Tag: Ashton Anna

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Ashton Anna Trips & Activities

We Visit England!

Anna and I have finally returned from England! We went with Anna’s mom, Carol, and Ashton’s Grandpa Joe. It was a fantastic trip. We’ll try to recap:

Anna’s entire English family lives in southern England, so we were able to stay with her family while we were there. Ashton hadn’t met any of his new England relatives, and he got to meet almost 20 of them on this trip.

This post is going to be a picture blog with descriptions. Enjoy!

We left America at around 4:00 in the evening, and 10 hours later, we arrived in London at 10:00 am the next day. This was our first glimpse of England. It took a couple days for me to figure out why the landscape definitely looked like England: None of the roads (or tree-lines) go in a straight line for very long… England is devoid of any semblance of straight driving areas.

Continue reading “We Visit England!”
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Ashton Anna Family Horses Mocha Montana Trips & Activities

Ashton and Anna’s 2010

Anna, Linux, Ashton and MochaWhat another great year. 2010 was another whirlwind of adventure.

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

Continue reading “Ashton and Anna’s 2010”
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Animals Horses Summer

Linux is Born!

Today, our Trakahner Mare, Liana, gave birth to her first foal; an adorable Trakahner colt.

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:

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:

Linux

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.

Liana, Linux and the rainbow

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

linux-1L

linux-5L

3months-3L

Linux and Liana

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

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Ashton Anna Montana Trips & Activities Work

Merry Christmas From Montana 2009

Ashton and AnnaWe have survived another year in Northern Montana!

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! Ashton's 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

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Ashton Anna Epic Barn Project Ranch

Epic Barn Project: Walls are going up

It’s been another crazy week. Anna’s family came to visit and work as been keeping me busy.

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:
First barn wall up
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.
second barn wall up

Here’s what the epic barn project looks like now:
Ashton Anna's Epic Barn Project

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