Categories
Ashton Anna Trips & Activities

Delphi Alumni Weekend 2010

Ashton and Anna finally made it back to a Delphi Alumni Weekend together. It was great seeing all the old friends and meeting the new kids who make up the new generation of Delphi Students. It’s only been 6 years since I graduated, but there were were a couple seniors (or recent graduates) who I actually supervised/taught when they were 3 feet tall. It was amazing seeing how these little children have grown up. Here’s a picture blog of some of the great events:

Volleyball

The party started with Volleyball. Where Cesar and his Lady Dragons beat us 3 to 1:
volleyball1

Categories
Ashton Anna Mocha Montana

Randomity of 2010

2010 has been an awesome year for us except for blog postings. We’ve done an absolutely horrible job of posting on our blog(s). I hope to remedy that very soon. The plan is to start posting pictures and posts of all the events that have occurred in the last 10 months and date them for the time they happened. If this all works out, no one would even know we’d totally abandoned our blog for almost an entire year… save for this short paragraph.

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. =)

IMG_6055

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

Cinnamon rolls

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

Apple Pie

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:

Computer Station

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

Top Priority Trakehners

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

Enjoy,
Ashton

Categories
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

Categories
Ashton Anna Ranch

Digging a Moat

Digging a moatAs a kid, I’ve always dreamed of doing crazy-awesome things like building a treehouse, slaying an evil dragon or digging a moat around my house. I’ve tried (semi-successfully) to do the first, but finally found a big enough shovel to do the last! (I’m still searching the interwebz for that evil dragon ;))

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.

Digging a moat

Categories
Ashton Anna Epic Barn Project Ranch

It looks like a Barn!

On the 2nd of September, we got the front cross beams up. You can see in the below picture that we’ve got all of the main outside walls up. (The back side will be mostly open for horses.)

Work on the Epic Barn on September 2

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.)
Truck and trailer in the barn

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.