Stella Reminds Me It's A New Week

I was ready to head out on the walk by 7:15am but it was pitch black inside and outside. The only way I'd ever walk with Stella in the dark is having the retractable leash attached to her collar. So we waited ... and waited ... and waited. It was another morning of getting up earlier than planned but I'm okay with it anymore. I just keep reminding myself when this happens after April it will be 6am not 5am. That will give me plenty of time to blog and plenty of time to get projects knocked off the 'to do' list. So how did Stella remind me that today started a new week?

Only today I was either not paying attention or was unprepared as I was starting my Apple Watch to track time, distance, calories burned blah blah for our walk. While I am doing that and concentrating on keeping the camera strap on my right wrist ... Stella walked right through and out into the middle of the dead ragweed and proceeded to capture every burr possible on right right side. Yes ... I yelled !!!! I couldn't believe it. She was in the middle of all of them!!! I would have taken pictures because the right side of her was just a few burrs short of being completely solid ... solid with burrs!!!! Lined up in neat even rows!!!! Burrs on top of burrs!!!!

The thing is I have to stop and pull them out right then before they get deeper in her coat, become tangled and almost impossible to pull away. I slowly took the camera off my wrist, turned it off and slid it into my parka pocket. It was going to be a major project getting the burrs off of her. She always knows what I am doing because she stands really still, never resists or tries to get away. Once that last burr is pulled off, she does a full body shake and then runs ahead of me without even a thank you.  LOL

Stella was definitely in her 'tracking' mode today ... more than I had ever seen in the three years that I have had her. I guess with the melted snow, warmer temps, the deer must have been out. I was beginning to wonder if she and I were ever going to make it to the first turn. I had never seen her like this, exploring every inch along the edge of the field and the bushes that separate the woods.

Although it seemed warmer, with most of the snow gone in the yard and driveway by 10pm Sunday night, every device I looked at said it was 26° this morning. We have about a week of 'warmer' temps with highs in the 30's, which I can live with. This weekend those highs are going to drop into the teens for a few days. By that time we will be in the third week of January so that isn't too bad. Photos from last year show we had snow in late March and early April, so my dreams of spring are still a distant rumor.

I have to say Sunday morning when I got up and headed out on the walk with the old Nikon D3200 in my hand to take pictures for our walk ... I had plans to be at Best Buy when they opened at 10am, to return the Canon camera. Something held me back from leaving that early ~9:15am. I was still writing the blog post for Sunday morning and by the time 10:30am rolled around I was not in the mood to drive to Bloomington. The camera had survived another day. It was the few great pictures the camera had taken the past week plus the pictures I took after the hounds had their lunch on Sunday ... when I decided I was going to keep it.

It was NOT the camera screwing up ... it is 'user error' .. me!

The thing I had noticed, no matter what time of day (lighting) I was getting better pictures shooting in the "M" mode with automatic focus compared to fully automatic. Even on this walk this morning I used both modes, can you tell when I switched?

It is rare that Stella moves into the woods or the brush before the woods. It has to be very interesting for her to go that far off the path. I wanted to see what she would do so I let her roam a little bit in that area to see if she would come out on her own. She did, without me calling her.

I kept thinking about the reasons I decided to buy the Canon G9X earlier in the month after months of research. They were still valid reasons on Sunday. It is definitely more handy to take this camera with me, like I will today when I drive to the recycling center, than it is taking the Nikon D3200. I am still reading, researching and practicing with the maxed out zoom, with hopes of getting clear pictures. On the forum for that specific camera there are other users with the same issues I complain about on this blog.

During this time I have had the camera I have been taking different kinds of pictures inside the house of the dogs in low light conditions so I can compare it to my iPhone 8+ pictures, which has outstanding picture quality. The 'Feature Image' that is at the top of this post, Stella's face, was taken last night while I sat on the couch. I used the flash and found this picture to be just as good if not better than the pictures I have taken of the dogs with the iPhone 8+ camera the past year. I have included a picture of Heidi below, taken a few seconds before I took that one of Stella.

The indoor pictures I've taken with the Canon since the 9th of January have been better than the ones I've taken with the Nikon D3200. So it kind of fits between the iPhone 8+ camera and the Nikon D3200 camera. Here is what I mean by that. The Nikon has fantastic quality at 200mm zoom, the Canon is still a work in progress at that setting until I can figure out what is going on. The iPhone camera is great indoors with low light, or outside, but not any more zoom than 2x. When I used it on the walks last year the quality just wasn't there BUT now there are new ways of editing those pictures in much more detail. Would I be able to edit them enough to make them as good as the Canon? or the Nikon? I have no doubt I will always need the Nikon for the 200mm feature. IF I could get the Canon to work consistently as good as the iPhone camera, I could replace the phone with the watch. The Apple Watch is that good.

Speaking of that Apple Watch ... last night I was within taping a choice button on my watch screen, letting it know that I DID NOT FALL !!!! before it would have called 911. What did I do for the watch to detect a fall and prepare itself to call 911?? I was trying to open a can of biscuits. Following the instructions to place pressure on the container seam with a spoon to open the container, it wouldn't work. So I did it the old fashion way and slapped that container of biscuits against the sharp edge of the kitchen island. That opened the can of biscuits I was going to bake but it also told my watch that I MAY HAVE fallen !!!!

It's times like these I have thought about just letting Stella go where she wants no matter how long that might take. It might take longer than an hour if I were to let her roam. At 26° I didn't want to do that this morning but it might be possible this spring, or in February or March when we have an unexpected very warm day. I want to see if she will go back into the woods on the north side of the field like she use to with Sadie.

Otherwise it was just another casual Monday morning stroll with her. Here she is enjoying the scenery, the exercise ... she looks happy to me.

There was just one more spot she needed to check out before we walked along the back side of the field.

She then returned to that strolling pace as we were about to turn and head toward the house.

I forgot I had the camera set to one picture at a time. If it had been set on 'continuous' I would have been able to catch Stella running full speed at me. By the time (2 seconds) it took for the camera to process this picture and then refocus automatically, Stella was past me and gone

While she lingered inspecting, I moved around her and headed home, while hoping to get more pictures of her from the front. Again, I barely caught her running. She was definitely energetic this morning.

It has not happened often the past year or two, since she either tweaked her back, grew older or whatever ... she still likes to play/wrestle. Her and Sadie played a little in early September. She has played with me a couple of times since, so that tells me the joint supplements I am giving her must be working. When I caught her standing this way I knew something was up. I tried my best to get some pictures of her playing with me but these were about all I could come up with.

She kept running and jumping up into me with her chest, then playfully growling ... spinning around and charging at me again. She liked it most when I could get my shoulder into her shoulders and wrestle with her. She would try to grab me with her front paws. No yelping of any kind or sounds of pain as she did this. She did a lot of full circle spins and then jumping back into me.

This is the type of look she and Sadie would do as they stopped playing immediately, standing still, trying figure out what the next move would be. For new blog readers or those that joined after I moved my main blog to WordPress on December 9th ... that old fence post with the roll of barbed wire hanging on it, plus the wire fence you see on the other side of the trees .... were there in the 1940's when this property was nothing but a field. In that time period my great grandfather from Ireland owned this land and my dad who was a teenager in the 40's would plow this field with a team of mules. It's amazing that roll of barbed wire, the fence post and small section of fencing is still here in pretty good shape 75 years later.

Stella wasn't through playing with me. As I attempted to walk away thinking she was finished, she charged into the back of my legs, then spinning she headed off in the opposite direction before coming back at me again.

Finally she was finished ... and started walking toward the house. It was a good ten minutes of wrestling.

After four or five attempts I finally got a picture of the rising sun that I liked.

I don't know what the dog's name is but the big St. Bernard that lives across the highway is barking loud enough at us that Stella stopped to listen.

This is the picture I took of Heidi last night with the Canon with the flash on. It's awfully hard to include pictures of her in the morning posts because she is sleeping before and during the time I write it. About the only pictures I can get of her are included in the early evening post of the day IF I post two in one day. Otherwise I will include any pictures I take of her in the afternoons into the post the next morning.

Well it's not quite lunch and I don't want to leave Stella locked up during her lunch hours while to drive to the recycling center. I think I can load up my two 32gal cans that hold mixed recycling material (I don't have to sort it) and get back before Stella would freak out and attempt another breakout from jail. I am still using the cord tied to two door knobs because after that one time where I left her during her lunch time, she has not attempted to break out of the bedroom since then. I hope to get some pictures of the local area that I did not get last week on our drive. It's not much different from what you saw because it's west of us and all of that land is also flat for as far as you can see.

It's going to be a good day in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana today.

A Strange Visitor???

As we stepped outside after the hound's lunch ... it really felt warm. I took this picture just to make sure I saw what I was feeling. It also proves to you that are scattered all over the USA, Canada and Mexico ... I'm not crazy .. it's 40° 18 hours after a snow storm. The NFL Playoff game didn't start until 1pm so I had some time to take more pictures, let the hounds out to wander ... but they did not wander for long until they were back at the door wanting inside. It was such nice weather I wanted to stay out longer ... then I saw them. Paw prints of something.

Heidi did not spend much time trying to decide what she wanted to do. That didn't mean she was going to walk out into the snow ... just under the overhang on the dry mulch. She has not been in any of that snow since it showed up on Friday. Of course since she is allowed to dump her tanks on the mulch, I have no problems using my old 25 or 30 year old 'pooper scooper' to pick it up and throw it out into the woods.

This looks like a typical January day. I clicked a 'tag' on this blog last night "Bloodhounds Love the Snow" and found out that it was just 3 days away from exactly a year when it snowed here last year and a lot more. Sadie and Stella ended up playing rough in the snow and did some running. The snow energized them, not so much anymore.

Stella stood and thought about it. Was it time for her afternoon walk? Or was it time to go back inside and sleep for a couple of hours?

I was starting to walk down to the mailbox in case something had been delivered the past few days when I saw something a little disturbing. Let me explain. These paw prints went all the way down the driveway before curling to the right into the yard. BUT.... they did not show up going back to the house in the middle of the front yard nor anywhere in the yard.

Stella has NEVER been that far down the driveway nor has she ever been close to the highway or the mailbox. So could those paw prints be hers? If so, she was doing it during that early morning trip when I let them outside while I pour their morning kibble. IF that was her I cannot let her outside on her own, after 3 years of doing it because I cannot afford to let her go that direction any time ... whether I am outside or not.

They look like her paws ... but could it have been another large dog roaming the neighborhood during the night or before I let Stella and Heidi outside in the morning? It has been YEARS since I have seen any loose dogs running around this neighborhood and they were not large dogs. Two of my three neighbors do not have dogs. The brick home across the highway has a St.Bernard but I've never seen him outside their yard and never near the highway. He will bark at me sometimes when I go to the mailbox but that's all I ever see or hear from him.

So I'll have to try to fake Stella out Monday morning as I let her out, turn like I am leaving to pour out dog food but sneak out of the house to see where she is going. The problem is, 95% of the time she doesn't go anywhere and stands at the door waiting to get back inside. We will see what happens.

Yes, a few dents in that 44 year old aluminum siding when the house was owned by other people.

I took more pictures of those paw prints as I went to the mailbox. Is it a stray Cougar??? Don't laugh, we have them in the area sometimes. Yet, I am pretty sure these are from Stella.

Or could those be Heidi's ????

Time to go in ... Stella will always put her nose to the door knob to go back inside. We all know though, she can't open doors with round door knobs don't we?  :)

Not only one of my favorite healthy breakfasts but one with color ... it was the colors that made me post this. Bacon, three eggs, baby spinach and cut up Roma tomatoes.

During one of the commercials of the football game I was looking outside the north window noticing how fast the snow was melting. Then .... I saw more of those paw prints. So I took my camera outside and followed them from the north yard down across the front yard heading for the driveway. I did not see any paw prints where they went from the driveway into the yard.

At least my car stayed clean this weekend. I might have to make a trip to the recycling center on Monday ... I'll wait as long as possible for the highway to dry completely before I go.

IT WAS CONFIRMED AT 3:07PM EASTERN TIME THE MYSTERIOUS PAW PRINTS ARE STELLA'S !!!! 

This was my chance to watch and follow her. I think we have a 100% confirmation these prints and those in the yard and driveway are Stella's. It's the house rules for the all the hounds EXCEPT Heidi, not to go into the front yard. It's been that way for 20 years of hounds ... Stella is now officially on "Double Secret Probation" .. (a Animal House movie reference for those that can't figure that out)

In the meantime the snow continues to melt at a rapid rate without the sun shinning ... the highway looks dry enough to me that I can make that trip to the recycling center Monday morning after our walk.

Still 40° today here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Stella And I Tip Toe On The Walk

I keep reminding myself this is just a normal winter, that winter weather is NOT the same every year. From the history of my photos, sorted by day or a blog post written in the past, I can see consistent changes taking place about ever three years. Although I cannot remember off the top of my head the last time we had a major snow storm where schools were closed, highways were closed and the bread plus milk aisles at the grocery store looked like the last day on earth ... empty. I remember those types of storms happening a few times since I moved in this house in March 1998 but unless my memory is really in the failure mode, that type of snow has not happened in the past ten years.

But it wasn't snow that Stella and I were concerned with this morning ... it was the extremely saturated ground with standing water on the field path in spots, after some rain, temps near 40 melting the snow from Friday night and as we started our walk, little balls of sleet were hitting my dark blue down parka sleeve.

Here you can see how the light overnight rain depeleted a lot of the snow, only to have its evidence frozen with low overnight temps. As my North Face boots took each step through the yard you could hear a loud crunching of ice only to met by 'mud' ... not really mud but ground so soft I thought I was stepping in mud.

You can see here each step we took yesterday at the end of the walk has melted. Also it's interesting to me to see that up in the north yard, the bare grass is the exact spot that the underground water flows, even making that right turn ... I've only seen that path after I cut and cleared all the natural overgrown brush in that area a few years ago.

I took this picture of Stella not knowing  my camera was still on "landscape" mode, after I was checking some things out yesterday. I did intend for the flash to be on because it was that dark outside, even at 8:05am.

When I saw the flash show up on the image on the camera monitor, I turned if off ... this is the exact time I caught the camera in "landscape" mode instead of "auto no flash" mode.

As you can see, with bad weather yesterday and about 4 hours until kickoff for the first NFL Playoff game, I had time to 'play' with the blog template. If you checked the blog between 12:30pm and 3:30pm Saturday you may have seen 3 or 4 different designs I had published. I was close to what I wanted but was still looking and using up my internet data like a water faucet left on. Yes, I thought I loved the dark background, making my pictures stand out but there was just something about a white background I really like. I even caught myself seeing every sports website now moved to white backgrounds along with the news websites I saw a few weeks ago. I found my own eyes preferred the white background with black fonts better than my dark and light tan color font. Still at 3:27pm ... I was still looking through the long list of WordPress themes I could choose from.

Then there it was!! Had I seen this theme before? If so, why didn't I choose it. I had used some search terms I had not used before such as "clean", "one column" (I did use this prior) "grids" (I did use that prior) ... but this theme looked great before making any adjustments plus it had a feature I had never seen before. I could choose for the home page to be skinny, standard or wide. I could choose my blog post content to be skinny, standard, wide and wider. If I made the home page wider I'd have less columns and if I made my post pages extremely wide I had huge pictures for us that read the blog on large monitors. For those of use that use laptops, those pictures would fill the screen ... for the tablet and phone readers, it did not make any difference. I checked the new blog design on my laptop, iPad Mini and iPhone so I had some idea what the readers on those devices would see.

Unlike yesterday I saw a ton of deer tracks in the melting snow this morning and so did Stella. They had followed the edge of the woods up to the first turn. Then around the corner where Stella is always checking out their entrance to or from the woods, there were tracks coming out of the woods and following the edge of the gully heading east across the field to the back.

It's funny to see when Stella picks up her pace. It reminds me that she really does have a bloodhound nose and she isn't a 100% 'couch potato' ... a term a bloodhound breeder told me once. She separated her puppies with a test at 45 days old and could tell who the 'trackers' were and who the 'couch potatoes' were. I have never bought a puppy from her but at the time I was talking to her about some issues Sadie was having as a puppy. I did not get Stella until she was 6 years old

If that isn't an overcast day I don't know what is. The temp is hovering around the 40° mark so most of the white stuff will be gone by tomorrow. I must admit I like the pictures I take in the spring, summer and fall from this vantage point. There is just something about bare trees I don't care for. At least when I lived in Washington, it might rain a lot in the winter and get dark by 4pm or earlier but those pine trees are always green.  :)

While I walked softly along the wet path, Stella had been tip toeing most of the way as if she didn't want to get her feet wet. She will walk around puddles of water near the house or on the carport floor, here I have her in 7 acres of puddles this morning.

Here you are looking at 4 stages of weather .... snow from Friday night ... residue of ice from last night ... tiny holes of rain drops from last night and then frozen overnight ... and standing water from the warmer temps Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.

Although in recent months, she has never taken off north toward those woods or even tried to escape on the worn ATV path made in the summer of 2017 ... she glances that way at times wondering either "what if ... " or "I remember when ..."

Stella is walking in the exact same steps she took yesterday ... she even veered left to walk parallel ... can you see where veered turned left?

With that left paw held up, that just shows you how slow she was walking with each step as the path got wetter. Super slow-motion. Tip toe through 'the tulips' ... wasn't that a song many years ago??

I've been feeling lighter this week. How can I tell? Two ways ... by what I bought and snack on since Thursday plus how much easier it is to fasten my jeans. I always find out that I can no longer eat breads in any form. It doesn't matter if it is wheat, sourdough, rye ... it's bread and my body craves it like candy when it's in the house. I also know that a 1/2c of pasta sauce isn't enough, nor is the 1c of 'dry' pasta ... even fact the word pasta can only be eaten about once per month and only in the recommended serving size on the jar or bag. I was looking through the list of diets by USNews the other day for their 2019 ratings. At #4 was something called the Flexitarian Diet ... I found out I'd had been following that for the past 5 years more or less. That is mostly veggies and fruits, eggs, seafood, chicken and then an OCCASIONAL burger at 5Guy's or that Stromboli at Nick's.

Yet that doesn't help me lose weight. And .... I'm not really dieting but just finding the best way to eat for the rest of my life ... of course open to changes as I get older.

I keep thinking about writing and posting my review of the Apple Watch I bought a little over a week ago or has it been two weeks already .. not sure. I still love it as much as I mentioned the last week. I still consider it one of my best if not the best electronic purchases I've ever made. I did a lot of research before I bought it. I also talked to an online friend who bought hers last year for health reasons. She emailed me a couple of days ago with an update about the watch, with some news you could almost consider negative as far as the watch goes but very positive that she is okay.

She has atrial fibrillation (A-fib) and that can be picked up by the Apple Watch Series 4. This newer model is supposed to detect when you fall, then automatically call 911 if that person whom has fallen does not respond in a certain amount of time by pressing a button on the watch. She fell, and passed out but that was not detected by the Apple Watch plus it did not call 911 as it was designed to do. Test reports stated it was very accurate in detecting a fall and if you had A-fib. Luckily her husband was at the house and found her soon enough to call for medical help. She did say the watch DID detect that she had a A-fib episode.

Fall Detection is one of the reasons I decided to buy the watch since I live alone. As I said when I wrote about it a few Fridays ago .. I don't think I will ever be in that situation, but you never know. If I would fall and the watch did NOT detect it, I guess I would be in the same situation as if I had not bought it. So nothing lost really ... I still love the additional information the watch gives me and the different ways it provides that information.

I have two more NFL Playoff games to watch today. I did not finish watching the second game last night. It was not that late but the urge to sleep was greater than wanting to watch the game. I guess that is what I get when Stella thinks I should get up every day at 5am. Only today, she let me sleep late. In fact I had to wake her and Heidi up to go outside a little past 7am.

I know you have heard me say this many times over the 7+ years of blogging on this blog, either here on WordPress or over on Blogger. I really like this current theme and am pretty sure this is the final design. I DO have one more option to check out. It is on this same theme.
I can add a sidebar either on the home page, the post page or bothI can only add to the footer, a sidebar is not an option I found out I had two options, in the footer but only two columns wide or on the single post page BUT only after the post BEFORE the comments section So I chose in the footer so the comments section is just below the post ... a sidebar would let me list those other blogs or websites I like to follow, the most visited posts or pages for those first time blog visitors, maybe a few favorite pictures, or the link to my new Flickr account that I keep forgetting I set up a few weeks ago.

That will be the only change that MIGHT HAPPEN ... a sidebar added ... IF I decide I want that information within a click away.

The Question of the Day ... why does Stella always whine or howl when I sneeze or when I am trying to break the record for the most consecutive sneezes in a row?

It's Sunday, the snow is melting, the hounds are laid-back like always, my coffee was good and my Apple Watch battery has lasted longer active than the 18 hours they told me it would. NFL games on today with some college basketball, good food available, a fairly clean house for a single hermit and a 'toy' list that is once again blank.

It's all good today in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.