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

I finally was getting used to all the snow. I was hoping to get 3-6 feet drifts, like we got last January… and it starts to thaw… Normally it doesn’t thaw until March or April, but our south-facing hill has been without snow for weeks already.

I saw the sun setting and decided to take a ride up our hill to see what kind of pictures I could get.

In this first one you can see the Mission Mountains and a series of sledding paths that we created in December and January.

Here’s a shot of our house and Bo, the extremely “skiddish” Wild Mustang.

Here’s Jett (Carol’s other wild mustang) in his new head shot with a nice backdrop.

Here’s a poster-style shot of Bo.

Here’s a picture of Aspen, and in the background you can see her baby, Maple, and Onora (Nora).

Well that’s it for interesting photos from Ashton Anna’s Ranch. Now for the Website Updates

Website Updates:

On Friday, Donald and I started working on a side project called “Polson.MontanaFinder.com”. We’re hoping to create a useful directory for everything there is to know about Polson, Montana. There is nothing on the website yet, except a couple pages of broken code. I have put up a temporary design for MontanaFinder.com. I should have a website up by next weekend. *knocks on wood*

Also, I had a breakthrough in designing my new website for WebsitesinaFlash.com. I’ve been trying to redesign my website for at least a year, and I just couldn’t think of anything I liked. Today I started putting together a simple design for the Montana Finder website and liked it so much, I adopted it. I hope to unveil it very soon.

That’s all from Montana
Ashton Anna

Enjoy,
Ashton

First step is the nap:

And then she walks in front of my monitors a couple times before deciding to jump onto my shoulder…

And then triesto get me to take a nap with her:

Okay, so she doesn’t actually help out at work any… it’s just a nice thought…

-Ashton