Storms & Sadie Forces Her Way Onto The Couch

It's been doing a lot of this so not much has been going on except a lot of rain passing through with spots of sunshine before the next storm. Some severe weather was forecasted but as usual in my location, the severe weather seems to split at the Indiana - Illinois state line and follows I-70 toward Indianapolis and the Ohio River towards Louisville, KY. That also happens in the winter when the snow is coming from the west.

Believe it or not, my gutters are not plugged up but more rain than they can handle in this particular storm. I was on the roof last week before the forecasted rain making sure the gutters were clear and could do their job.

Needless to say, I haven't been too far from home and have spent most of my time being lazy ... as have the hounds. I was able to get some sunset pictures, and some bad quality pictures of Sadie that tells an interesting story. She never fails to entertain in any kind of weather.

These are in order and from this past week, taken without any filter, standing in the same spot every day facing due west.

Severe thunderstorm warnings plus a tornado watch until 1am this morning.. but like I said, it splits and goes in two different directions so the warnings for both were later canceled.

The leaves are starting to change a little color but nothing dynamic like the Aspens out in Colorado. 

Now to Sadie, who at times has cases of "cabin fever". We don't take the daily walk when it is raining or during thunderstorms so she will bring a ball or a bone to where I am sitting while on the computer, drop that ball or bone expecting and getting a long session of fetch.

For readers that are unfamiliar with the bloodhound breed, they have their own rules. At times Sadie will use those rules to her advantage. She is never aggressive but she tries to intimidate the basset hounds when she wants their food or when she wants their spot on the couch. You can see the "bloodhound property laws" here toward the bottom of the post.

In this case, Winston was sleeping in a deep snoring state. He isn't moving no matter what but that does not bother Sadie because she has a plan. Due to his length I am pressed to the far right side with no room to move and there is just enough room for Sadie to sit ... but as the pictures show, she isn't interested in just sitting ... she wants the couch to sleep on, with not a lot of room available. She actually would prefer that Winston and I get off "her" couch but when we don't move, Sadie goes to Plan B. My couch is longer than a love seat but shorter than a couch with two oversized cushions.

Sorry for the poor quality but I was trying to get these taken quick without waking Winston up. I was holding an iPad Mini with one hand and probably to close for clear pictures.

Sadie sees a small spot available on the couch and even after telling her "no", she takes a seat. This is only the first step of her plan to create space for her nap. As you see there is more dog than space available.

Her usual process of intimidation is nothing more than holding her head over the hound that has something she wants, in this case she wants the space that Winston is using to sleep. He doesn't move, and doesn't wake up.

Sadie then looks at me as if I am going to wake Winston up and tell him to get off her couch or if she is lucky I would also get up to move off the couch. At the same time she is finding out if I am going to tell her to get down off the couch again or if she can proceed with her plan.

Once she sees the coast is clear and I am not going to do anything to her ... she does a slow sliding 360 to position herself in the last small space left on the couch, as I feel myself sliding to the right against the couch arm. She declared that space as hers when she jumped up on the couch. Still not enough room to lay down.

As she moves into her sleeping position, she uses her weight to push Winston up against me, thus moving me more to the right with no space available.

She continues making small adjustments by using her weight and strength, to gain just a little bit more space. Plan completed and now taking a nap just like she planned. Winston is now forced to hang his head over the edge to continue his deep slumber, due to lack of space.

That was about the highlight of my week, besides some great football games on Saturday and Sunday. It currently looks like the last part of the storm has moved east of me and nothing forecasted until Wednesday and after that a week of sunshine.

The pace of retirement living is great.

Sadie's Nose

It has become such a habit of letting the hounds outside when they want to go out, to where I have forgotten to check if we have any visitors nearby before opening the door. We go out the same door every time. I use to glance outside the door window to make sure there were no other dogs, birds, squirrels, cats or other animals in the near vicinity before opening the door .. but Saturday morning I wasn't paying attention.

I didn't glance outside before opening the door and just as I did, Sadie had already barged through the door into a full sprint at olympic sprinter speed along with those other two short legged bassets baying behind her. What ever it was had already darted from under my Toyota FJ and scaled the fence running along my driveway, and down over the hill. As soon as the (squirrel??) was out of site all three of them had to return to the scene of the crime to start their own investigation.

I was not able to take pictures of all of them and basically the only picture I came up with that was any good, is the one you see. Between scrambling to keep the hounds from taking off on me and hoping they would remain on top of the hill and not head toward the highway 100' down the drive, I didn't have a lot of time to run back into the house to grab my camera and snap pictures of all them scrambling in different directions. By the time I had my camera Sadie was the only one on the hunt.

If you look right below the silver color of the bumper you will see Sadie's nose as she is stretched out tracking the smell of what I think was a squirrel. Every time since then I have glanced outside before opening the door and will get back into the habit of doing so.

The next picture I took of Sadie late Saturday night. It's nothing out of the ordinary except being one of the first pictures I took with my new iPad Mini. I was holding the iPad out arm's length over her head so I would not wake her. I was curious how well the iPad picture would look.  I like the new Nikon DSLR so much that I almost want to take every picture with it but realize in the mode of hound spontaneity it is not possible to use just one certain camera, that you have to grab the one nearest to you.

She was into a deep loud snore at this point and had lost all interest in watching the last football game of the day/night.

Taken with an iPad Mini

It was cold (50's) with rain off and on most of the weekend. I didn't get far from the couch and never left the house for the weekend. With the cold mild winds Saturday during the day, Winston decided he wanted to spend time outside and wouldn't come back inside. He sat like this for quite a while enjoying the colder temps. I even went back inside the house and when I came back outside 10 minutes later to check on him, he was still sitting just like this, like a statue and the cool breeze blowing toward him.

Heidi has decided that she is only good for a couple of days per week getting her picture taken and was uncooperative whenever I pointed the camera at her his weekend. Funny basset.

That's all for now.

A Covered Bridge

At what point in time does a covered bridge not remain original or historic? I don't know the answer to that question since I don't follow covered bridges but the part "extensive structural renovation and replacement of timbers" made me wonder and asked myself that question.

On cold winter nights I can see a light off into the SW distance across the plowed fields and through the trees with no leaves. I know that is the covered bridge. It is a nice covered bridge.

Also on Friday or Saturday nights when it's quiet I can hear kids hanging out over there. It's has enough space for cars and trucks to pull over, has a few camping spots along a creek that looks to be about 50% low. The water is muddy so any swimming would be out of the question.

Late Wednesday afternoon I decided to run over and take some photographs. I debated whether to take the bag that held the other lens or take the 2nd leans by itself ... I took neither ... bad decision.

I mounted the 55mm-200mm lens and took off. I wasn't even finished with the first shot when I wished I had brought the 18mm-55mm lens. I drove the shortest distance, parked and didn't realize until I had walked through the bridge that I had parked and started my photographs on the backside of the bridge.

Even with the renovations I found it to be a pretty neat bridge, plus it's nearby. Due to the amount of traffic I left the hounds at home.

I'll be hibernating this weekend, more than normal. At least I can head south today to replenish the food supply and miss all the traffic from the east and west that will fill this small town for their annual Apple Festival. It will end Sunday with a parade featuring the high school band. With the high school's small number of students, they do not play football therefore this parade is just one of the few highlights for the band.

I'm not a festival person, wasn't even as a young child. My mom would take me along with my sister to festivals, she loved them, but even as a 5-6 year old I would walk the around the festivals thinking of the football games I was missing on tv ... in those days there were only a couple of games on Saturday's whereas now they will be showing 5-7 games at one time and then slim down to 2-3 after 10:30pm eastern time. One word can describe the reason for the increase of televised games ... money.

I went to the festival the first year I lived here. I couldn't believe the amount of traffic backed up on the highways coming from the east and west. The local police department, county sheriffs' and temp deputies direct traffic. So ... from 1998 onward I have not attended the popular festival. Too many people for me walking around. I'll hide out with the hounds instead, watching college football.

That's it for today.

A Year Ago Today & Other Thoughts

One thing about using a blog as a journal of sorts, it is easy to go back to certain times of the year or a particular month to see what was going on with you, where your mind was and what was going on.

Since my weather here in the "tropics" of southern Indiana turned south last night, with it raining every since, at times very windy and hard rain .. I thought I'd get some blog reading done in my busy retirement schedule at a little past noon.

Ironically it was a year ago yesterday, October 2, that the weather also changed for the worse but that wasn't the big news going on. The big news going on was after a couple of weeks of RV ownership and only 1 long shake down cruise with the hounds included ... I had found an oil leak. If interested you can read about it here.

I can say now, that one small incident poured a lot of doubt into my mind ... enough to put the RV up for sale a few days later just to see what kind of feedback I would get. Also the site I listed it on had a special that day ... list it until it sold for ~$20. So it basically was listed through the winter before selling in early April.

When my eyes picked up that small drop of oil dangling from the hose connector, my first thought was not about the problem but the first three answers I got when I asked five people years before "What do you think or know about RVs?". Three of the five had the same answer ... "They are money pits". All three had owned an RV from all different categories...the Class A, an older Class C and an older Class A.

I guess some people just get lucky and rarely have problems ... or they don't blog about them.

Anyway that was my first thought as I moved my finger up to touch that drop of oil. I spent the next few days around my daytime job, replacing those lines with OEM lines from GM. I'm not a mechanic so to me it was a pain in the ass to do the repair. I wasn't thrilled about the situation. After the test drive all things ran smoothly with no oil seen underneath the RV.

Still those thoughts of having more repairs waiting for me around the corner at unexpected times didn't give me any warm and fuzzy feelings, just a lot of doubt. It is also when I started thinking that the tow vehicle and a trailer might be the best combination for me.

I've gone through all of that in the past, so for new readers you can check the past blogs on the right sidebar if you are curious what went on. Once you open up the "month" link, the posts are listed with the oldest on the bottom.

Now on to just general rambling.

After a few months I am enjoying my internet satellite service ... the speed ... but I am not enjoying the part of trying to stay within 15Gb's per month, it's hard to do. That's my monthly allowance with Exede (prior Wild Blue). I always knew that watching any kind of videos were data suckers but I found out something the other night that changed when I would upload my pictures from my computer to Flickr.

That uploading of pictures also took more data than I thought. So I have to decrease my daily usage the rest of the month to keep within the limit of 15Gb's. The company stated that unlike others, once you reached the limit you would NOT lose internet access but would just have a slower connection. I found out last month when I ran my account to 15Gb with a couple of days to go on purpose, that nothing would load....so it did run slower I guess but you could do nothing as far as the internet. I wanted to see what happened if I hit the limit earlier than 30 days.

Data plans remind me of the new war declared this past week when AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint all came out with new data plans, offering to double your data now for a new contract and a new phone. Nina over at Wheelingit has a very good detailed description of the different plans on her blog today.

If any of you are at the point of changing internet plans while on the road or thinking about it ... I'd take a look at her post today and look at Nina's detailed options available.

A few days ago I did the "devil" of upgrades for my Apple iPhone and iPad. The news was full of horror stories about what would happen if you did the upload at 8.0, but like I said the other day the 8.0.2 seems to be great ... I have no problems a few days later. Sure I have to find and learn some new ways of doing things but that's ok ... I'm happy with the update.

I noticed recently the blog is kind of turning away slightly from RVing posts. Readers have decreased about half from what I use to have before announcing that I wasn't going anywhere. Strangely enough the #1 post searched and read of all time on this blog of three years ... is about the Lil Snoozy Trailer. I get readers looking for information on that trailer on a daily basis and at times it is the most read of all the posts that day. If I were depending on affiliate income with ads all over my blog that decrease in traffic would be a concern ... but as it is, I understand why some people stopped and it has no affect on what I write now or in the future.

The hounds decided to slow down their number of photo shoots and have taken a couple of days off. With it raining outside both basset hounds will get no further than the roof overhang and the bloodhound will sit next to me outside with a look as if "what are you taking me outside for, I'm not going out in that weather".  So there is a break in dog photos, but they will return soon.

So like I was saying the RV posts have kind of decreased lately. I haven't been looking at any trailers for sale nor glancing on Craig's List for RVs that are local. I moved my large folder of RV bookmarks back to the general bookmark population and off my favorites bar that runs across the top of my screen .. so out of sight. I still read all the blogs along my left sidebar on a daily basis.

I still have urges to hit the road. But what in? When I saw Tom's blog up in Alaska yesterday and his weekly forecast posted on his blog, I commented that I would pack up and leave with that forecast. Yet, those temps are nothing close to what what we will experience in the main months of winter. I already can feel I don't want to put up with that kind of weather.

So the travel bug still lingers deep inside the brain cells.