What 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. Read the Rest of this Post
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 surveyWith 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. LishaHere’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 coolI bet Ashton will like that one too.
Anna Wow guys thanks for all the feedback! Glad you like Linux
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.
We 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! 
(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
Digging a Moat around our house
<3,
Ashton and Anna
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:
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
After all of Ashton’s Family left, we spent some time catching up on work. We had just gotten 10 poles in the ground, so we spent a week or so filling in the holes, and tamping it down hard. You’d be surprised at how long just these small tasks take.
The deconstruction destroyed 3 of the long poles, so I had to purchase some pressure-treated square ones (under the tarp above).
On the 19th of August, Clayton came out to help get the remaining 6 poles up. It was a long day, but we managed to get them plumed and started filling in all the holes.
Not too bad for a hobby, eh?
Now that we have all the poles in the ground, I borrowed yet another gadget from Buzz. This thing on the left is a laser level on a tripod. Once I got the tripod level and straightened out, I can rotate the laser level around to create a “level mark” on every pole. I just finished doing that today, so now every pole has a pencil mark that is exactly level to the other pencil marks on every other pole.
The mark on the “uphill pole” is 2.5 feet off the ground, and it’s about 4 feet off the ground on the most downhill pole. So the slant of the ground is about 1.5 feet from one end of the barn to the other.
My shortest short pole is 7 feet 2.5 inches above the “level mark.” (My second shortest short pole is 7’6″.)
My shortest long pole is 10 feet above the “level mark.”. (My second shortest long pole is 10′ 4″, and then 10′ 9″).
I’ll have to cut down all of the poles to be the same length as the shortest pole of their type (to have a level roof).
Here’s the Epic Barn Project as it is today:
I feel like I’ve done the hardest parts, but there is still a lot left to do…
Ashton Anna
