Brutal Morning Temperature

What I expected for weather Sunday morning was right on the money. It looked like and felt like the weather experts were 100% correct even if they were about six hours off in the time it was supposed to start. After watching a basketball game last night, checking my movie shelf, then the DVR recordings and finally channel surfing ... I decided the best thing to do in weather like this was call an early finish to Saturday. Of course when you go to be early you wake up early, and that we did ... 4:05am. I could tell by the ice on the outside of the storm windows it was a very cold night. I glanced on the lower corner of my watch and saw it was 12° ... but it's early so plenty of time to warm up.  LOL

With an official weather advisory out, meaning unless you are going to work or in an emergency situation ... stay off the highways, I didn't hear a lot of traffic this morning but who would when it's a Sunday morning at 4:30am??? All I heard were snow plows passing back and forth in front of the house. I took this photo from inside a dark house at 7:07am ... it didn't turn out quite as good as I was hoping but in a way it's a neat picture.

The problem for any travelers today is that with the high winds, and snow that started as rain, it has turned the highways into a hockey rink. Even the snow plows couldn't get to the highway surface so they have spent most of their time spreading the Indiana winter highway mixture of salt and sand. In fact there is a big spot of sand just left of my driveway out in the middle of the highway. Every device I looked at showed 16° by 7am but a 'feels like' temperature of 8°. I knew that Stella and I would not be outside long and we definitely would not be taking the morning walk.

Where Sadie would have been hopping up and down with excitement dragging me outside to do the complete walk .. not Stella. I remember last winter on a day similar to this one, we had not made it to the first turn yet and Stella lifted her paw because of the ice in between her toes plus having cold feet. She immediately turned around to go back home but had to limp as she walked. I picked her up and carried her as far as I could, but at 83 pounds that wasn't far. I had to convince Sadie the walk was called off and we were heading home, she didn't want to quit.

Why two pictures of the same thing? It's a camera comparison. Yes another comparison just because I was curious. Photos from today are mixed and matched between the Nikon D3200 and the Canon G9X Mark II.

I had let Heidi and Stella out this morning just like aways. Both were at the door waiting for me by the time I finished pouring two bowls of kibble. Yet I will say it wasn't the coldest day I have seen here. There have been times the aluminum storm door has been frozen to the frame where I couldn't open it to let the hounds out. Not today.

So with Heidi in bed sleeping Stella and I headed out a little after 8am. I explained to Stella that "just because you see me putting on my down parka, my gloves and sock hat DOES NOT mean we are going for a walk." She looked at me as if she understood, so out we went. I took about a step outside inhaling that freezing cold air and hoped that Stella was not going to take too long to pee. I wanted back inside. This only shows there was a lot of wind last night for my car to have that amount of snow parked inside the carport.

From the paw prints from early this morning in the dark it looked like Stella took off around the house and only followed the house because in the backyard there were no signs of her getting out into the yard ... the yard was perfect smooth layer of pure snow.

These are Stella's prints returning from her lap around the house and that happened in the dark a little after 4am.

I will be changing the dog food when I buy the next bag. Same company but a change from chicken to lamb to see if she scratches less

Stella THOUGHT she wanted to go for a walk. By the time she got where she was in that picture, notice that left rear leg ... she's cold. Stopped in her tracks as she was trotting to the field.

Signs of some high winds last night.

She didn't move but stood there while I took pictures, wondering  if she really wanted to go out in the field. Obviously she didn't have to dump her tanks that bad and turned around the same time I did, heading toward the house.

She wasn't finished though. While I looked around a little, without going out into the yard, her paws must have warmed up.

She's excited jumping around and goes running back, jumping into the snow in the backyard as if she and I were going on the walk. There is probably no more than 3" of snow but it's too cold for me, I'm not going anywhere. Besides, I didn't have my boots on just some Nike shoes.

She tried her best to convince me to go ... but it wasn't going to happen.

She knew it was time to come back inside.

Right after the hounds had "Brunch" ... I asked Heidi if she was coming outside, the normal routine after they eat. She turned and sprinted for the couch ... an obvious no.

Stella did what she had to do in quick fashion and slowly migrated back to the house.

This weather reminded me of my 1961 VW Single Cab pickup I had in 2004. With a brand new Jeep Liberty parked next to it, this truck was the best vehicle to drive in any amount of snow. Due to its low gear ratio, there was nothing that would stop this truck from snow to sand. I drove it daily to work during the bad weather days. Of course like all old VWs, the heating system was based on the heat produced from the engine. I had a control inside that would adjust the amount of heat I wanted ... but the faster you drove the hotter it got, so I 'd turn the knob that was below my seat counter-clockwise to decrease the amount of hot air coming out of the heater. That large door on the side is the "Treasure Chest", storage under the bed of the truck, with doors on both sides.

With the forecast telling me it's not going to get warmer today even with the sunshine out, the hounds and I will not be doing much different from what we did Saturday afternoon. They will sleep after their lunch while I start watching the first of two NFL Playoff games at 3pm or so. Compared to the pounding the Northeastern USA got the past couple of days, our small amount of snow doesn't mean much. I'll take it though. Looking again at the 10-day forecast, our temperatures will bounce back and forth with high temps one day at 45° and a couple of days later 16° ... it will be yoyo type of weather as we finish January.

I tried Firefox again the past two days and still found it to be nothing more than a data hog, using twice as much data looking at the same webpages I do every day, including blogging, as I used with Google Chrome. So I'm back on Google Chrome today.

I mentioned to my long time friend Ralph that I had bought the point and shoot Canon G9 with the 1" sensor. Ralph has been a camera buff all the way back in the 1960's when he was already shooting 35mm film and having them developed into slides. He had recently bought a new DSLR but said some interesting things about my camera. "that sort of camera can be SO nice because they are SO CONVENIENT!! If I had it to do over, I likely would have not allowed myself into buying the DSLR ... I'm just losing my motivation to strive for high level pictures. A pity actually, but a few snapshots and I'm kinda' ok."

So maybe I am not going crazy after all thinking my Canon G9 could replace my Nikon D3200 for most of my photography.

It's sunny and 16° here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

The Snow Arrives Early

With the light rain continuing off and on today, while the temperatures that started at 36° this morning were dropping faster than I thought they would ... we didn't do much but stay inside. As you see, Stella and Heidi knew what was about to happen outside and were not interested in doing anything more than sleeping.

Heidi got her exercise in moving each time she woke up, from the couch to her chair and back again. I can't tell you how many times she did that in a five hour period.

Late in the afternoon I could hear the wind howling outside and the slight rattling noise from the storm windows. I knew something was going on but nothing was suppose to happen until after midnight tonight. What a surprise it was to see it snowing 30 minutes after I had checked the weather outside. It will hit a low of 15° tonight and we might wake up to 5" of new snow by tomorrow morning.

I went to check my favorite weather radar online, Intellicast. For some reason it kept going to a Wunderground website which is one of the bookmarks I have on my bar at the top of my screen. It took me three or four tries before I got the message from Wunderground that they had merged with Intellicast.

It told me I would enjoy those same radar maps I did with Intellicast, that nothing would change ... but ... after multiple attempts to bring my local radar back and seeing nothing like I had with Intellicast, I quit trying  ... I looked at WeatherBug and will probably use their weather radar from now on.

I tried using the flash to capture the blowing snow with the dark background of the woods but that didn't work, the flash never turned itself on.

This is what I found without the flash.

Stella spent a few minutes looking for that perfect spot to dump her tanks. It was getting much colder with the wind blowing as I stood at the corner of the house waiting for her to finish.

She finished and then trotted toward the house again. I wonder how long that routine will last before she chooses another path home?

I might watch another basketball game tonight or I will turn this into an official movie night. It doesn't look like the hounds are going to move much more than they did all afternoon. We might see some great potential early morning pictures tomorrow on our walk unless Stella decides it's too cold for her. I'm not sure I can carry a 83 pound bloodhound home from the middle of the field.  :)

Snowing harder right now in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Rainy Saturday Morning

With the weather forecast from a few days ago a 100% accurate this morning, I knew when I went to bed last night that the chances for the daily walks today were in jeopardy. I had water coming up over the soles of my boots on Friday when we took two walks through the field. So add a night of rain, signs of flooding in the field across the highway, the Saturday morning walk was postponed.

Stella did go outside in the dark this morning when I let her and Heidi out first thing in the morning. An hour later you could still see her paw prints after she came running to the door from the backyard or field.

So that meant to put some kind of a blog post together I was going to have to dig into my photo archives. With over 60,000 pictures in my Photos Library I figured I could surely find 20 some pictures for a post. Luckily I found two old folders that I had not looked in for a very long time.

They both came over in the transfer from Apple's iPhoto to Apple's Photos programs after they changed their formats for storing and editing pictures a few years ago. One folder was called "From MobileMe" and the other was "iPhoto Events". I found pictures all the way back to 2001.

The picture above is from June 2006. It looks like I had a much better lawn, with thick grass and the field was mostly filled with grass/hay instead of wild weeds.

As you can see the field has not changed that much in 20 years. If you look straight ahead you will see an additional Sycamore tree to the right of the larger Sycamore tree. In June 2008, "straight line" winds pulled the Sycamore tree on the right side, out of the ground like a weed ... falling through my fence and across my yard, parallel to the house, measuring over 100' tall.

The house was light gray with white trim with a crimson color front door. Hard to believe that 20 years have passed that fast. I don't know how that small caption in black letters in the upper left corner got there nor how to take it off.  LOL

I bought Max from GABR in 1998 or 1999, can't remember. He weighed 83 lbs when I got him and couldn't walk 30' to the field without sitting down to take a break. It did not take him long to find the "dog chair" and claim that as his favorite sleeping spot.

By taking away his daily portion of cottage cheese on top of Pedigree dog food (previous owners), then changing him to high grade kibble, along with the daily afternoon walk when I returned home from work ... he dropped 21 pounds and lived 12 years.

That stain on his tail is a burn stain. He was sleeping so close to the baseboard electric heater one winter day that he was burning his tail. He ever noticed it and I was able to rescue him after I was smelling a strong scent of burnt hair in the house. He growled at me when I tried to move him ... he never liked being woken up from a nap.  He did not realize his tail was burning!!! LOL

Bertha was my second bloodhound and was a very big girl. Back then I was probably feeding them the measured amount that was on the dog food package without adjusting the portion size. Or ... she might have just been a big girl. She was a great house dog and I can't remember her ever destroying anything as a puppy. I've looked through the few pictures I had of her at a young age and none of them show any kind of damage.

She looked a lot like Sadie and both were so similar in personality once Sadie was older. Yes, that is the back of the same field where Stella explores every morning.

In November 2002 Bertha was not real happy with me. I had been gone all day after an 8 hour round trip drive to pick up a new basset hound puppy. She sat there mad or maybe sad that another puppy had butted into her world. Thinking back to November 2002, Bertha and Max were the only two hounds I had at the time.

But how could I pass up not buying Arthur? He was Winston's "Uncle" born two years before Winston. They had the same exact mannerisms, personality except Arthur would wander off more than Winston ever did.

This gives you some idea just how small a basset hound puppy is at 8 weeks old, compared to that bone. Needless to say, Arthur arrived and took over the house. He drank out of Bertha's water bowl at the same time she did ... and would slide his mouth in to steal Bertha's kibble while she ate. He was extremely funny and a little cocky.

Bertha might have looked mad that fall day in November, but within the hour after Arthur arrived she decided that maybe the new puppy wasn't that bad after all. Max rarely played with her so I think Bertha was happy she had someone to be with.

Arthur loved to play with the big bloodhound ... they ran many laps around the living room coffee table and out to this area when they played. Bertha never used her full strength when wrestling with Arthur. She'd let Arthur bite and chew on her ears, and climb all over her.

After playing a lot, that led to a lot of sleeping until the next round.

Even as Arthur grew older and bigger, Bertha liked him even more.

On occasion Arthur would have to be the 'petsitter' to my niece's mini dachshund. I remember the day we went to pick up Kila as a 8 week old puppy, she wasn't much bigger than my hand.

In 2011 Heidi arrived on scene. That is her up in front and of course on a retractable leash because I was told by the foster mom she was a 'runner' that had to be on a leash at all times. Sadie was 3 years old and after her escape chasing deer the previous December, she was still being leashed on the daily walk, with a 25' retractable leash.

Winston never needed to be leashed even at 8 weeks old. He was just as laid back as a puppy as he was at 12 years old. He and Arthur had the same mother

Again the field was so much different from now. Different owners, although both were/are neighbors. In the first 10-12 years I lived here they would spread fertilizer on the field from the turkey farm you see in the pictures of the AT&T tower. The first time I came home from work, with every window in the house open ... to smell what was all over the field ... told me I had moved to a farming community.

So much different from living on Carlsbad Blvd, Carlsbad California across the street from the Pacific Ocean 20 years earlier.  :)

In June 2011 I was on a basset hound rescue webpage when I saw this picture of Heidi. She was named Lucy at the time. She ended up in rescue because she had been in and out of her local shelter many times, always running away from her home. I emailed them immediately and filled out the form for adoption.

Like I said before, they told me she had to be on a leash at all times, so even when she was in the backyard with Sadie and Winston, I'd have her tethered. Yet, she never showed any signs of running away from the yard nor on our walks. My basset hound Sadie out in Oak Harbor Washington was a 'true runner' and Heidi was showing no similar signs.

I still kept her on a leash the first week she was here. Then I tested her without a tether in the backyard and when we took walks. I had a leash in my hand just in case but not connected to her collar. She would walk next to Winston most of the time on the daily walks. 8+ years later, she has never been leashed since her first week here.

In the summer of 2013 I had plans to sell everything I owned, including the house, buy a Class A or Class C RV and travel with Winston, Sadie and Heidi. I cannot tell you how many times I pulled that sign out of the yard then put it back up a few days later. I would not retire until the next year.

People at work that drove by the house every day to and from work, use to joke with me asking me if I was trying a new method of selling the house. It would be up in the morning when they went to work and not there when they drove home.

I know the future is always hard to predict but based on the trip in June 2015 to Colorado and Utah with those same three hounds ... with their reaction after returning home after a week on the road ... selling this house would have been the worst decision I have ever made.

Sometime around 2002 I got back into the VW Bus scene. I found a website called The Samba that listed every model and every year of VW ever made. I was strictly into VW Buses older than 1967 ... with the year 1967 being the last year they had a 'split window' in the front.

This is a 1965 Standard bus that I bought in Wisconsin and drove it back home without any mechanical problems. It would end up being one of four VW's I would own within the next five years. Every parking space up here on 'the hill' was taken.

This picture was taken on Hwy 6 in Utah as I was heading to connect Hwy 50 in Colorado. I had just bought a 1963 VW Cargo Van in Salt Lake City, UT and was meeting a friend from Alamogordo that had bought my first 1967 VW Bus in 2002 ... I blew the engine on the bus that Dennis bought, on I-25 a few miles north of Truth or Consequences NM.

I've always loved driving through the western states with open skies and beautiful scenery. I've lived in Southern California and Whidbey Island Washington, so I've covered about every state out there making trips back to Indiana to visit family or when I moved back here in December 1994.

Photos always seem to bring back some great memories don't they?

I see where Al over at TheBayfieldBunch has been one of the first I have seen or heard about, that has been hit with the latest Google closures. For years Google has been saying they were going to close certain programs they had developed. Sometimes it would happen but then as if they were teasing us, they would supply an update and keep the programs they were going to close ... open.

I guess this time, they are serious and are doing just what they scheduled. It is not the reason I moved my main blog (not moved but started blogging) to WordPress this past December. Yet, I am glad I don't have my blog based on what Google does. Yes ... my old blog of 7 years is still there and will remain there because I don't think Google will every get rid of Blogger. There are millions of people who use Blogger for personal and business websites.

Besides ... Blogger is one form of income to Google. Advertising.

Whereas .... Live Writer and their Picasa Photo editing is expendable not only because there are options to use to replace those two programs, but Google doesn't make any money on Live Writer or Picasa. It COSTS THEM MONEY to run. Just like Google + which will be gone in a couple of months.

I hope Al finds usable options to do the same things that he is use to using putting his blog together and editing his great photos.

I consider myself to be fairly computer literate but I also found it to be quite an adjustment after moving to WordPress even though in 2005 I had over 100 one page WordPress blogs used as product pages for affiliate ecommerce.

Even when I changed from a Windows PC to an Apple Mac in October 2008 ... it took me a little over two weeks to understand the different language and processes where I could work with the Apple iMac. I love Apple products and will never go back to a PC or Microsoft program.

For those that don't know, with the Apple Photos program that comes free with every Apple device ... you can edit photos in that program with as much detail as Lightroom and other photo editors.

THERE WAS AN ADJUSTMENT AND A STEEP LEARNING CURVE MAKING THOSE CHANGES ... even for someone who is computer literate enough to be dangerous.  :)

Good Luck Al ...

Not much planned today except a basketball game at 2pm that I want to watch. It's already 10:27am and Heidi has still not woken up from her morning nap. Stella has figured out the walks are canceled for today. She does NOT know that all this rain is turning to snow after midnight.

I'll try to get some updated pictures this afternoon to post tonight. I moved the Favorite List and Archives back to the footer of the home page. Scroll to the bottom to see them.

It might be raining but at least it is warm this morning in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.