To the right, you can see Liana (pregnant Trakehner mare), Anna, Ashton and Maple Pancake in front of our house.

Our ranch is still keeping us very occupied. We planted another 15 baby trees just in case we run out of oxygen. We added 500 feet of underground water pipes to add 4 hydrants all around our property.

The largest project we have done to date was building a new “Epic Barn!” With the help of many great neighbors and friends, we took down and rebuilt this 1000+ sq ft barn! (You can see endless details on our AshtonAnna Blog. )

Anna’s Top Priority Trakehners is doing great. Liana (above) is pregnant (due 2010). They also purchased a new Trakehner named Elbe: an imported mare from Germany. She had a small meeting with Trakhener Breeders from Idaho and Montana, plus a special guest, Dr. Maren Engelhardt, a breeder from Germany.

Anna went for a 3 week apprenticeship with a Trakhner breeding farm in Florida and started showing the first horse she bred: Ossette.

On the nerd front, Ashton found a great group of web programmers in Montana. He has done a few presentations on topics like CSS and Search Engine Optimization. He’s learned a lot and found some more great friends.

Ashton’s Websites in a Flash business is still doing great, starting out the year with a brand new website re-design and another consistent highest-ever income year. The more he learns, the more he realizes that the learning curve for web developers never really ends.

Here’s a collection of my favorite posts from 2009:

Sledding on our neighbor’s hill

ATV 306’s on Ice

First 2009 Spring Grub Club

Epic Barn Project Begins

Digging a Moat around our house

Epic Barn Completed

<3,
Ashton and Anna

Another fantastic neighbor, Sam Doble, had an untamed, 3-year-old, large Tenesee Walker (horse) that needed training. He also had an excavator. You can see both in this picture (on the right).

Sam started digging early on October 3rd, 2009.

By the time everything was said and done, we had dug almost 500 feet of trench and laid 1500 feet of pipe and electical.

Sam, our neighbor, did an excellent job digging the trenches. We had to find and dig around three pipes/wires that crossed the trench.

We only had one mistake, which happened on the last scoop next to the phone line. Where we crossed the phone line was practically limestone… okay, so it was just really hard packed clay/dirt. We spent more than 45 minutes digging by hand to clear space around the wire for the backhoe to easily dig around it… and we only cleared like 6 inches. It was a pain-staking ordeal. Even with the crappy clearance, Sam was able to get around it well, until the last scoop. With a ridiculously unlucky jerk, the backhoe didn’t extend enough and went straight into the phone cable.

It was just barely enough to break the cable.  =( The cable even had a bit of plastic that was still attached…

I was pretty darn impressed with the CenturyTel guys, though. I’ve ranted on numerous occasions in the past about how CenturyTel Sucks, but I really haven’t had a problem with them in over a year now. These guys came out first thing on Monday, and did both splices in 20 minutes flat. Props guys.

After all that excitement, we laid the pipe and electric cables and began filling in the moat. =( It was a sad day. My alligators hadn’t even arrived yet.

Now our lawn/driveway has even more bumps in it… yeay…

<3
Ashton Anna

Here’s a picture of a truck and trailer in the barn so you can get a feel for how large this barn is: (We used the trailer as scafolding.)

We had a barn raising party on the 4th, but only Donald came over. =( It ended up being perfect anyway. We spent about three hours on the North side of the epic barn and got 6 more boards up. It’s really amazing that we can get so little done in so much time… but I guess that’s all part of the learning curve.

We got those three horizontal boards on top and the three boards directly below them

Labor Day Weekend

Buddy came over in the morning and Donald came over in the afternoon. We worked on it from 10:00 to 7:00 and this is what we got done:

How great is that! It looks like a barn. I realized that building things is one of my favorite hobbies. Hopefully this means most of the calculating and measuring is done… but it doesn’t.

Here’s some more pics for your entertainment:

Haha, good times,
Ashton Anna

(P.S. Special Thanks to Amber and Anna for taking pictures so I could get proof that I do work on this barn. )

Clayton came over for a few hours yesterday and a couple hours today to help put up the cross braces. After a couple “planning failures” and taking out some tough nails, we got a pretty good hang of it.

This pole barn is extremely simple. There are three horizontal cross-braces between each pole and then we’ll nail boards vertically to them to create the wall. Here’s the first side of the barn we got the braces on:

That was what we got done yesterday in almost 4 hours.

Today, we got the other short wall done in under 2 hours. We had one measurement failure that caused some of the middle boards to not be perfectly horizontal. Anna and I managed to fix it after the pictures were taken.

Here’s what the epic barn project looks like now:

So far, everything is going as planned. Tomorrow Bryon will be coming over to give me s hand getting the other braces up.

-Enjoy,
Ashton Anna

Here’s a picture diary with some notes of when my family came to visit this year! We had a great time.

One of the many projects everyone worked on was putting up the fence around the “foal paddock.” Everyone pitched in and worked hard. It cam out looking beautiful. Grandpa Joe even took time to help spread the weeds. =) (Just kidding, he worked on it more than anyone else.)

Here’s some family photos:

Grandpa Joe helping to tame Aspen (the wild mustang who is scared to death of humans).

Some Cowboy shots with Geoffrey and Ossette.

<3 yall,

Ashton and Anna

8/4/2009: Bryon Harrison helped a lot in this stage. He lined up the poles with the appropriate holes:

Here’s the first four corner poles up and braced. (If I could do this again, I would have measured these corner poles to make sure they were placed perfectly (and square), plum them out and then fill them in.)

8/5/2009: Then we started bracing up the inside poles. Once they are all plum and centered, we braced them with the old purlins.

Grandpa Joe helped me a lot in getting these 8 poles plum and braced. At one point, I turned around and took a step right into one of the three-foot holes. I fell almost up to my waste and no cuts or bruises. hahaha

Thanks Grandpa Joe!

After that, Grandpa Joe had to go back to Florida. =(

AshtonAnna

Anna’s father & step-mom decided to get married in Lahaina, Maui and invited all of his children and grandchildren to celebrate with him at a large house right on the beach, which they kindly paid for. (Most of the sunset pictures below were taken from the back porch!) We had a great time. Thank you John and Lisa for inviting us and providing such a great place to hang out and relax.

After Anna and I got married, we decided that we’re going to go on one vacation/honeymoon a year. And since we were married on September 21st, going to Maui for John and Lisa’s wedding in October was a perfect “Honeymoon Version 2.0.”

I think I have finally gotten all of my blog-worthy Maui Pictures cropped and uploaded. I’m not going to lie: I’ve posted way too many pictures, but it’s better than the alternative. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to add captions to all of the images, but I’ll try grouping them.

Anna’s sister, Diana Henderson, is an amazing photographer and posted some of her Maui pictures on her photography blog. I definitely recommend checking those out. (You may have to scroll down a little.)

Okay, let’s get started with a picture of us:

Now that we got that out of the way, time for some babies:





Madeleine




Jace




Mason



Turtles

Biggest Single Tree Ever


Etc.

Just because it was ridiculous, Anna and I will tell the story of our trip home to Montana from Maui:

On Sunday, we helped pack up the cars, and drove to the airport with the family. The family left on a 2:00 PM flight, and we left on a 7:00 PM flight. After dropping off John’s rental car (hehe), we “relaxed” in the airport until we could check our bags at 4:30.

We got on the plane in Maui at 6:30 and landed in Kona, Hawaii at 7:30. After sitting in the plane for another 45 minutes, we left again, arriving in Seattle Washington approximately 5.5 hours later at 5:30 AM (Ashton got 2 hours of sleep, and Anna couldn’t sleep.)

We switched planes again and finally arrived in Spokane, Washington at 8:00 AM on Monday. We got in our car, and drove for 4 1/2 hours arriving home at 2:30 PM (with baggage and lunch).

Yep, ridiculous.

Enjoy,
AshtonAnna

Thanks to all you great friends who sent me “Happy Birthday” messages. It’s great to have so many good friends, even if many of you live states away.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we did for my birthday.

On Thursday (the 25th), we had a grub-club birthday party, where we ate good food, talked and watched Constantine. David made a great chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting, and Anna made cupcakes!

Then, on my actual birthday (Saturday the 27th), we went to an authentic Montana estate auction! (Last year we got a truck-load of stuff for $36.) It was good fun. This was AshtonAnna’s second Auction; both of which were hosted by Roshon’s Auction Service. Here’s a picture of the “parking lot” for the estate auction:

It did get a little crazy… this saw for example. Guess how much it went for?

$80… Heck no, I didn’t bit on it.

They have two auctioneers, and they are both very entertaining. This guy’s our favorite (I don’t know his name.):

I won two “auctions.” My first auction was for a set of three tools: a Sledge Hammer, shovel and spud bar. All for $12. I bid on it for the spud bar, as I’ve been needing one for a month. If you’re not familiar with a spud bar, Here’s a picture of it after I used it to lever two (ginormous) rocks back into place:

My second auction was for a pile of wrenches. I got this set for $20. It wasn’t a steal like my first win, but it will come in useful.

(We went to Ace Hardware to get some price comparison, and they had a huge wrench similar to mine for $19.49, and a full set of smaller wrenches for $27.99, so it definitely was a good deal:)

Then we came to relax, and play with some horses. I played with my (ridiculous-looking) Maple pancake. Her baby fur was much much lighter than her new fur, which makes for hilarious shedding stages:

Anna worked with Ossetteon the hill (which has become the latest AshtonAnna Header image.)

Then we introduced them:

After feeding and playing with the animals, we went to Carols for dinner and a movie (V’s Favorite Movie: The Count of Monte Cristo). The sunset over the lake was fabulous (as always):

So was dessert:

It was a great Birthday.
Thanks,
AshtonAnna

So as I mentioned before, babies pick up a lot from their mother, and it just so happens that Aspen is scared to death of humans. So when momma freaks out and walks away from “those two-legged creatures” the baby follows. But today, 7 days after Maple’s birth, Anna got to show Maple the goodness of scratching:

As you can tell, Maple just loves getting scratched. Near the end of the video she even tries to jump on Anna cause she loves her so much… go figure. =]

On a similar note; earlier today, Maple had a huge burst of energy and did sprints around her pen. She ran all the way over to the hay shed, and back, and around her pen. I wasn’t fast enough with the camera =(

Enjoy!
-AshtonAnna

Enjoy!
AshtonAnna