It Was Only Snow Hoopla

What started this state wide panic last night was the 6pm local tv weatherman showing a large radar screen on the tv, justifying why we, here in 'the tropics' would be getting our first snow of the winter sometime around 1am. This wasn't going to be like the dusting a few days ago. No, a whopping 1-2" of snow on my doorstep and much more further north.

Over the 20+ years I've lived here I had heard this story before and I can't say I was real confident it would happen. By 1am there were no snow flakes, just rain. By 2am I thought I heard a snow plow go by and I could tell by their front blade hitting those highway seams every 10' ... sounds that you hear with a CLEAR highway.
 

I took these next three photos from my kitchen table though my large window yesterday afternoon, the best view in the house. Their second truck had not shown up yet so they were filling this smaller wagon because the combine was full to capacity with soy beans. The temps were dropping fast and it certainly had a feel of snow was in the air, if you know what I mean. I guess I use that 200mm setting more than I think I do.

Later after the second truck showed up, they transferred the beans from that wagon to the trailer. I am sure by the time they finished their dinner last night they were happy to get those beans out of the field before the big snow arrived. I was still a little suspicious because when I was channel surfing I was not seeing any banners at the bottom of the local tv channels saying there would be school delays due to snow and icy roads in the morning.

By the time they were finished it looked like a freshly mowed yard. That part of the field is a very small portion and is the south end of it. The field turns right and goes almost a half mile behind all of the houses across the highway from me.

Stella was happy to get started on her walk this morning. It's pretty obvious that she likes her morning walk at 8am. Since she does not go out in the field to relieve herself after a night of sleep like Heidi does, she really has to go out side by 8am and will start whining if I am not in my jacket, gloves and sock hat. No, while I am pouring the breakfast kibble she stands outside by the door looking inside, waiting for me to let her and Heidi back inside the house to eat. So she is really waking me up to eat not because she has to go outside.  LOL

She veered off the path on occasion but not much.

 

Just a leisurely stroll on a cold crisp morning and no plans for the day.

We took what I call 'the old way' home, meaning we went left at the Y intersection, on a path that runs parallel to the one we start on. It was strange that she did not head off to the north part of the yard where we normally return but angled her walk across the field to the path where we started. I can't remember the last time she did that.

With her getting her walk 7 minutes after we woke up, I had not had coffee yet. I was also scrapping the bottom of the dog food container pouring out their breakfast so I needed to buy some dog food.  So I made a change in plans by going to town to pick up a bag of dog food BEFORE my first cup of coffee for the day. It was 8:44am before I poured my first hot cup of Seattle's Best Coffee #6 ... nice and strong.

With little use of my vintage baseboard electric heat, my house was still staying at 66° all night and today, with the outdoor temps not getting above 30° by the time the hounds took their after lunch trip outside. It didn't feel that cold, there wasn't any wind but Heidi never got off the carport and Stella never left the driveway. 

Instead of heading to the yard to dump tanks, Heidi turned around and headed for the door to go back inside. She had seen and felt enough. With a full body shake and continuous loud barking, I figured out real quick she wanted back inside.

Stella assumed with the quick exit, there might be a 2nd serving of lunch and she wasn't going to miss that. She was wrong about that, but made a thorough check around both dog food bowls and the dog food container just to see if a piece or two of kibble was laying around somewhere.

I headed to the library to return one book then picked up two more new books. I've always liked the books written by Yuval Noah Harari. If you are interested I'd start with his first book called 'Sapiens'. That will shed a new light on current problem with the weather and you will see this climate change stuff isn't something new. His latest book is called 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. It should be interesting.

I am not a NASCAR fan but the new book by Dale Earnhardt Jr looked interesting. He details his career at the end while dealing with concussions. You never picture those drivers suffering injuries on Sundays, struggling through the week, then recovering just in time to race again that weekend. You see the races and the interviews but never what they might be going through away from the track.

With both hounds in their afternoon routines of sleeping, starting both of those books was easy to do in a quiet house ... that is until Stella woke up, started whining for her afternoon walk a little past 1pm. Of course any time they smell my food or their dog bones they will wake right up and sprint to the kitchen. I should have never shared that first piece of pizza crust the hounds many years ago.

As usual there is not a lot going on but enough to keep us three active every day.

It's been a nice day here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

Busy Day With Possible Snow Showers Tonight

With snow showers predicted tonight I wasn't the only one that decided some things needed to get finished today. I had Phase II of my leaf project finished by 11am. Soon after I had taken a shower, and changed into some dry clothes I heard a rumble outside. They decide since it might snow tonight it might be a good idea to harvest their soy beans. Due to all of my activity this morning, I am tired. So I'll leave you with a lot of photos, no content. Heidi says hello from deep inside her sleeping bag.

The temps are dropping fast this afternoon in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.

A Little iMac Hiccup ... Virus???

Yes, there are some eyes under that skin you see. This is the look Stella gives me when she feels I have not given her enough treats or snacks. Last night she wanted more of the grain free dog bones that were flavored with bacon. For a 'cleaner' photo I wiped off the drool on the sides of her jowls before taking the picture. Even after the walking I did to grab the iPhone to take the photo, she never moved.

With the second day of the coldest days this winter, the hounds do a lot of sleeping. Although the room is not cold Heidi knows it is winter and will shiver until I bring out the sleeping bag for her to sleep on or wrap up in on the couch.

This was Friday night ...

I decided to test the quality of sleep for the hounds, so I put a piece of the pumpkin pie crust in front of Stella's nose while she slept. It was funny to see her nostrils twitching while she slept after the crust was placed there but she never woke up.

As I glanced out the window this morning in the computer room, the field was covered with white heavy frost. I did not know at the time it would be a great background for taking photos of Stella and bring out that red coat of hers. These fresh deer prints kept Stella busy this morning. She was active because they were scattered all over the field but not nearly as hyper with excitement as Sadie would have been. Sadie would have been going out of her mind with fresh deer prints like this.

Stella was going to try a different entry point into the ragweed burrs but I was right there and talked her into walking back to the path to start her walk.

It was freezing, crisp, and extremely quiet this morning. The skies were beautiful.

For some reason I keep wanting to buy a smaller camera with a zoom capability. I know the picture sharpness will not come close to what I get with the older Nikon D3200 but for some reason the urge to buy one has been strong the last two days. If I were to buy a new lens for the D3200 I have come to the conclusion I need one with a range of 18mm-135mm. But does it really make a difference if I already have a lens I use every day that is 18mm-200mm ... no it doesn't. I'll keep what I have.

The problem getting up at 6:15am or around that time to start our day ... the hounds are begging for lunch by 10am now. For 31 years I've had hounds, I never fed them more than once per day unless they were puppies ... until Stella showed up in August 2015. She had come from a home that had 'free feeding' ... ate when she wanted.

Yes, on the walk before 8am ... there is that sun again.

I could hear that distinct sound a bloodhound makes when they are sniffing a scent in the tracking mode ... their jowls flap just a little. One year when I left Bertha, Winston and Max at a kennel while I was away on a business trip the kennel owner heard that sound when walking Bertha ... she said in all the years she had hosted different breeds of dogs and walked all of them ... she had never heard a sound like that, only from a bloodhound.

This is about all the intensity Stella shows when tracking.

Of course there is always time for her to have some natural deer protein ... especially when it's frozen.

Freezing cold and crisp.

She knows the deer went that way but we are on our way home and it's getting cold.

When I told her "let's go home" ... she took off trotting.

There were till plenty of things to check out until she got to the backyard.

I was happy to see that the last of the leaves from the Mahogany tree are gone. I can now mow the leaves for the last time this year. I'll do that sometime this week after the temps crawl back up to the mid-40's. That small north side yard has the most leaves as the winds seem to always blow them there, where they get trapped between the house and that small bank.

Once again this morning Stella did not stop at the trees or the fence to smell but she took off along the edge of the field and yard. If she had her way she would have gone back into the field in the middle of all of those burrs.

For the first time since I have bought this iMac in May 2017 it had a 'hiccup' this morning. The computer hard drive locked up as I was moving my morning photos to the external hard drive, something I do everyday without any issues. The Activity Monitor was telling me a system program that moves those files was "not responding".  It did not matter where I put the cursor and clicked ... the computer was locked up. I had to hold the power button to turn it off.

I unplugged the 4-port USB hub, then turned on the computer seeing it boot up with no issues. I then plugged the USB hub back in and tried to export the morning photos to the external drive ... same result and the Activity Monitor telling me that same com.apple.xxxxx program was not responding.I repeated the process to turn off the computer but did something different after I rebooted it.

To find out if it was my hard drive acting up or the external drive I did NOT plug in the 4-port USB hub. I opened my Apple Photos program (like Windows My Pictures) and tried moving the photos I selected for this blog to the Blog Folder on my desktop so Blogger can import the photos to the blog.

Ah ha .... the Activity Monitor had in red "Photos" ... "not responding.

So it was something on the hard drive. I opened the App Bitdefender and updated their latest Malware files, then ran their Critical Locations Scan, something I do weekly. It did not find any malware or viruses. The computer was running normal as I read the internet sports, answered emails and a few texts during the scan.

I decided I'd run their "Deep System Scan". I had not done that since buying the computer. It took 48 minutes to scan everything. I gave it permission to scan my photo library that has over 70,000 photos since I was trying to export photos that froze up the computer. It found 3 files of malware, all from one App that I had personally downloaded before I bought this computer in May 2017. All the apps, photos and document files were uploaded from my Time Machine backup when I was setting up the new computer in May 2017. This app came along for the ride in that transfer.

The app is called DrApp Cleaner. It was an easy fix. Bitdefender had quarantined the files to prevent any harm to my hard drive. All I had to do was go into my Finder folder, then Applications folder and delete the App "DrApp Cleaner. Once the trash was empty, those three files disappeared from the Bitdefender log.

I turned off my computer, plugged in the 4-port USB Hub and then turned on the computer. Everything loaded normal with no issues. I exported 74 photos from this mornings walk to the external hard drive for backup with no issues.

The iMac was and has functioned normal every since I removed that App and those "spy" files as they were called. I jumped back into my Applications Folder in Finder (Windows My Computer Folder) and deleted any app that I had not used. If I could not remember what the app did, then I must have not been using it and deleted those too. Any system app was protected by Apple by not giving me the option "Move to Trash".

In the meantime I am going to try to warm the house up. I am going to 'give-in' to the hound's demands that they want to be fed and feed them. I'll try to grab a few more photos for this post before I post it.  SUCCESS with the after lunch photos !!!

It was the normal after lunch routine. That might show 38° but believe me it feels much much colder than that.
 

Stella stood and sniffed the air putting her plan together. I had a good idea where she was headed if she got the chance.

Heidi could tell by the freezing feeling, she didn't have a lot of time to relieve herself and then get back inside. She had to be quick.

Sure enough ... there goes Stella into the field but luckily behind the area with all the burrs. Once she saw me walking up the path she came running.

By the time I had Stella back inside the carport I see Heidi is sprinting across the front yard and up the driveway. She was cold enough that she was first inside not waiting for Stella to step in front of her. Then it was a fast run through the kitchen and jumping up on the couch for some afternoon sleep.

With all the leaves down from the Mahogany tree and most from the tall Sycamore tree, I'll get some but but not this many leaves after I mow them again. This should take about an hour to do the whole yard and I'll be done for the 2018 Leaf Project. It might snow on Tuesday but will be in the upper 40's for most of the week. I can mow then.

It's a pretty good retirement day here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.