my steps concrete gray THIS YEAR like I had planned. The word "distraction" is a terrible thing to say.

This morning's walk started no different than yesterday, only this time I was expecting Stella to do the same thing as she did yesterday, when I had forgotten about those crazy burrs that dead ragweed produces. Yesterday she was covered in them before I saw her. This morning I caught her only a few steps in the large area of burrs and dead ragweed ... luckily when I yelled NO ... she turned around and came walking toward me.

The ragweed will be easier to cut down with my weed eater using the nylon string since their stems are dead. I would have used the gas power weed eater with the steel blade last summer but I have yet to get it started. The local hardware store quoted me a $100 repair bill if it was the carburetor, or around $70 if anything else minor. I passed.

Most of them are not embedded in her coat so they are easy to pull out.

When I saw her turn and then start chewing something (a burr) I decided I would not wait to get back to the house to pull them out of her coat, I'd do it now. She was happy with that decision as she jumped and trotted off when I was finished.

Fall was short lived this year. A chance of snow predicted for Thursday has now been moved out to Monday. Snow ??? Really ??? Hey, it's the Midwest in November and winter is right around the corner, no reason to complain. I told myself if you don't like it that much then move, don't complain.

A lot of leaves were blown off trees the other night but there is still plenty left to extend my leaf removal project out to late November. Maybe I can mow them while it's snowing for the first time ever.

As you can tell, Stella was not in any hurry this morning. It's just another day in retirement for her.

Believe it or not, she wasn't eating deer scat this morning ... only collecting and identifying different scents.

It's going to be another nice day today. As long as the sunshine is out I rarely mind how cold it is.

After a lot of verbal herding this morning, she finally is steps away from the backyard.

She must be waiting for a compliment for finishing the walk ... but that isn't really finished yet. In a way she is just starting a new one, at her pace.

Those photos look much faster than the time she took to go just a few feet in distance.

The Sycamore tree to the south of me, right by the driveway, will keep me mowing leaves for weeks to come.

The Mahogany trees in back will be doing the same ... unless ... I get a couple of days or nights with high winds and the yard is cleared of any leaf left behind. It's happened before so I can only hope.

The routine doesn't change here much once summer is over. If fact it doesn't change much in the summer either does it? The hounds and I are fine with that. It fits in our schedules since we have no schedules. All of us are retired and can do what we want when we want. I fiddle around on the computer a lot, I may read a lot but lately that urge has decreased. No closets to clean out and reorganize, house is clean, dishes down ... so it's pretty slow.

Channel surfing the other night I saw that the Hallmark Channels are showing their movies about Christmas already in the first week of November. Plus the Walmart Garden Center is now full of Christmas decorations and not even a bottle of weed killer is on the shelves. I am not a fan of extremely early marketing for Christmas but I do understand how it happened.

Of course these slow times makes it hard to find something to blog about, unless I do only a paragraph of content and list 40 photos. For me that is hard to do. "Every picture tells a story" (Rod Stewart sing 1970???) and I find it hard not to say something about the photos or at least have them in some sort of sequence. I have said it before, it's hard for me to list a few highlighted photos to decrease the number listed. Plus whenever I take a day or two away from blogging I always seem to come back with too many photos.

The best decision I have made in a while occurred yesterday. After a few days of wearing my new pair of fleece lined jeans,  I decided they were too big. Another wash with hot water and the hottest setting on the dryer did not shrink them. They just didn't feel like they were the right fit. So I exchanged them yesterday for a size smaller. This morning I can tell I made the right decision and they are now working as they were designed too. I didn't have to inhale too much to button the waist.

I guess it's the small things that make a difference when the pace of life is fast and furious.

College basketball has started officially in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana and that's never a bad thing.

A Very Strange WordPress Story

Normally I would list more than two photos but today it is more about a very strange thing that happened on this WordPress blog yesterday and makes you wonder who is tracking who and what. I just added two photos today to show you what these two hounds have been doing a lot of lately as winter approaches. Be sure to scroll down to read my strange, weird WordPress story.

This is not my main blog but one I started as a test by listing just a few photos and only a paragraph of content. I wanted to see what kind of response I would get (dismal) and to find out if I could spend less time blogging. Plus I like WordPress better than Blogger but it's almost impossible to import 7 years of blogging with a million photos from one free Blogger blog to the free version of WordPress. They don't play well together. So you will not see many blogs that I follow on the right sidebar. That area is the key to this story. When I glanced at my blog yesterday, maybe the day before, I saw a list of blogs under "Blogs I Follow" ... and I did NOT know any of the five that were added to my sidebar!!! Who added them??? I am the only administrator/owner for this blog ... but there they were ... listed below my original four blogs. As I told the story to my friend is when this story went beyond the bizarre. He traveled for many years, living on the road fulltime on a motorcycle. I don't own nor have I ever owned a motorcycle .... BUT THE FIVE UNKNOWN BLOGS WERE ALL BLOGGERS WITH MOTORCYCLES. During our conversation I found out he made a rare visit to my blog that morning to check on my photo quality as he is trying to sort out some photo quality issues on his own WordPress blog where he pays for his own server and domain name. So here are two things that make it possible that something this weird could take place on my blog without my input. He has friends that travel on motorcycles and they own blogs on WordPress He visited my blog within an hour that I noticed the strange blogs listed on my sidebar He made a comment on my blog I think that is the answer to how it 'started' As I moved to my blog Dashboard to remove them from my sidebar ... they weren't listed anywhere. I could not delete them because they were not listed and showed only the four blogs that I personally added and are listed even today. I opened a new tab and clicked on my WordPress blog home page ... THOSE FIVE BLOGS THAT WERE LISTED WERE GONE !!!!!! To say I was confused would be an understatement. I am computer literate. I have blockers installed to block advertisements and videos from auto-playing when I look at any website. I don't even have Google Chrome installed on my computer to decrease the chance of being tracked everywhere I go. I also don't have a Facebook, or an Instagram account. My location setting is turned off on my iPhone. The story gets much much weirder. My friend that I told this story to, KNOWS ALL FIVE OF THOSE BLOGGERS, and had talked to me about one or two of them in a phone conversation. His phone OS is Android based, my is an iPhone. At no time did we mention names and he did not even know the addresses of those blogs so he could send them to send me. He does not have any blogs listed on his WordPress blog sidebars. Only the first names of two of the bloggers were mentioned in our phone call. I only found out that the five bloggers traveled by motorcycles when I clicked on each blog link to see who they were. I found their blog links on the "Reader" side of my WordPress admin page. For my own sanity and the sanity of my friend that knew these bloggers ... can anyone explain what happened here? Has anything like this happened to your 'free version' WordPress blog? I am not concerned just mystified.

The Hounds Were A Little Off Schedule Today

The day started out normal time for Heidi and Stella but they were off schedule today. It might have all started Sunday night while they slept soundly on the couch I couldn't make up my mind what movie to watch or what book to read. I flipped through tv channels and saw nothing to catch my interest and out of all the DVD's I have on the shelf, same result. I probably threw off their schedule today because I went back to sleep after feeding them breakfast. Each hound had about as much energy or lack of, as I did.

It rained Sunday and the wind blew a little but nothing like the forecast. As you can see a lot of leaves are still on the trees. I might have to go back through my blog archives to see the latest date in November where I was raking and burning leaves. I can't remember something like that.

Since we started really late with the first walk of the day, Stella was well on her own walking path. I had to do a little verbal herding to get her back in the general direction I was taking. It has been months since she has taken off for the neighbor's yard while I walked away on our path. She does like to veer back and follow our return path about 10' away.

That is the return path you see just a few feet in front of her back towards the camera.

I could already tell soon after the walk started I had lost my momentum to get anything done today. That didn't mean I might have some idea later in the afternoon and end up doing something, but this morning I felt like I was in the deepest of ruts. I didn't expect any sudden energy leading me to cleaning or painting the walls. I have all the materials to use but can't seem to get started on interior painting.

Stella likes to run a few feet to catch the path I am on and head right over to the edge of the field and woods.

After a few weeks of great sleep, last night was a disaster and a night of total restlessness. Of course during all of that middle of the night chaos (accurately recorded by my Garmin) both Heidi and Stella were in a very deep sleep. The past 7-10 days, Stella has decided the leather couch is her spot to sleep all night. The dog bed in the corner of the bedroom remains vacant as does the big leather chair with the ottoman. Neither hound uses them. I take that back, sometimes Heidi will take a morning nap on the dog bed after breakfast, but no other time.

A friend of mind that has been writing and taking photos of his travels for many years, has been talking about the sharpness of his photos and how they just don't look crystal clear like they use to. I had those same type of discussions here with my photos. With the help of trying different settings and an answer from Barney over at OFM Adventures I found out why my photos are not as clear as I thought they use to be.

My friend is still trying to put the pieces of his puzzle together. It all deals with 'compression', whether a blog does it automatically when photos are uploaded or by a 3rd party photo editing service. Through all of this emailing back and forth about the photos issue it reminded me of my tv picture on Dish Network after moving from Directv last February.

That little 'not as sharp' drives me insane sometimes. I knew I was seeing it on some of the ballgames I watched or the movies, yet on different channels the tv picture was crystal clear and sharp. Of course none of the Dish Network tech reps on the phone would admit what I was seeing was correct. Nowhere online did either tv service website tell me about potential picture issues in their troubleshooting section.

That is where a good forum comes into play whether it be about computers, smart phones, cars, dogs, dog food, blogs, or even tv satellite service. I found my answer and regained my sanity on a Directv forum where customers were discussing the same things I was seeing on my screen after switching to Dish Network. On some shows, games or movies THERE IS A DIFFERENCE between companies because Dish Network will 'compress' their signal.

Other users had noticed the same thing I did in picture quality when they switched to either competitor. The bottom line, neither company has the best of everything so you have to decide what is the most important ... picture quality, equipment, lower cost, program selection and even customer service. I decided the small difference in picture sharpness was not that big after I computed what my fee would be for breaking my 2-year contract 15 months early. Plus, only Dish Network lets me watch 4 ballgames at one time.

I have no idea what she is looking at or smelling off in the distance.

In fact I was beginning to wonder if she was ever going to move.

This is pretty to some but I prefer the bright sunny skies. It was warm at 49°, I had overdressed today but the thought warm weather has been scrambling my brain cells recently.

As you can tell this walk was not on a record breaking pace. One thing Stella has always done since she arrived ... she has taught me and Sadie how to relax and take things as they come. "We" are retired and are on "our" own schedule. No need to rush things.

Somewhere through the tall grass is a path we follow.

The finish line.

As you can see the yard as a few leaves back in the yard and close to the house but not that bad. Those along the house are easy to blow down the side into the driveway and either over the bank or down near the highway where traffic will blow them away.

How did I miss not putting that on the list ???  Cleaning the outside of the gutters.

There was no barking for lunch today by Heidi. In fact I had to ask Stella "where's Heidi" when it was past their lunch time. Within seconds of hearing Stella howl, Heidi was sprinting from the bedroom wide awake and ready for lunch.

I was taking a picture of Heidi's tail and the top of her forehead looking in my direction but after downloading the photo I see where I need to add more of the concrete paste to fill those cracks after the first application settled. The paste dries as hard as cement. Since it was 55° I could apply a second layer.

No lap around the house today either. Once she was finished she turned and came right back to the house.

Once inside she did a couple of sprints around the coffee table back to the carport door in the kitchen and back around the tables. Then she hopped up on the couch, scratched her blanket into the perfect position for an afternoon of sleep.

Stella was more interested getting back inside for her after lunch nap than getting off the carport floor. Her first walk of the day had only been an hour before. I decided early in the summer that I would not power wash my steps or concrete floor this year. I wanted to do that before I apply some new concrete to the low spots and then paint the floor and steps with a textured gray concrete paint next spring.

Here is some evidence we did not get the high winds that were predicted. The is the only branch in the driveway that needed to be picked up. Looks like another item for the 2019 'to do' list unless I have a hot day this fall I don't know about. I didn't pressure wash the fence this year because at the time it did not need it. Things change fast around here.

With the house quiet with two sleeping hounds and no energy to do any kind of interior work, I grabbed John Grisham's new novel and continued reading it.  The pace was just too fast today. That happens sometimes when you are retired, you just go with it.

Slightly warm and overcast today in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Stella Starts Slow On Monday

The only sign you see that the hounds know the change of Daylight Savings time is they want to eat lunch in the morning instead of noon. It's weird to feel your body feeling the affects of the time change, even as you try to ignore it. Stella's walk this morning looked like I felt ... slow and tired.