We had an interesting thing happen this year when the snow melted. Instead of making a cute little frozen pond for us to “ice skate” on, it just kept growing. It kept snowing, raining and freezing until we ended up with a lake that is currently covering about 7 acres (including the road between our house and the neighbors).
Here’s a video where Ashton investigates where all this water is coming from:
*It is late so please excuse my especially horrible spelling.*
After not working on the epic barn project for 20 days, old man winter peaked his head up just to remind me what’s coming. It snowed a few inches in a night on October 9th… Last year we had snow on June 12th. Someone please tell global warming to hurry up, geeze.
This Epic Barn Project won’t be of much help to anyone without a roof… especially if this winter trend keeps up.
First things first: I called my good neighbor Buzz down for some quality construction advice and so he could chainsaw down the excess top of the support poles.
A cool thing about our property is that half of it is pretty steep 20+ degrees, and the other half is almost completely flat. This allows for lots of different activities. Well, that melt off that I mentioned in my last post drained down our steep hill and made a small pond in the middle of our “flat pasture.” And the latest cold snap has frozen the pond into a small ice pond.
If you’re interested in more back story: The previous owners lived in our current house for 1 year. The winter that they were here, the father had this great idea of dragging his children behind his vehichle on a tarp. I bet they had a blast, and it ended up killing a lot of the grass in a long strip. So now we have a fairly flat, slightly lower strip of land going through the middle of our pasture. It was this strip that now is home to our frozen puddle.
I think that’s enough details to enjoy our video. Donald and I (Ashton) took our friend’s ATV out into the pasture and had some fun:
Ashton:
Donald:
Here’s the video we made:
Wahoo! What a blast!
-Ashton
After the horrible winter weather we had in December, January was pretty mild. We had a couple below zero weeks, but there wasn’t any snow or wind or anything else that would be considered “bad weather.”
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.
Donald and Amber made our first snowman of the year. Hopefully there will be many more to come:
Anna got a “Make Your Own Snowman Kit” from Diana Henderson for Christmas, and Anna knitted a scarf to match. Here’s a picture of the builders standing next to their creation so you can see how “ginormous” the snowman really is:
(This was before they added the arms.)
Enjoy,
Ashton Anna