I realized that I forgot to mention in the last post about Autumn's Prom. It was on April 26 and she went with her long time boyfriend, Jerad. We drove down to Woodruff, WI, about an hour away, in the morning so that her Aunt Jennifer, who is a manicurist, could do her nails. They turned out really nice and then I did her hair. She got lots of compliments on her dress. I've been told she had the prettiest dress there!
Elliot is in track again this year and is doing the high jump again and also running the 400 meter and the 1600 meter relay. Unfortunately, due to weather-snow and/or rain, most of his meets have been cancelled, but he's enjoying it and has done well for the most part.
In kennel news, we just got done moving the dogs from their winter dog yard to the summer one. We were lucky enough to find some weld casing pipe for a really good price, so we now have enough pipes that we don't have to move them any more. The pipes are closed on one end and cut off at around 7.5 feet long. We decided to drill holes for the rebar swivels to go into on the closed end and drive the jagged cut off ends in to the ground. We also decided to sand the rust off and paint them in hopes that they might look better and last longer. It's been a bunch of extra work and we are hoping it's worth it.
First, drain holes have to be drilled below where the swivel reaches so they don't freeze up and stop swiveling in the winter
Closed ends
Have to start with smaller holes...
...
and work up to bigger ones.
Sanding...
and more sanding the next day...
and then painting
and more painting (I hope we're not wasting our time!)
We actually moved the dogs on May 7th. Jeremy's brother Tobi and his wife, Crista, came over and with the extra help, we managed to get all the dogs moved in a little under three hours! That was way fatser moving 23 dogs and their houses than I would have thought we could accomplish. Sure was nice having the help!
We figured it was time to get them out of this muck.
Crista and Tobi.
Elliot and Tobi hauled houses.
Jeremy and I hauled houses.
Crista and I hauled houses.
Jeremy had to do some repairs on a couple houses.
Crista watering dogs.
Now the dogs are high and dry.
Old Man Stimpy helped oversee the project. Still kicking at probably 15-16 years old (we're not sure of his exact age).
And Spike tried to supervise from the house.
Almost done!
We got the job done none too soon, as now all we seem to get for weather is either rain or pending rain and everything is completely saturated and the winter dog yard is like a giant puddle/swamp.
We were able to get out for a few more runs in late March and had fun (minus our very last run, which involved major tangles and fights, but we will try to forget it). Above is a picture from one of the last runs with a couple of ten dog teams.
Now we are having a very cold, rainy, snowy, crappy spring. Our high today won't even be 40 degrees (F), same as for the last week or so. With the cold, we are getting snow flurries and rain interspersed. Very muddy and messy. We haven't been training and are hoping to get the dogs out loose running soon, if the snow ever melts enough to get out to the area we run them with the truck and trailer, not to mention the mud that has to dry up at least a little after the snow melts and with the weather the way its been, the melt is very slow and the mud might never dry! We will soon be moving the dogs up to their "summer yard" where they can be at least higher and drier than they are right now. Very mucky down there...Luckily we got a great deal on some pipe so we can stop having to move their pipes for their swivels from one yard to the other and just have permanent pipes in both yards, saving quite a bit of work. We still have to move all of the houses, but we're thinking seriously about building enough dog houses to be able to have them permanent also, so all we have to do is move the dogs.
Yesterday, we took a load of 18 huskies and our pit/border collie mix house dog, Rukus, who's now 9 months old, down to Mercer, Wisconsin (about a 30-40 minute drive) to a vaccine clinic for their rabies shots. The Clinic is put on by The Fix Is In out of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. They travel around doing affordable spay/neuters and vaccines to anyone who wants or needs it. They were nice enough to do the shots outside for us, even though it was raining a little. They do a great job and we got a great deal!
We were quite the spectacle down there. People kept asking us if they were bear dogs or sled dogs. Of course they were extremely noisy because they were hoping that we hauled them to run them, but instead they got to be in the trailer for a 40 minute ride down there, got stuck with a needle and then got loaded back up to sit for another 2 hours or so due to having to finish paperwork (lots!) and then the ride home again. The young dogs got a chance to learn how to be in the dogbox for a while and they behaved well.
Rukus-pitbull/border collie mix house dog that we got around Labor Day when he was 6 weeks old. I realized I forgot to introduce him...
And a new addition to the kennel - Clint. We got him early March. So far he's fitting in well.
One more video of one of our last runs this season, I'm yammering on it about how proud I am of our sweet little tiny Leia, our "mini husky" pup from last winter. She's the closest to the sled little white dog on the right. We figure she might weigh 30 lbs. at the most and this was her first time running on snow. She kept up great and really didn't seem tired at the end. She seems to have great drive and even though she is strictly "my dog" (not Jeremy's) and most people (including Jeremy) think she might not be worth hooking up, I am in love with her looks, personality, and drive and have hopes of maybe getting a little leader out of her...
Okay, so I know it's been a really long time since I've updated and I always thought I'd do better at this. I see all kinds of blogs where the blogger seems to have lost interest or whatever and stops posting and thought "why did they bother if they're just gonna stop anyhow? It's not like it's that hard to just journal once in a while" Now I'm guilty of doing the same thing.
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!
Dogbox in shambles.
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...
It's the lazy days of summer here and not a lot going on. We just had a heat wave, with temps. in the mid to upper 80's and high humidity. Our insect population is booming and it's almost impossible to spend much time outdoors most days without being harassed by either mosquitoes, biting flies, gnats, or a combination of the three, and we are constantly putting bug repellents on the dogs to try to keep them somewhat comfortable. Really makes us look forward to fall and winter- give us cool temps and no bugs over this heat, humidity and bugs anytime!
We've been cooling off at the lake as much as we can, although unfortunately the biting flies are almost always a nuisance on Lake Superior's shoreline this year.
We did take a ride up and spent the day in the Porcupine Mountain State Park the other day, hiked at Presque Isle and then drove South Boundary Rd. and swam at Union Bay, which has the nicest, perfect sand beach at this end of Lake Superior. Then we went up to Lake of the Clouds and enjoyed a packed lunch and walked up to see the Lake. Elliot was not content with just hiking and strolling and had to be his a little bit dare devil self. He likes to jump over most things and climb on everything else!
Like a monkey!
We've had quite a bit of rain, too, so the water is flowing fast for this time of year.
The customary "on top of the rock photo". We always take a pic of the kids on this rock when we are there.
Snake.
Tadpoles.
The photographer gets photographed.
Lake of the Clouds.
The cute kiddos.
A rare family photo (successful use of the timer on the camera)
More pics from this summer:
Rare sighting of a deer in our front yard (rare because of the 23 huskies in the yard)
Had a big bon fire for Elliot's birthday (June 20)
Elliot likes to cook over a campfire.
Went to the fireworks in Wakefield, MI (bout 13 miles from home). We got Elliot some of his own fireworks this year and let him light them while we were waiting for the show. No, it's not snowing-those are mosquitoes that were harassing us. Bug spray is a necessity this year!
Lighting a mortar. Elliot's show was better than Wakefield's!
How Elliot started watching the big show. Yes, he's laying in the middle of the road. He loves to entertain!
Our pond and flowers-I'm pretty happy with the results of our work to put this in.
And of course, some current pic.'s of the "summer dogyard". We are really glad we decided to do this. With all the rain we had this year, we don't know if the winter yard would have ever really dried out good. The grass has overtaken it and it should be ready for the dogs to move back down in the late fall.
