The Trakahner breed puts more importance on the mare (mother), so a Trakahner foal’s name must begin with the first letter of the mare’s name. Before we knew what gender the foal was going to be, Anna did a facebook survey with some filly/colt names that she liked. Here are Anna’s facebook posts and the comments from people who liked Linux:

Anna

So we have a baby horse thus a name survey With this breed of horse I have to pick a name that starts with the same letter as the Mom’s “L”. Here are a few picks for if it’s a girl!
1. Lanai (veranda) 2. Lareina (queen) 3. Laveda (cleansed) 4. Leala (loyal) 5. Lavena (mother of roman people) 6. Lexie (protector of mankind) 7. Labella (beautiful) 8. Laurette (little angel) 9. Lila (night) 10. Lisha

Here’s the Boy’s

1. Lark (songbird) 2. Lake 3. Lanier (woolworker) 4. Lander (landowner) 5. Larkin (fierce) 6. Latif (elegant) 7. Larch (a type of tree) 8. Lacrosse (a game) 9. Lancelot (attendant) 10. Linux (computer nerd name

Don’t forget this is for a horse so it can’t be hard to say quickly. It also can’t be a name that has been used before so don’t be offended if I can’t use a great name as it may be taken.

• 

  Kori Curry I like lander best and Linux the computer one second
• 

  Dawn Denison Larkin is cool. Ditto with Linux
• 

  Devin Hanson Linux is cool I bet Ashton will like that one too.
• 

  Anna Wow guys thanks for all the feedback! Glad you like Linux Not sure about the Twilight thing lol..Sorry Marla Lucy is taken
• 

  Ashton hahah @ linux. That’s hillarious. I also like Lander and Lancelot.

After the majority voted for “Linux” (Pronouced: Lynn-ex), and as a tribute to her nerdy husband, Anna chose Linux for the new colt. (Linux is a computer operating system like Windows.)

Here is a picture of him on his birthday:

Liana was 4 days late. Which just so happened to be when Anna left for a weekend horse show with Ossette. The first day Anna was gone, Carol was feeding the horses, and saw the new baby out in the field. We figured he was born around 4:00. He was so long-legged, it took him 3 or 4 hours before he was able to stand and drink.

It was sprinkling that evening, and a beautiful rainbow came out.

*UPDATE: Here’s some updated pictures of Linux a couple days to a couple months old*

You can see more pictures on Anna’s Top Priority Trakahners Website.

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

In case you didn’t know, our family is here in Polson, Montana at the Ashton and Anna Headquarters, but this time the activities were epic! Ranging from barn raising to water skiing, the family has lined up for a week of fun and games in true Montana style, basically.

I created a AshtonAnna header design for this blog, which you can see here:

Here are some photos of some of the activities on the Lake:

Here’s me and Ashton flying around in the tube (also a new header):

This is AshtonAnna’s “I’m on a Boat” picture:

This was fantastically hard to do.

Me pulling my parents around:

Here’s a quick family photo:

I’m leaving first thing in the morning, and the rest of the family will be leaving later this week.

Great Trip!
Geoffrey

When we moved out to our ranch where we really could only see four neighbors from our property, we were very fortunate that they were great neighbors.

With that said, one of our coolest neighbors, Buzz, has a 38′x32′ horse barn that came with their house that they don’t really use. Anna and her mother now have more than 10 horses so to make a long story short, we are going to be buying his barn and moving it to our property! Since I already have a post about helping out on Buzz’s Latest Barn, I’m going to call this the “Epic Barn Project.”

Epic Barn Project Begins!

Here are some pictures of the Epic Barn as it looked this morning. You can consider these “Before” pictures.

Epic Barn Project: Remove Roof

The first step of moving the barn is to take the barn apart into transferable pieces, so this morning Buzz, Anna and I started taking the roof apart.

We got the first half of the metal roofing off in just over an hour.

Then we did the other half of the roof in about the same amount of time (not including the Polish Sausage lunch break)

We first unscrewed all of the screws holding the roofing down, and slid it off the edge. Here’s a simple video of Buzz doing the exciting part:

Once all the metal roofing was off, the sun came out and I could take some good pictures of the wood and how it was weathering near the entrance.

Then began the tedious part of removing the purlins (the wooden cross-beams that were supporting the roofing). It took almost 3 hours to get the tallest purlins removed from the center walkway. All of the purlins on one side of the roof were also strapped with metal strips which had to be clipped before we could hammer it off.

Once the main purlins had been removed Buzz cut down the peaks of the roof bracing. As you can kind of see the the main braces for the roof were 2×6′s nailed to 2x12s to be longer. Buzz cut them down with a Skill Saw.

*Ashton’s Moment of Brilliance* The first two Buzz cut down ended up falling into or close to his ladder, so I recommended not cutting through the first cut all the way. Then the second cut will send the frame away from Buzz. You can see the five cuttings below:

Once that fun stuff was done, we went back to finish removing the lower-hanging purlins. It took a little over an hour to finish those off leaving us with a roofless Epic Barn:

It was a great day. There isn’t anything quite like feeling extremely productive. Even though I spend all my time on the computer, I love building (and carefully destroying) things in the real world. =) And check out my sweet farmer’s burn on my computer nerd bicep! haha

What a crazy day! Can’t wait for the next one.
Ashton Anna

We finally had fairly decent weather for our grub club, so we decided to build a campfire. For the first grub club campfire of last year we burned a dog house, so we had to come up with something fun and cool that we could do/burn…

Are those Pizza Hut boxes?

That’s right. We made a Pizza Hut Fort! Donald came up with the structure idea: using card stacking methods to build the different layers.

Our completed Epic Pizza Hut Bonfire:
(Epic Pizza Hut Bonfire creators: John, Jeb, Corey, Eric, Ashton, Donald.)

We each got a torch…

And lit it up!

Then we celebrated with some jump shots.

Picture documentation provided by Anna.

Good Times,
Ashton Anna

(How did we get so many pizza boxes, you ask? We are freinds with 50%+ of the pizza hut staff, and I love pizza (and pasta), so they hook me up with leftovers. Anna decided to save all the boxes through the winter for an epic campfire! So epic.)

Talk about crazy fun. Everyone was smiling and laughing afterwards. At least half of the boat was very worried/scared about flipping, but in hind-sight are very happy that we did. It was a blast.

-AshtonAnna

Here’s some pictures of our house:


(I brought these green urchin shells home from CCV)

Here are some of our Animals:

Our House:

Time for Breakfast:

Time to head out…

To the Lake:

We took a break and visited the Stanfield’s for a boat and some more photos:

Then Back to the lake:

For some water skiing:

We met up with the Grub-Clubbers at Pizza Hut…

And went off to do some Sparklers and Fireworks!

Happy Fourth,
AshAnna

Well I haven’t blogged in a while but I guess I should talk about my great summer!! Ash and I bought that cute little house in Feb and I decided to start my first huge garden and used every square foot possible to plant all kinds of vegetables and flowers. I counted up 11 kinds of vegetables and 9 herbs and 40 types of flowers. I had so much fun starting many of them from seed and watching them grow. I can’t even tell you how many peas, tomatoes and zucchinis I picked. Now it is Oct and everything is dying I wish I could keep all these healthy plants alive but that’s Montana!

To summarize the last couple months of our life:

3/13/06: Anna and I bought our first house!
3/27/06: I popped the question and Anna Said “yes”

May: Ashton found a little kitten running around our yard and adopted her! Her name is Mocca (or Mocha, depending on who you ask =])

5/29/06: I got on a plane and left my two girls in Montana. =[ I think about them constantly, and can’t wait to see the love of my life again.

Muah!

-Ashton