Love you forever,
Ashton

To the right, you can see our latest addition to our Ranch, Linux, Trakehner colt (boy). You can also see Anna, Ashton and Mocha.

Florida

This year started with a trip to Florida so we could see family and spend time in the Florida sun. We stayed with David and Marcy for few months. Ashton found some beach volleyball players and amazingly got a sunburn in the middle of winter.

We also got to spend time with Ashton’s relatives: Grandpa Joe, Aunt Debbie, Uncle Lenny, and cousins Jared and Evan.

Montana

In June, Anna’s Pregnant Mare gave birth to Linux, an adorable, kind colt (pictured above).

Ashton learned how to weave apple pie crusts (and make apple pies).

We had another handful of friends visit us this summer. Grandpa Joe and Geoffrey visited for over a week. It’s always so much fun having Grandpa Joe around.

Just before our family came to visit, one of my best friends from school agreed to come and live with us for a year. Ashton has been teaching him websites, and he’s been helping Anna with the horses and running the ranch.

While Geoffrey and Ross were here, we managed to have a successful one-day LAN (computer game) party!

November

In November, Anna went to the Florida to visit her friends at Valhalla Farms and attend the American Trakehner Association’s Annual Convention. Ashton went to Front Sight for a four-day defensive handgun course, and then to Los Angeles for Delphi LA’s Alumni Weekend.

Websites in a Flash

Our website business, Websites in a Flash, has continued to expand. We’ve been very fortunate to find some very good help and have been keeping them busy with lots of work. We’ve had a lot of fun working on projects together. We even had a “Formal Friday” where we all went out to lunch dressed to the nines. We have a lot of fun.

Trakehners and Dressage

Anna has continued to show her horses in Dressage competitions in the North West. She had three successful shows with several first and second placings. She earned second place in her division for Trakehners across the nation!

You can see her horses at http://www.tptrakehners.com/

<3,
Ashton and Anna Sanders

Volleyball

The party started with Volleyball. Where Cesar and his Lady Dragons beat us 3 to 1:

It was actually a pretty close game. I had a couple good plays, but also managed to lose a game for us =/ Obviously, I don’t have any pictures of me failing. It was very fun playing on such a short net though.

Basketball

Basketball was a little better for the Alumni. We won 40 to 26, but this is the best shot I got of us… about to do a jump shot. =)

Our team was Dane and Brando Christensen, Damian Espinosa, a skilled parent and me.

Soccer

Definitely the highlight of the weekend, the soccer game was awesome. Although I was sure we would win easily, it ended up being a very very close game. We won 3 to 2. Adam got 2 goals, and Kerry Jones got 1 goal. I got two assists .

Here’s a couple action shots:
Geoffrey:

Ashton vs Cesar:

Here’s some pics of the team:

Jump Shot!

I was the only one to play in all three alumni games. =)

And here’s a few pics of good friends at the soccer game:

It was so great seeing everyone. I hope to make it to the next one too!
<3
Ashton

(btw, All of these pictures were taken by Anna except the ones I took of her.)

Since I couldn’t leave this as such a boring post, I decided to continue by posting pictures of some of the randomity of 2010: namely anything that wasn’t important enough to have it’s own blog post. Enjoy.

On October 8th, we had “Formal Friday”. We even went out to lunch at the Hot Spot. =)

AshAnna watched Julie and Julia together and Anna got super excited to cook some yummy foods. This was our breakfast the next morning! Yummy!

Oh, and I (Ashton) cooked my first apple pie. I still have lots to learn, but it was edible…

My friend from Von Rocko gave me an awesome storm trooper picture for a present, and I fell in love with StarCraft 2. (I got to play the beta for a few glorious months.) Here’s my work station:

Anna competed in 3 Dressage competitions this year, and qualified to compete a the championships!

What would a blog post be without a picture of Mocha being adorable:

Enjoy,
Ashton

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