Hounds Have High Energy Today

I spent most of Friday afternoon visiting with an old college friend of over 40 years. I met her and her husband at our favorite establishment in Bloomington. With the temps at 48°, the word "chile" sounded good to go along with a locally brewed pale ale. We talked about old college memories, places we had traveled to over the years, her grown kids and a lot of sports. Laughing was a major activity.

So needless to say by the time I arrived back home late Friday afternoon, the hounds were more than ready to get outside and dump their tanks but more importantly they were ready to eat.

For a dog that had a reputation of having separation anxiety, Stella has done very well staying with the other hounds in a room with the door closed. No damage of any kind. I suspect she does a lot of sleeping like the others while I am away.


Friday morning didn't have much activity before I headed to Bloomington, after a couple of cups of coffee and some blog reading. Heidi was not outside long enough for her to be photographed.

Stella

Sadie

Winston

I could tell though this morning (Saturday) by the way Stella and Sadie were playing inside, they needed to get outside to burn off some of the "Halloween Energy" they had. They were not 10' outside the door when they started playing. With my hands full with a camera, a lens and a cup of coffee I was unable to photo those first few feet.

They started their normal sniffing of the field. Stella trotted out to the edge of the field and woods.

You can tell she knows her name by this photo as I yelled it out from the house. She then started the trip back to the yard.

About the time her feet touched the yard where Sadie was waiting for her ... they were in action. Sprinting, dodging each other showing off their moves and agility for big lumbering hounds.

This was about all the energy Winston could muster up this morning. It looks like he might have found some good tasting dirt on his way back and was trying to lick it off his chin before I would see it.

Checking to see if I am watching him

My football marathon starts soon. I need to replenish the food supply but cannot find time today to head out to the store between games. I'll find some combination of food that's here in the kitchen and come up with something I can survive on. It's amazing how quiet the house is with 4 hounds all off in dreamland.

Cleaning up tree limbs and raking the last of the leaves will take place Monday.

Life is rough here in the tropics of southern Indiana.

Fall Is In The Air

I guess it's expected when you stay up until 3:30am or a little after and then get up to let the hounds outside for their first trip in the morning at 7:30am ...  things could be a little foggy until that first cup of coffee hits the bloodstream. Why not go back to bed? Tried that but couldn't get back to sleep, so the hounds and I were up for the day.

I forgot to mention last night while I was working replacing the photos, around 1am the wind became so strong and loud, it made me get up and go outside just to see what was taking place. With leaves blowing across the drive from the NW, I was hoping I would wake up today with a yard "cleaned" of leaves. Not quite.

They blew off the large sycamore tree. They blew off the small saplings along the end of the drive. But there were plenty of them blown up along the house that will expect me to come outside a rake them for a final time. Of course Winston had to walk through the stack just to check how deep they were. Just like that, after a day of rain and wind what little color was there ... was gone.

Even though it was 46° by the time we hit the streets, Heidi decided to make her appearance to check out and see for herself if it was as cold as rumored. It might be hard to tell from the photos but Heidi is starting to gain weight. From the "feel" I think it's enough to stop by the vet to use their scales just to check how many pounds she has gained recently.

Stella and Sadie started a little search on their field but Sadie was more interested in some playing. With Stella out in the field, Sadie's nose picked up her location. Stella didn't know that as she ran back into the yard Sadie had a running head start toward her and was planning to meet her head on to start the wrestling session.

After some good kibble for lunch, some napping, they came out for a late afternoon break. Even with the damp ground and cool winds, it didn't take long for Stella to find her spot for the day and lay down to enjoy the breeze from the SW.

Life is good in the land of hounds.

All The Photos Have Been Fixed

I didn't plan to do it all tonight but it's like anything else I start ... I get started and can't stop. The closer I get to finishing "pulls" me onward. So 5-1/2 hours later, it was finished. Actually it was good to do. I was able to resize all the new photos to the XL size I have been making most of my photos the past few months of the hounds.

It also had some good and bad parts in the process. I was able to see just how healthy Heidi looked only a year ago before she became so thin. I was also able to see how much weight Sadie has put on these past two years. Winston got grayer but still in great shape. Although recently I can tell his hearing is decreasing ... faster than I would hope.

I decided not to re-activate the old email only to have over 20,000 emails loading back into the account ... just to see if those photos on the blog would show up automatically. So on my 2nd monitor, I opened a different browser and went to my blog. I used that screen to scan through the blog looking for posts where the photos were missing.

Then I would write down the photo file name, which is what that paper is at the top of this blog post, export them from my Apple Photos program into my computer "pictures" file so Blogger can upload them. I used the 2nd monitor to put the photos in order plus added the original captions, if the photo had one.

It was funny ... as I uploaded all the photos of the Coachmen RV I bought in September 2013, I thought to myself I probably should have kept that RV and I would be on the road as I type this. Sure I could not have gotten off road like we did last summer but that was a nice RV and the inside was immaculate.

As I was uploading the photos of the major repair job for me, not being a mechanic ... I started thinking how happy I was that I sold it when I did. Add in the time where the rear inside tire went flat during the winter while sitting in the backyard ... I was certainly happy that I sold it.

I was also able to see how I drove some readers simply insane with my decisions changing at times within DAYS!!, going back and forth on what to do. I'm sure many of them have left this blog and no longer read it.

After glancing through all those older posts while posting the photos I did not feel the obsession to travel that I had back in 2011-2013. Even in the spring of 2014 I was raring to go with the Chevy 2500 HD 4x4 pickup ... only to trade it for the Toyota FJ a little over a month after I bought it. When I was loading those Chevy photos back into the blog I realized just how nice that pickup truck was. It's no wonder the car dealer that took the trade, sold that truck within 3 days.

I am happy though with what I have, the FJ. I am also content with where I am right now but I do know that traveling is in my future.

I have to log off and get some sleep before the hounds wake me up this morning to go outside. It feels like a Friday night but it isn't. It is 3:32am though ... so I am out of here.

A late night in "the tropics" but at least all the photos are back on the blog.

Where Did All My Photos Go???

Well at least as I write this post I now know where all the missing photos went and possibly how I can get them back. About an hour ago I had no idea where the photos went that were posted on posts from July 2014 all the way back to the start of my blog in October 2011.

I remember last August I ran into a similar problem of photos disappearing but found the reason was deleting my Google + account, one that I had for a short time. Well I have a LOT of work to do IF my idea does not work.

A few weeks ago due to finally getting tired of all the spam, I deleted my home Gmail account. I had used that account for many years. I just remembered as I started this post, I used that home email account to start this blog and as my profile in October 201. I later changed my blogger profile to the one I have now with the "houndsnrvs" email account.

So ... when I deleted that account, I did not know I was also deleting all the photos that I have posted for the first 3 years of the blog.

With the recent Google changes on recovery of old email addresses, all I need to do is log into the old account. After a period of time that account will be updated.

Will that also update those photos back into my blog?  I don't know that it will.

The 2nd option is a slow process and that is going back to all of those posts and if I right click my mouse on that missing photo and do a "save as" on that photo it will show the file name of that photo so I know which photo to reload using my current profile. A profile that I have had for a few years.

It will take a long time to reload all of those photos, looking up the file name one at a time. Then going to my hard drive to find that photo, and export it to the file. Before doing that I will check the Picasa Photo file that blogger uses for all the photos posted and see if those missing photos are still in the Picasa program.

I really wasn't looking for this type of work to do. Yet, I wanted to keep this blog as a journal, as a reference for me and other readers ... so it will have to be something I will have to do, rebuild the missing photos.

I will start rebuilding the most popular blog posts that are listed on the right side of the blog. A reader emailed me telling me all of the photos of the Lil Snoozy Trailer were missing. That is how I found out I had the problem and then looking back through older posts showed me I had a major problem.

It wasn't until I downloaded my camera tonight that I found I only had one photo of the hounds today. One of Stella with a look on her face that really shows what she and the other hounds felt about the weather today. It was rain, wind and them more rain and wind. Consequently they only went outside to dump their tanks and then sprinted back to the house.

The time the hounds went outside today it was pouring rain, so I didn't take the camera outside when they were trying to stay dry.

Well the World Series is on the tv in the background. I can see the large tv screen if I roll my desk chair back a little and look through a couple of rooms. I need to get started on the photo rebuild.

What is today? Tuesday? Wednesday? ... life is tough at times being retired, especially in the "rainy tropics" of southern Indiana.