Whats New...

My goats are going on vacation! I have been very stressed about their current living situation, they are confined to a small corral due to collapsed fencing at my parents from the snow and my farm is not goat-proof and will not be anytime soon. I sent out a plea to friends and family about possibly giving them away, I didnt know what else to do. Debbie & Phil (Andrea's parents) offered to take them in for me until I can get my farm back on track. So my goats are catching an afternoon flight on Saturday in the bed of my truck and heading to Barten's Farm in Snohomish to spend some quality time with other goats in a big pasture where they will get lots of attention and be free to run and play again.

The horses are home and I am Lovin' it! :) I so enjoy just going out to my barn and feeding them and spending time with them morning and night to brush or just sit and watch them eat. A true horse lover enjoys those sorts of weird things. We are hoping to get in a couple hour ride tomorrow at the tree farm, weather permitting. Although I did get the feeling from Derek he was riding rain or shine!

Scout.. little stinker! I have been turning the dogs out into the backyard when I go feed so they can run and explore. Well for the past 6 weeks or so, the ground has been pretty hard/frozen still so Scout has not been able to escape..... until yesterday! I'm in the barn doing my thing and I realized she is nowhere to be seen! Derek comes out and we can hear her collar on the other side of the wood fence, of course she doesnt come when we call her when she is "free!" so Derek says, screw it, she'll come home when she's ready! So I go back to the barn, he goes in the house. A few minutes later I hear her collar on the other side of our property at the the neighbors and I see her running all around his place. I called her and she came up to the pasture fencing and looked at me like "Mom I cant get through this wire, come help me". So I take some steps towards her to show her how to go around the wire and she turns and looks at me with this snarky attitude and says "See Ya BIIIIAAAATCH!!" LOL

A few minutes later she is running around in our pasture so I open the gate to the yard and walk through the gate like I'm going to the house and I can hear her behind me at a distance coming my direction. I turned to look at her and she darted off, so I continued to walk towards the house and by the time I got to the slider door on the deck, she was right next to me like "well aren't you gonna let me in, I'm freezing out here!" Oh that dog, how could I punish her.. I cant really because she did come when I turned my back on her and I dont want her to think coming no matter how she does it, is a bad thing.

Derek can say the darndest things!

Last night we were at Eric & Andreas to celebrate Andreas 26th Birthday. She had gotten 15 live crabs from a friend, so we had a feast! It was delicious.. As we were sitting around the table eating our crab, Derek was looking at his crab and talking about how he had gone riding that day and the day before and his tooshie was a little sore. Eric did not know that we had Blackie Smalls, he thought we just had Edgar. So Eric says to Derek, "Who did you ride?" Derek looks at Eric with this look of... Duh and says "Piper". OMG LOLOLOLOLOL We all busted up laughing at the table, almost in tears, everyone knew except Derek what was so damn funny!! Derek says "What?" Derek thought Eric said "Who did you ride with?" It was hilarious!

And Derek asked that I clarify why we call Blackie Smalls, Blackie Smalls. Well for one cuz he is black and for two, when he is standing next to Edgar, he looks very small... so thats how he was renamed.. My apologies to Steve & Angela (his owners), he can still be HotRod of course to you, but Derek is gonna call him his new name! :)

A Great Weekend!

The horses are home!!! I brought them home Friday after work, it was foggy so it got darker a lot faster than I wanted it to. They didnt seem to think the barn was as cool as I do, I had to convince them they wanted to stay inside the stalls to eat dinner.. lol A new pasture, new barn, they were just feelin frisky and spooky.

I had ordered some new stirrups for Derek and I, we ran some errands on Saturday and then decided we wanted to go for a ride around the neighborhood. We rode down to my friend Molly's place, she had her horse out as well, so the three of us rode for a little while, Derek and I rode over an hour, enough for his knees to start feeling it. It was the first time I had been on since October and first time for Derek in about 15 years! He was very comfortable on... Oh I should mention that his horse came with the name HotRod, but Derek decided for now, he wants to call him "Blackie Smalls". lol So anyways, Derek was feeling really good about riding B.S. (for short).

We set the alarm for 7:30 Sunday morning as we had a lot to get accomplished and we wanted to get in another ride. We woke to about an inch or more of snow, decided we didnt want to haul the horses anywhere, so we just saddled up and rode the neighborhood again, about 45 minutes today. :)

Our first big ride will be on Valentines Day, ahhhhhh. The horse club is having a ride up at the Heart Lake Trails in Anacortes, so we are going to try to ride 2-3 times a week to prepare our horses and ourselves for this ride.

So here are a couple pictures of Derek today:

Oh and we had wanted to work on the garage this weekend and getting it cleared up and organized, well now that Derek has discovered riding, I dont know if we'll ever get any projects done around here... hehehe

One More Thing...

Oh and I forgot to mention. See this barn is supposed to be a 36 x 24, so basically 2 stalls on each side of a 12' isle. Well those mats I talked about in the below post, are 4x6, sooooo I should be able to fit 6 mats in each stall to have a perfectly matted stall... ERRRKK, stop the truck/trailer again! Darn if those stalls are not 12x11.5 instead! GRRRR. :) So for now, I have 5 mats in each stall, leaving a big open unmatted section, until we can loosen up the wall and slide the mats under the ouside wall.... See this is what I'm talkin about when I say Plan C, Revision 5, every time we go out to finish up this darn barn or our fencing or anything that has to do with getting the horses home, something comes up and some darn thing needs fixing, tweeking, deleting.... Oh Happy Days!

Problem....... Solved!

Grrr.. I woke up this morning with every intention of bringing the animals home today.. Screeeeeeetch, stop the truck/trailer! It is 5:50pm and still no animals. Saturday I spent the day helping my cousin Marc with a workparty at his house so I had only today to work on our place. We woke up this morning to a frosty white ground, something we havent seen in a week or more, as it has been foggy 24/7 for almost a week. We went out to look at the barn and talk about our goals and intentions for the day and what needed accomplishing, and wouldnt you know, it was raining inside that barn! It was close to noon when we were out there and the frost was melting, so the entire underside of the roof and all the metal beams on the underside were soaking wet and dripping A LOT!! So that was the problem of the day.

We made a $175 trip to Home Depot and we now have a roof under the roof.. :) We/Derek, built a wood framed roof to sit under the metal roof in the tack room stall. I dont mind water dripping on the horses, but I cant have water dripping on my tack... After we put up the wood roof, we put plastic over the top of the wood so when water does drip down, it will hit the plastic and slide off out the back side of the stall. I hope that makes sense, my fingers are still frozen from being outside all day. We are going to just put a tarp in the hay room to keep the hay dry.

While Derek built the roof, with my occassional assistance, I spent the afternoon digging up 10 stall mats and moving them on my own! If you are a horse person and have ever tried moving a 4x6 dirty stall mat, you will KNOW what a PITFA that is!!! Whew, and I did 10 of them by myself! 5 of them were buried somewhat in the ground with grass growing over the top of them. As I sit here typing, I can feel my back stiffening up by the minute. I better get up and out of here before I get stuck in this chair...

Oh, so story of the weekend, still no horses home. I feel like Plan A turned into Plan B, but then Plan B needed modification, so we have Revision 1 and 2 on Plan B, then back to Plan A with Revision 1, shit now we are on to plan C but I think up to Revision 5... lololol

90% Completed Barn :)

The barn is pretty much done. I HAVE to thank those that helped get this thing loaded and set up with such short notice and so quickly.


Thanks SOOOO VERY MUCH:
Cousin Marc
My Brother Eric
My Mom & Dad
Marc's Father in Law, Bill
Thanks to George for helping us 3 weekends in a Row, and driving up from Covington!
His wife Rachel too of course, she and I spent all day one day burning while the guys cut wood


A BIG Thank You as well to my friends Mark & Molly for the use of their tractor for a week!!

We couldnt have done it w/o everyones help!!


The Barn is up and covered, we need to seal some holes in the roofing material, buy a 12' gate for the isleway to keep the animals out of the inside of the barn, dad is going to help us cut in a door for our tack and feed room, then we need to put a floor down in those rooms and finally install the mats in the horse stalls. It is workable as it is right now, we laid gravel down for the "sacrifice area" for the horses. This coming weekend, we plan to finally finish the fencing so we can hopefully bring the kids home this next weekend.... crossing my fingers.


Here is the load of gravel we bought, this is 2/3 of it. This was just this last weekend (1st weekend in January) it snowed off/on in flurries Saturday and Sunday as we worked both days on the barn that weekend... It was a cold weekend to be outside.

This is the very beginning of the process. I am standing on my deck looking out to my pasture

Some building process pics





Here is the completed project, YEAH!!

Technology I never wanted, but LOVE that I have!

I was driving today thinking about my blog and that if it weren't for Derek, I might not even be able to do this. Well I could still type things, but I certainly wouldnt be able to post pictures. Way back when.... when digital cameras were just coming out, I was ADAMENT! that I did NOT want one!! What did I need one of those silly gadgets for? I was perfectly happy with my clunker of a camera, although at the time it was an average sized camera, nothing too extravagant. To lift that thing now and look at it, WOW! lol Its a monster, it is huge.. Heck our first digital camera seems LARGE compared to the smaller one we traded for last year.

Derek was persistant on getting a digital camera and am I ever thankful he pushed and finally just got us to buy one... Oh I was stubborn and didnt want to use it, but from the minute I started using it, lets just say we've had the digital now for what... let me look back at my oldest dated digital pic..... Sept 2004! I have never gone back to the clunker and as a matter of fact, when I was packing up that camera before we built the house, I noticed it still has a roll of film still in it, unfinished. I really need to dig that thing out, finish the roll and develop it.. I might be happily suprised at what is on there, at this point, I have NO idea! I must admit too, I have NEVER developed ANY of my digital pics... I AM that commecial where all the pics fight over who is going to get deleted, although I do pull all my pics off my camera and they are all stored (and backed up) on the computer. I've printed them to my own printer, which is not a picture printer, printer! Did you follow me there.. lol I just print them through Word to fill photo frames and create cool things. Oh and for this blog... hehehe

The other thing I was adament we did NOT need was something Derek bought me for Christmas this past year and I just love the thing! It is a Garmin Navigational System... Well what I call it is a vehicle GPS, but Derek kept correcting me, apparently it is not a GPS, that's just what I call it. Basically I punch in an address, and the lady in the dashboard mounted screen tells me where to go! lol She shows me all the local restaurants, parks, shopping etc.. She's awesome! I never wanted one of the darn things, why did we need one.. but again, I just am lovin it, thanks to Derek. Maybe I should stop being so darn stubborn and just realize some gadgets can be very useful.

Lookie Lou - I Must Do!

I left work an hour early, okay well 1.5 hours early if I'm being honest.. lol My co-worker that lives in Spokane usually heads back to Spokane on Thursday afternoon, but he was stranded with I-5, I-90, Hwy 2, and White Pass all shut down. So I did leave someone at the office to answer phones.. I wanted to get out and check some of the flood damage and there were many others doing the exact same thing!

Snohomish is supposed to crest tonight at 10pm, it's already pretty bad in Snohomish.

Here is the Skykomish River in Monroe

This is the Valley between Snohomish/Monroe along Hwy 2

Some flooding off 88th in Snohomish, close to Pilchuck Vet

Here is Pilchuck Vet, not quite flooded in the building yet

Here are some pics of the Snohomish River in Downtown Snohomish and all the other Lookie Lou's..

Standing on the Bridge looking towards the River Road

Here we have the Lumber Mill just across the Ave D Bridge in Snohomish and the intersection for the River Road. I walked down to the River Road as well and took a couple pics of the water crossing the roadway and then right up next to the road.

Here is a picture overlooking the Soccer Fields on the road heading out to Lords Hill

Pilchuck Park & River here and some of the flooding from it. The people on the other side of the river have all their hopes into bales of straw, that is the only thing keeping that water from gushing in at this point.

I plan to watch the news tonight and hopefully find out just how bad Snohomish is flooded at 10pm. Sounds like they shut down Hwy 9 already, not a good sign!

Drowned Rats...

I dont quite feel like a drowned rat, but my horses sure look the part! :( The barn should be done on Saturday, so the plan is to bring the horses and goats home on Saturday afternoon... :) I have not posted pics yet because I want to post them when it is completely done and I can show pics of all the boys in the new barn!! I can say that I LOVE LOVE LOVE my barn and I'm soooo excited to have somewhere to just go and sit and play with all my animals.

So we have had LOTS of snow, LOTS of rain, LOTS of cold and now record flooding, all within 30 days. Other than dealing with my animals and their situation, I love this stuff! Okay I dont really love the rain so much, but I love natural disasters. It is just amazing what the weather and water and storms can do. I feel fortunate to live on High Dry Ground!

Give me til the weekend and I should have new pics posted!

Portable Barn Project

We did it, we bought the barn! A scary undertaking, spending such a large lump of cash on something always makes me feel weird. But it is a good thing. Today online I found a VERY good deal on the wood we need to finish the barn, we are getting the wood for about 1/5 the cost. We have to drive to Tacoma to get it, but it's worth the drive. Poor guys, I think arms will be sore by the end of the weekend with moving gravel, spreading gravel, unloading barn off flatbed, setting up barn, loading 500 boards onto the flatbed.. I hope our friends and family still like us after the weekend. lol

Picking up the barn was quite the experience! We get down to Enumclaw, very nice people, but she neglected to tell me that the barn was in a pasture full of shin-high water! I was prepared, I had worn my muck boots, but Derek and George had regular work-type boots on and they got soaked... the panels were not under water, but we had to walk about 100 feet or so from where the panels were at to the flatbed, through big puddles of water. It took over 2 hours to load this thing up! We made it safely home, whew! I'll take some before, during and after photos this weekend of the project.

I am getting very excited now that I will have a barn and that I found the wood so it will be a completed barn. It has been SOOOO long since I have looked out my window to see my horses in my pasture! I cant even recall right now when they were at my house last, I'm thinking almost a year and a half.