I know there's no great excuse for me. We haven't really done too much, things get tough sometimes (life happenstance-wise) and I just don't feel up to journaling. We get busy, but it's not very interesting, etc.
So I'm finally getting around to it. We had a busy fall with Elliot playing football. He is in 9th grade and should have been on the junior varsity team, but our school is small and there just wasn't enough players to have a j.v. and a varsity team, so they were all put on varsity. The 9th graders didn't get much play because of it, so despite our traveling around to watch all the games, Elliot got almost no time on the field and no big plays, but he did get the chance to be on the team and get acquainted with his fellow players and the coinciding camaraderie that creates, so he'll be looking forward to his next 3 years on the team.
Our fall training did not really happen this year because of dog box issues. Our box is about 8 years old and was is great need of repairs and was no longer safe to transport the dogs. Money and time problems made it difficult to do the repairs as soon as we had hoped and we have to transport the dogs to train decent because we don't have trails from our yard. We did try to train off the truck right out of our yard and down the road, but after several attempts, it really became apparent that no one was having fun, partly due to the extreme mud we always have in the yard in the fall, partly due to the pavement we have to run on for the first and last parts of the runs, and also because of the extreme mud/puddles/soggy that is the trail we can get to nearby. Each of these things on their own would have been okay, but put them all together and we were all miserable.
So we held off hoping we would have the trailer ready by the time there was snow to train with sleds and figured we could just catch up on miles then, maybe just putting off racing until the latest races of the season. Of course, nothing ever seems to go as planned and as we were working on the trailer, the whole project just got more and more involved, with small details popping up here and there that became pretty time consuming. All the while the season was just slipping away...until the realization was that there would be no racing this year, we were just hoping to have any time on the runners at all! Luckily, mother nature has been kind enough to make this winter drag out long enough that we finally got on the runners on St. Patricks Day!
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| Dogbox in shambles. |
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| The finished box (we added another set of boxes so we can now haul all the dogs at once if we need/want to) |
We had been planning on just refurbishing this box for temporary use, just to finish this season and then buy/build something else this spring/summer, but we put so much work into this and like it enough that we decided we will use it for at least another year now. It still needs some painting, but that will be finished this summer.
As far as this winter is concerned, we sure have had a long, cold, snowy one! We had a lot of below zero temperatures, during the day and night, more than we've ever experienced in our 16+ years in the U.P. and it's still been staying pretty cold so our snow will last a while yet. Sledding conditions are great yet and we will surely be able to put a few miles on the sleds/dogs this spring! An example of the snow depth in the woods around our closest trails we use, as of 3/16/2014:
And a bit of our first run up in Marenisco, near Henry Lake:
Now that spring is on the way, we will remain very busy with Elliot running track at school and Autumn getting ready for prom. And we will be getting out with the dogs as much as we can! Hopefully I'll do better updating. All for now...
