Still Kicking

It has been the best part of a month since I updated the journal, so I thought I would let you all know we are still alive and kicking here at Dogpound North. There haven't been a lot of exciting things happening here other than fence building and the seemingly never ending task of hauling away broken tree branches from our late summer snow storm last year.

Not to sure but I think I have moved about 100 loads like this so far.

And as you can see it isn't done yet.

Way back in May Mom and I took a trip up to our friends the Pohl's place near Ponoka where they had a Farming with Horses day going on, coincidentally on Mothers Day. They were plowing, disking, and harrowing in preparation for seeding about 5 acres with oats. There were a bunch of teams there and it didn't take long till it was looking pretty good.

Nope Ben and Beauty didn't fall into the Lady Clairol, Ken borrowed this team for a bit.

Doing a little plowing

 

 

 

We did get out and visit some little people in the last month though.

Hmmm, not getting in the house like that though!

 

But Grandpa I am still pretty cute.

 And Max and Maya are enjoying the summer here and all the green grass to roll on.

Mid June Rebecca and her cousin Leighanne took off on a little bike ride to raise some money for MS. They rode about 178 km's over two days along with about 800 other riders and managed to raise about $650,000 total. Good for you girls.

It has been a pretty nice spring here in the north country and just the last few days we have been getting a little moisture which makes digging those fence post holes a whole lot easier.

Once again we have resumed our monthly lunches with our eldest granddaughter Claire and yesterday we tracked down the Perogy Boys food truck and gave them a whirl. There are a bunch of different trucks rolling around Calgary and if it weren't for the fact that we need to try out some of the others we certainly would be back at this one pretty soon.

Two of my favourite girls.

Today was Father's Day here on the farm and I celebrated by getting a few more fence posts dug in and mowing all that nice green grass. That made it a great day in my books and Brenda cooked me up one of my all time favourite dishes, Fetticcini Gigi so that made it even better.

It's Spring............

It is spring here at Dogpound North, we are down to just some 3 or 4 foot drifts around the yard and most of them should be gone by late June or early July. Just kidding although we are having some nice warm days we are still getting some wintry days also. Oh well, that IS spring in Alberta. We usually get most of our snow in March and April so I am hoping this year is a little different than usual cause we have enough snow already.

We are into week 4 of the rehab of Brenda's knee and although she is not convinced it is going as well as it should, all the professionals we see think she is doing great. Might be a while before she starts running marathons or riding Wink, but she is doing a lot of her usual stuff. Tough to keep her down.

Last weekend we snuck into town and picked up a stationary bicycle from Claire's Mom Melissa, thanks Melissa, and while we were there we kidnapped Claire and took her out for lunch. She is a delightful young woman and managed to put up with her old grandparents and keep us entertained and caught up on the goings on in her life.

And then once we got home Clayton, Lacey and their girls popped by to have a visit. Major score three granddaughters in one weekend.

As the snow melts around the country the wildlife is starting to move around a bit more. These moose are hanging out just a couple of hundred feet from the house here.

Today was another snowy day so I thought I would head out into the West Country and see what was moving about. Along Alberta's Eastern Slopes there are some wild horses that have been out there for a long time and seem to be pretty well adapted to the country. Likely some of them are descended from horses that were either let loose out here or escaped from local ranches, but some of them probably escaped from the local First Nation folks over the last couple of hundred years. I managed to find a small band and get a few photos.

Hiding in the trees

Took over an hour to get these guys to let me see them without trees between us.

Lookout

Although the rest of the small band keep grazing while I was watching them the guy in the photo above never really took his eyes off of me the whole time I was there.

Along the way I crossed paths with this fellow and it looks like he is complaining about the spring weather also.

Time is Slipping By

Well a few changes around Dogpound North, not the least of which is a new computer for me. I finally slid into the abyss and broke down and bought a MAC so this is my first visit back to the Blogger software in many years. I alway wrote my journal on LiveWriter in the past and only after I am finished this entry will I know whether things have improved here on the Blogger site or not. It has been over a month since my last journal entry and although we have been doing lots, not much of it is very exciting.

Last year we started moving all our medical stuff earlier in the summer so we can get that out of the way and jump through the hoops that allow us to travel south in the winters a little earlier. Other than a few final visits with our various docs we are getting close to the end of that process, so barring any late breaking news we should be good to go for next winter.

Our windmill and some interesting cloud formations off of our front porch last night.

One thing I do enjoy about being home is the Sundre Aquaplex, I swim there almost every weekday morning and unlike the pools in Arizona this one is a lot less crowded, in fact sometimes towards the end of my daily swim I get the whole thing to myself. Down in Arizona you are lucky if you get a lane to yourself at some point in the swim and it is unheard of to get an empty pool to swim in. I usually swim about 2500 metres each day but a few weeks ago the pool complex started tracking our swims and gave the lane swimmers as a group the goal of swimming from Victoria to Panama. Probably for some Pan-American Games or something. Well I figured if I was going to get out of here for winter I should kick up my contribution so at least the rest of them would be swimming in warm water once I headed south so I am now logging 3250 metres a day, or just a smidge over 2 miles. Takes me about an hour and twenty minutes to complete it so if I was really headed for Panama I think I would walk, bad knee and all, it would be quicker. But it is a good motivator anyway.

Sunrise in the morning on the way swimming

One more bit of exciting news that is being worked on here at Dogpound North is that my son, Matt, and his longtime girlfriend Michelle have decided to take the next step and tie the knot. Actually he proposed way back last winter while they were on a vacation in Cuba but just last week they set a date, so we are heading towards the Mexican Riviera next April to see them take their vows.

Michelle, Matt and Family

Yet another reason to keep swimming, so I don't embarrass everyone on the beach down there!

In our last couple of entries we showed you lots of pictures with the Anderson girls and since then we have actually had a visit with our grandson Kashton and his mother Rebecca, as well as our granddaughter Claire who was out to visit her Dad and sister Madison a couple of weekends ago. Both Kashton and Claire got the mandatory visit with the horses while they were here

Wink, Brenda, Kash, Becky, Claire and of course Mack

and Kash took one of our John Deere's for spin around the yard too.

Little Boys do Love Tractors

Of course those who have been here know that Dogpound North is an actual farm and we raise, or try to raise a crop here every year. Some years we are a lot more successful than others but most years we do manage to get something back from the land. We had a good spell of dry weather here during the last month and other than a few acres that will be sown to oats, for silage, and underseeded with timothy hay, the rest of the unseeded acreage is barley and we did manage to get that all seeded a few days ago.

Big Boys love Tractors too.

I have managed to give the fellow who farms here for us a hand from time to time this spring and at least run a set of harrows over what he has seeded.

Another couple of projects we have going on here include a little reno work in the house, kind of a makeover for the bathrooms and putting a new cooktop in the kitchen so Brenda has been busy picking out tiles and and countertops for that endeavour. We dragged our daughter Becky into that mix as she has a real good sense of what goes with what.

Rebecca and Brenda

So for the most part I was overruled and we will not be having a mauve bathroom, but they did let me pay!

The other project consists of a little rural renewal going on, we, like most old farmsteads, have a plethora of old buildings around, and it time to tear them down and reconvert them into greenhouse gases. Matt and I spent a couple of days hauling some old junk to the dump and sorting some other old junk into other spots where it will probably be stored untouched until the next generation discovers it all over again. So with all that and a few fencing projects around the yard we have been keeping busy here at Dogpound North.

As for the Blogger experience, all in all, not to bad, although some of the great functions of LiveWriter that I used a lot have escaped me here so I am, at least for now, having to resize each and every picture and was not able to subject you to an album full of pictures of the junk we removed from our buildings, but I will work on that for next time. Sure wish Rick over there on Vancouver Island would get a Mac so he could figure out some things for me. :)