Not a Picture to be Seen

We seem to be having a pretty nice summer up here north of the Medicine Line. After a pretty wet June, which is kind of normal for us, the weather heated up a lot and the Calgary Stampede had spectacular weather with almost everyday in the 80's and nary a cloud in sight. So maybe there is something to this global warming thing after all, in the past we probably only got about a half dozen days over 80 every year and I am thinking we are already at that point with our hottest month, August, still to come.

In my last journal entry I mentioned that we finally got some seed in the ground on the last acres of the place. Pretty quick after that Bob, the fellow who farms our place, started cutting a small part of the hay that we seeded last year. It had a pretty good volunteer crop of rye mixed in with it so it will probably end up being cattle feed.

About all the excitement we have had around here the last few days is the preparation for Lacey's wedding in Jamaica, a ways off in February. Lace and her mom, along with her sister Bec, and a couple of other bridesmaid girls were off yesterday on the hunt for the perfect wedding dress. Although no pictures were taken the only report is that she is going to make a beautiful bride, which is no surprise to me anyway. Brenda was pretty excited to go along on the search and even though she is restricted to crutches all reports said that Lacey's bridesmaids took wonderful care of her all day.

Well she was off on the dress hunt I decided I should head out into the West Country and see what I could see. It had been years since I had really driven many of the roads out West and it is always interesting to see what changes had been wrought on the landscape. Remembering that a lot of my working life was spent searching for gas and oil out there is was great to see the final product of my labours. Most of the seismic lines are now being used by ATV's and offroading folks, and of course some of what were just rudimentary trails in the distant past are now pretty nice roads. Of course I had my camera's with me so although there were no pictures of our beautiful bride to be I did manage to catch a few shots of some of our local denizens of the woods.

The whole band of wild horses, four mares, one colt and the stud off to the left

Here is a close up picture of the herd sire.

Watcher in the Woods

The wildflowers were spectacular along the way also.

So there a few pictures of my activities and a second blog in a month. who knows maybe we'll get three next month.

Blog a Month

Well if I am to keep up my blistering pace and maintain my membership in the "Blog a Month Club", I thought I had better get to it. A long time ago I swore I wasn't going to tell you about my morning coffee everyday and we haven't really done a lot of exciting stuff this month so I don't have a lot to catch you up on!

Brenda's knee is still not progressing at the pace we thought it would. She still has another couple of weeks of using crutches and although she is not liking it for the most part she is complying. We headed into the hospital one day and had some X-rays done and it appears as if the fracture is still there, but not moving around so that must be a good thing. Guess we will hear what's next at the end of the month when we visit her orthopedic guy.

Last time, I told you about our little flood, not much has happened on that front either, but the fans and dehumidifiers are now gone so it doesn't sound like we have a Twin Otter preparing for take-off in our basement any longer. In the next few days I expect to hear about the re-construction plan.

About the only thing of note around here the last month was Miss Ella's birthday and we did manage to get up to Rocky Mountain House for that event.

Looking back wistfully on the past 5 years

It took a while this year but we did eventually get some peonies blooming

 We have had an exceptionally late spring and a lot of rain early in the year so getting onto the land was a bit of a challenge. We finally got some seed in the ground along about July 11th so hopefully we get some silage and the timothy that is underseeded gets a good start for next year.

The rain has had some good effects though as the grass in the yard is loving it and we are mowing a couple of times a week still.

Last Friday Lacey, intuitively it turns out, figured Grandma need some Grandgirl time. She brought the girls down and we had a great visit. It is so nice to see them but with Grandma's knee she is not really up to a lot of driving.

A game of "Ring around the Rosie" going on!

And of course it is always nice to get a little work out of our visitors too.

 

  These Sandhill Cranes thought they would join the party also, they are not common here this time of year, but I am thinking the freshly sprouted oats and barley drew them in for a little snack. As you can see in the picture below if they were not vigilant one of our local coyotes would have made them into a little snack also.

Ella always loves to get a ride on Grandma's horse while she is visiting.

And that about catches you up on all the excitement here at Dogpound North this past month. So as you can see, my not drinking coffee certainly curtails my journals.

But we have had some pretty cool cloud formations roll by.