What A STRANGE Morning

For the second day in a row I am up and awake at some ungodly hour, sometime after 2:05am. The first question that came out of my brain was "can I transfer data from my food tracker MyFitnessPal to Cronometer. It was a program I used before and breaks down the food in much more detail. Although today I may have gotten up that early for another reason but I just didn't know it ... Stella. Within 15 minutes that I was up, on the computer to find the answer to my question, she was standing by the entry way of the computer room and her stomach was 'growling' ... not the hunger pain kind of growl but the upset stomach kind of growl.

So still in a t-shirt and gym shorts, I grabbed my GoLite jacket and put on my snow/rain boots with no socks, grabbed the flashlight and we headed outside. It was really warm at 36° and a light sprinkle of rain. She went right to the field to find tall wet grass to eat. She moved from spot to spot with my small LED flashlight pointed right on her. She never did get sick and after 10 minutes or so, walked calmly back to the yard, peed and came back inside. She wasn't finished though. I'm in the dark house again, on the computer and about the time I think she has gone back to the bedroom to sleep, I hear her stomach again and there she is ... standing in the dark looking in the computer room at me. She wasn't whining but when I got up to go back outside with her, she didn't move. She didn't want outside.

You guessed it ... she wanted to eat.

I thought, why not? That might settle her stomach. I had yogurt or cottage cheese that I could give her but I thought I'd try her normal dog food. It worked. As soon as she finished eating, she was in back in the dark bedroom sound to sleep on the floor, like nothing had happened.

So here I was, still not even 4am yet and I am wide awake. I didn't fix coffee because I had high hopes of going back to bed and sleep longer than the hour and 50 minutes I had accumulated so far today. I found out that Cronometer does not list my Apple Watch as a 'device' like it did with my Garmin VivoSport, but there was another way to do the connection. I did that by connecting it electronically to the app Apple Health, which pulls data from my Apple Watch. As of this morning it is doing exactly that, giving me more details on my food intake than the MyFitnessPal app did. What might those additions be? A breakdown of vitamins, mineral, and micro nutrients. I would have had to buy MyFitnessPal's monthly subscription to do that same breakdown.

Since I was still awake I kept doing my normal reading online that I do every morning plus I had a couple of more questions on my mind. I 'googled' them (with DuckDuckGo) and found out what I needed within two or three clicks. By this time it's 4:45am and I am still wide awake. I wanted to get back to bed for some sleep and not have to rely on a nap this afternoon to catch up. I was needing coffee but knew if I went in that direction, then all hope was lost of getting more sleep this morning. The free app SleepWatch I downloaded for my Apple Watch WILL TRACK the sleep time when you take a siesta. That is something the GarminConnect app would not do.

The hounds?  Both were sleeping soundly where they normally do in a very dark bedroom.

I thought more about waking up so early, extremely early today and what was the cause. Stella was not standing by the side of the bed, whining or nudging my hand with her nose when I woke up, she was sound to sleep. As was Heidi. THEN I REMEMBERED .... I was too hot and my sinuses were plugged!!!!

Late last night I felt it getting much colder when Stella and I stepped outside one final time. I wanted to try something different with the forecasted drop in temperatures. I closed all the mini blinds for each window but did a quarter turn more to close the steel mini blinds tight as possible. That is something I rarely do, not turning a quarter of a turn more to tighten them. I left all of the thermostats the same in each room. To my surprise just less than two hours later when I woke up, the whole house was much warmer than normal that time of night. The temperature outside was the same, low 30's but the thermometers inside were saying no less than 70° (way too hot) and in the living room it was 72°. My sinuses were plugged up too.

THAT was the cause of me waking up at 2:05am !!!!

For some unknown reason, by 5:30am I was tired, sleepy ... a welcomed feeling. With the house still quite dark and the hounds still sleeping, I went back to bed and didn't hear anything the rest of the morning. Finally at 9:05am I was awake, feeling much better but a little confused and wanting coffee. Of course these last seven hours have thrown the daily routines out the window. How would the hounds react?

I fed Heidi immediately ... of course that meant Stella wanted to eat too but she had a normal amount of kibble a little after 2am. I was happy to see she was more than satisfied with the two pieces of GlycoFlex Plus that she gets every morning. THEN we all went outside but with no walks planned. I could hear it raining very lightly. Heidi thought about it and then proceeded as close to the side of the house as possible for a full lap around the house. As you see, Stella took a different path but a familiar one for when she has to dump her tanks and knows the walk of the day has been postponed due to rain.

It was funny now that I remember it. Earlier when she and I were outside sometime between 2am - 2:30am, when she was finished eating wet grass to settle her stomach, then peed ... she followed the same path you see here and headed back to the side of the house as close as possible for her return back inside. I guess if I didn't mind getting Stella completely wet, we could do the walk this morning. It's not raining that hard but after 16 - 20 minutes of solid drizzle she would be drenched based on how wet she was this morning after the short time she was out in in the field.

All Heidi wanted was to get back inside, jump up on the chair that Sadie gave her, scratch her blankets in a pile, do three circles and lay down to sleep the morning away. I've mentioned it before, but I cannot wait to strip that green paint off the steps and then paint them gray with the floor sealant I am going to apply to the carport floor this spring. I'll have to retrain the hounds for the day or two it will take to dry that application on the concrete floor, and have them go out the front door when we go outside. That will really scramble their braincells as well as mine.

It was just last Sunday that the ~4" of snow was melting with temperatures hovering around 40°. Then today I have light rain all day that started last night and will spend the late afternoon and night into a drizzle, if the forecast is right. Yet by Saturday night we have more snow on the way and a 'front' behind it that will lower the temps into the teens and single digits after midnight. Back and forth. Up and down ... typical weather in Southern Indiana.

Just last Sunday.

And the plans for the next few days.

With the pantry and refrigerator full of good healthy food, a tv schedule of college basketball and NFL Playoff games, a couple of books, and enough coats and thermals ... the hounds and I will make it with no problems. After all it's only for a day or two. The hounds always sleep based on 'outside' temperatures NOT what it feels like inside ... otherwise it looks as if I am freezing them out of their house with them curled tightly in a ball to sleep as well as close to each other.

Can you tell which pictures were taken by each camera I have?

I've added another show about roughing it in Alaska to my DishNetwork DVR Timer ... a schedule of automatic recording of programs, movies or ballgames. A few things I have noticed among the two shows I've been watching about Alaska ... even if the sky is clear above their roof of their small houses or cabins, none of them have any kind of solar panel system to produce electricity. Why not? Also for the few people that have teams of dogs for their dogsled, used to either check traps or race ... they feed their dogs salmon that that they had caught just to feed their dog teams. One team of dogs will eat over 500 salmon during the winter!!!!

Compare that to all the different kinds of expensive dog food on the market, those dog survive in much more extreme living conditions on just the protein of salmon and at times meat organs. There isn't any fruit and veggies added, no added vitamins, no fish or meat meals, no rice, etc ... just straight meat or fish. I also noticed as a family or couple, they don't sit down to a meal type of dinner with everything on the 'food pyramid' ... they might only have some moose or caribou they shot that day or just some cooked salmon they caught that day. They rarely eat fruit because they live in the wilderness and few will grow a garden during the summer months to grow vegetables. I know they live a much different lifestyle but to me it's interesting to see the diets they and their dogs follow while surviving extreme living conditions.

I normally like to have all my window blinds open during the day, even in cold weather ... but after finding out just how much heat is retained with the additional quarter turn to close the blinds tight, I don't want to open them today or any day until it gets warmer. I can open them on sunny days I guess because the western sun really warms up the living room in the afternoons. I've turned the thermostats down and the house is staying at 65°, just like the hounds and I prefer.

I guess the question of the day will be ... do I add the widgets back to my blog footer instead of just showing a couple of bits of information. I am not sure with the current design if many readers get to the bottom to see the list of blogs I follow, or the top posts or pages, maybe click on a category or look through the archives back to November 2017 ... so they may not be needed. A big difference in this theme that I really like and is called the most popular theme on WordPress, is the 'sidebar' on the post page, is NOT on the side but below each post BEFORE the comment section. I don't like that arrangement after testing to see what it looked like a few days ago.

Between now and the end of the day Stella and I will still check on weather conditions to see if we can fit in a quick walk. IF that happens I will write another post like I did yesterday with only a paragraph of content and all pictures of the walk. Do you prefer that style compared to my rambling?

It's warm, foggy, overcast and wet this morning in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

My First Two Tone Basset Hound

It was perfect weather in the middle of March 1998 to load up  Maggie, Harry and Max, along with our furniture to move into the house I still live in 21 years later. It was a smaller house than I had ever lived in but it was surrounded by land owned by a neighbor who didn't mind sharing it with the hounds. The field gave them some room to wander and exercise their noses and in exchange the hounds gave 'Smitty' something to laugh about. He would always stop if he saw us outside while driving by, just to talk to the hounds.

It didn't take long for Winston, Maggie and Max to settle in with the orangish/yellowish shag carpet that was popular in the mid 1970's, when the house was built. I didn't need them to convince me it needed to be replaced with some new carpet and I had the new carpet installed within the month after moving in.

It also didn't take them long to figure out the warmest place in the house was as close to that baseboard electric heater as possible. It might have been warm the day we moved in but there was still some winter left and they stayed warm together.

Maggie was my first two-tone basset hound. I can't remember if that was something rare with basset hounds in the 1990s but it was what I asked when I made that phone call to a number I found the newspaper classified section. I wasn't a good basset hound buyer back then. The internet had only been out a few years so not all basset hound breeders had their webpage yet. I never researched breeders and basically just looked in the "Pets for Sale" sections of the newspaper.

I noticed he kind of laughed when I asked "do you have any two tone basset hounds?" Once I arrived at his house, I saw what he meant by laughing. This seller was the true definition of a 'puppy mill'. There had to be close to 30 lemon/red and white basset hound puppies to choose from. I cannot remember how I chose her but I am guessing she gave me a basset hound look that I could not resist. Two days after bringing her home he called me telling me he had given me the wrong AKC paperwork and asked if I could come back to exchange what I had for the correct one. I had no idea which registration was the correct one. It didn't really matter to me since I was only wanting her as a pet.

Soon after moving in and Harry showing me his wandering skills were optimized living in the country, I would keep him tethered anytime he was outside. I put Maggie in charge of watching him since she never left the yard and showed no signs of stepping into the front yard. She was that good. Later I would let Harry out of jail and luckily the highway was never a factor with him.

It didn't take long for her to figure out her spot on the couch was the same here as it was in Bloomington, 25 miles away. She would never lay on the couch until she had moved the cushions into the perfect spot. She did have the energy and jumping ability to get up on the couch when she wanted, even with her extra weight.

She loved the snow as much as any hound that I have had. Of course with those short legs, the snow couldn't be too deep. There would be many times I'd have to go outside to bring her in otherwise she would have stayed out in the snow too long.

Not until years later when I had Winston, was I reminded how she use to love spending time outside on her own, never leaving the yard or the field in back. She was a lot like Winston in that regard, as she would stay outside for hours snooping around or sleeping in the hot sunshine. Yet she and Heidi are almost identical in temperament and personality. They both enjoy life.

As you can see not much has changed outside. That is the same yellow reflective plastic covering the cable that runs from the electrical power pole to the ground, that's there today. It has saved many a car or truck from backing into the cable.  The burn pile still stands just right of the utility pole. It's hard to say since these are scanned photographs, but I think that is Max standing with her. Max and Bertha are always hard to tell apart when looking at old photographs.

Sometime around 1998 or 1999, I found a website that is listed on my other blog and was listed here when I listed websites in the footer of the homepage. It was a Basset Hound Rescue ... from GABR I picked up another Max, which is the basset hound behind Maggie. Yes, too many hounds by then ... three bassets and a bloodhound. I have no idea why I couldn't stop buying more basset hounds ... was it all the land I had around me?

Years later after Bertha had grown tall enough to look out the living room window, a rabbit would stop by every summer night to visit Bertha and Maggie. It never failed to show up around 7:30pm. Once Maggie passed on, I never saw the rabbit again.

From the time she was a 8-week old puppy, she was always the perfect house dog. With the number of other puppies the seller had, all outside in separate kennels, I was sure she never had the required socialization her first 6 weeks. That didn't seem to matter as she was an old soul in a puppy body. She got along with all the hounds and really enjoyed following the bloodhound around, biting him/her on the back of his ankles, then running for the other end of the house or the yard, depending where they were.

She would always go to the door when she wanted or needed to go outside. Day or night, summer or winter, it didn't matter. Just like Heidi.

She approved of the new Berber carpet. She thought it was a big improvement over the 1975 'shag carpet' we got rid of.

You might notice some changes looking at this picture. She and Bertha loved to play, and run around the backyard, then into the field. My backyard was smaller then. Based on what I was told when I bought the house, the property line only went as far as what was mowed. All of that brush area belonged to the owner of the field ... it is now cleared and mowed, and what I mention on the blog as the "north backyard", is part of my property.

The gray pole was pulled out of the ground with my 1987 Toyota 4Runner. It was my Prime Star tv satellite system until 1999. DirecTv bought them and with the different coordinates for a signal, my DirecTv dish was installed in the front yard.

Maggie was borderline overweight. As with any puppy mill, the breeding isn't going to be the best. I really knew nothing about different breeders or classic features of the breed. To me, it didn't matter, she was a fantastic basset hound.

She use to roam the field for hours alone. I never had to go out to check on her, as she would always be at the door when she was ready to come inside. Unlike Sadie whom I use to let stay out on her own ... Maggie never ventured next door to see the neighbors, in either direction. She was a true 'homebody'

She had just turned 7 years old in the summer of 2002. Prior to that, she had zero health issues. She had the annual checkups, the annual shots along with eating kibble that was considered at the time to be one of the best dog foods. She did the daily walks on the same path that Stella and I took this morning ... but suddenly in June, something was wrong. She was starting to cough after finishing the daily afternoon walk. She also started taking breaks along the way, where she had always forced herself to the front of the other hounds to lead the walk.

I felt two large lumps on each side of her throat. You can see them in some of the pictures below. As my fingers checked out the rest of her coat, stomach, legs, behind her ears ... I found more of those lumps. They were right behind her rear legs and one on her stomach. She was also looking bloated.

A quick trip to the vet, the same place I took Sadie this past September, Heidi and Stella for their surgeries in October ... found the sad news. A very fast spreading cancer. I was told they would do all they could but not to expect more than two weeks. The news came from out of nowhere and surprised everyone that knew her. She always wanted to lead the walks, always making sure she was in first place. Her appetite was normal up until the last few days she was home.

She spent five days at the vet as the staff did more tests, more treatments. It was a shock since I had never had a hound get sick so quickly. My first basset hound Harry lived to be 13 years old and I just assumed they all would.

After her 5th day at the vet as we approached 4th of July weekend I told them I wanted to bring her home. I wasn't going to let her spend her last week in a vet kennel, with no one around. They knew she didn't have long live and thought it was fine that I pick her up. There was nothing else they could do for her. They said to watch her appetite as she was showing signs of not wanting to eat anything.

So Maggie, Max, Bertha and I hung out at home during the weekend where I would get the following Monday off from work for the holiday. It was one of those July weekends that was hotter than hot. In 2002 nobody was mentioning 'Global Warming', it was just a typical summer day here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana. I knew this would be her last weekend alive. I could see she was going downhill each day. At least she was able to spend it with the other other hounds and in a place she loved being at. It was a sad 4 days.

She would want to go outside, but only to sit and pant since it was so hot ... or was that panting a sign of pain? She showed no other signs of being in any kind of distress. She always came back to the door when she wanted inside. Only this time, every minute she was outside, I was too, keeping an eye on her

We didn't have blogs then as I was at least three years away from starting my first one. Therefore I didn't take the same number of pictures like I do now. I saw by the 'information' on these pictures I had used an Olympus digital camera but that was about all I remember. I don't remember the model number nor does it look like I had a lot of pictures on file. Yet, that 4th of July weekend in 2002, I couldn't stop taking pictures of Maggie. She kept posing and acted as if she knew this was our last hoorah. Needless to say, it was gut wrenching.

She wasn't eating much, slept a lot, but she still knew the best place in the house on a very hot July weekend was right on top of the floor register that was blowing out ice cold air conditioning.

What ended up being her last afternoon at home, turned into a photo shoot. She didn't want to go back inside. She would wander from the driveway to the yard, then back in the field ... then the yard. She was wandering but looked so sad and scared. She knew something wasn't right.

Bertha knew something was wrong. I had brought Bertha home as a 8-week old bloodhound puppy, when Maggie was 4 years old. Maggie instantly claimed Bertha as her puppy. She taught her how to go outside, where to sleep plus how to share food and water. They were best friends. Seeing this picture of the grass right up next to the house makes me wonder if that arrangement might be the best for erosion control. It looks so much different, I am not sure I could go back to that

Then ... without asking, or coaxing them ... they did just what Stella and Heidi did this past October. They posed for a picture together. I think they knew this was their way of saying goodbye.

Some say that dogs/hounds/animals will venture out by themselves into a field or woods when they are ready to die. This seemed to be the case with Maggie at the time. In fact one time I came back outside with some water for her and didn't see her anywhere in the yard, the driveway and not in the field. The hay/grass was too tall to see where she had gone.

Finally I saw where some grass had been mashed down a little and followed that. I found her laying down at the back edge of the field where it meets the bushes, straight back from the house. I didn't know if it was time or not. How do you ever know how long it will take for them to pass naturally? Almost an hour later I stood up from where I was sitting next to her ... she got up and followed me back to the yard for some more pictures.

She wouldn't stop posing for pictures and my small digital camera wouldn't stop taking pictures.

By the next afternoon she had deteriorated so much in the previous 24 hours, it was time. Over the 31 years I've had basset hounds or bloodhounds I have had to choose to put them down, not all, but more than I want to remember. When I took her to the vet that afternoon, she couldn't walk.

While waiting for the vet to finish his previous appointment, she laid spread out on the cold tile floor. It was interesting to see her wag her tail once the vet came out to see her. She new his voice. It was the only time I had ever put a hound down and saw the whole staff of vet technicians (4) in tears as they tried to print my bill. Everybody loved this basset hound.

After I downloaded this picture into my computer, a PC at the time, I could not remember ever taking a picture as good as this. She was speaking a million words with that look of hers. It affects me even now, 16+ years later, when I look at it. I don't remember how or who sent me an email soon after this but the email was an offer from a photography company to submit a picture that we thought was our best one or a favorite one. The subject didn't matter. It could be from a vacation, landscapes, cities, children or our pets.

I submitted this picture and then forgot about it, not really expecting anything ... about 6 months later a delivery slip was in my mailbox when I got home from work one day. Remember those? Letting me know what time and day I could pick up my package at the post office. It was a mid-size, hardback book named "Sharing the Past" from picture.com, edited by Dinah Elashvili. Russell Hall was the senior editor. It was published in 2006 by The International Library of Photography ...

There she was ... page 179.

Under the category of animals/pets but on the same page as a Texas sunset, a firetruck in action, a swan and two children.

There are a lot of times when I am feeding Heidi, talking to Heidi, or watching Heidi when she's outside, that I am reminded just how much Maggie and Heidi are alike. Almost identical in they way they act, move and look at me.

I have always planned on it, but scanning pictures has always been the hold up, for writing posts just like this about the hounds I have had the past 32 years. You might see them during the days the weather here is too bad to take our daily walks, or I don't have enough photos of the day, or I have writers block where the words are nowhere to be found. It will be then that I tell you about another one of my hounds.

Every single one of them were special in their own way and were great hounds to share life with. I keep telling myself and a few friends, that Heidi and Stella will be my last hounds but sometimes I don't see myself ever living without a basset hound, or a bloodhound or possibly a different breed that needs rescued from the shelter.

It's too bad there isn't a way to have a "Hounds Reunion" here in the backyard and the field. What a picture that would be.