Winter in New England

Some pics from out storm last Friday. It pretty much snowed all weekend.
Enjoy!

But we were warm and snug inside.

Christmas Dogs

Dogs are really like furry little children when it comes to Christmas.
The cattle dogs especially like to unwrap. Jackaroo is so fast I couldn't get a good picture. It doesn't matter how many gifts each gets, they all want the other guy's gift.
Kindle has not yet mastered unwrapping but this was her first Christmas I am sure but next year she will be ripping and tearing with the best of them.
Tugging wars often break out as they vie for ownership.
Alas this little snowman took the worst of the battle.
Then there is the need for regeneration.
We wish you a very Merry Christmas and hope yours was as much fun.

Merry Christmas!

The ice world

Whew Christmas Open House is over. Everyone had an awesome time.
I just have to get a few stocking stuffers for Scott and I will be set for Christmas morning. Well except for all the baking I will be doing since I could not do that last weekend with my electric stove (I hate that stove!)during our ice storm and power outage.

I told you I had more pictures of the ice storm of last week so I wanted to get those up here. By the by, there are still scads of people without power, especially in the little town of Lunenburg just a few miles down the road from us. The Governor has launched an investigation into the delay and I saw about 25 electric company trucks while on my way to church today. The worst part is that it is snowing here today. In fact it has been snowing since Friday. It started about 2:00PM Friday and I really think it has not stopped since. From flurries to blizzard like conditions it has just been snowing.

First here is what we saw when we got up Friday 12/12.
This is the top of a birch tree used to be totally just outside our fence. We're lucky it fell in the fence and not on it.

You can just see the top of the broken tree in this pic. Pretty tall huh?
and here is a close-up of that, the rest encased in ice.

Scott and I usually go and cut down our Christmas tree each year. We go to a tree farm in Lunenburg but they had to close down this year due to ice damage. We set out last Saturday and were astounded by the absolute devastation we saw in that little town. I keep saying it looked like a tornado went through and left a wave of ice behind. This was a typical look down a side road. The glare from ice everywhere made it difficult to take pictures.
This was also a far too common site for the whole week.

This video shows what it was like when the sun came out and melted everything that day.

I have more pics I will share later on. But for now I'd like to focus on Christmas. Uh oh, the lights just flickered. I hope we stay in the current century. I am not much of a pioneer woman.

Front Yard Backyard Meme & Ice!

It has been quite a week. Last Friday we woke up here in Central Massachusetts to a world of ice and no power. I was reminded of Narnia except we really only had a touch of snow but most of our world was encased in ice.
Here is the front yard:

and the back yard:
We were very lucky just some minor tree damage and only one tree fell into our fence instead of on it. but we were without power from Friday at 2:00 AM to Tuesday at 3:30 PM. That was way too long but again we are lucky. There are many who still don't have power and won't until Christmas or after, because of downed trees like this one. It is amazing to see what ice can do to our modern convenience filled lives. I came to the conclusion that I am way too spoiled but really I am ok with that.

I love this picture.

There is so much more to tell about this week and I took lots of pictures but thankfully we are able to have our annual Christmas Open House today so I need to get going to finish preparations. I will come back to give you more of a taste of what this week was like. Have a great day bloggy friends.

The new look

So bloggy friends how do you like my new look? I have winterized the blog.

Come on I know you are visiting and not leaving a comment. Comment!
Hal? Sheila? Irene? Nancy? Mom?!

I know you were here! Comment!

Do you love Christmas?

I absolutely love Christmas! I love all the decorations and lights. The shine, glitter and greenery and how it warms up the leafless landscape. I love carols and sing, listen and drown myself in them for the few short weeks we get to hear them. I love the preparation for our annual Open House cooking. cleaning, baking and planning. I love gathering to see friends, relax and catch up. I even love the tug of stress getting it all accomplished.

The dogs love it too!This is a preview of our Christmas card though not the picture we picked.

So do you love Christmas too?

Thank our Troops

Regardless of how you feel about the war in Iraq I think we can all agree the soldiers are making a huge sacrifice of their time.

I was trolling my favourite blogs this evening and came across LetsSayThanks.com at Chronicles of a Country girl. (Her photos are gorgeous!)
This is especially important to me because my niece Lauren is serving in Iraq right now. Go visit her blog Laurne and say hi. LetsSayThanks.com is a program Xerox created to send Thank You cards created by children to our troops. You just click on the card of your choice choose a message and your card will be sent to a soldier.
This is a great season to let them know we are thinking of them and thanking them for their service.
Go send a card!

What a cutie

Look at this little dog! Isn't she one of the cutest dogs you have ever seen?!
I am still not feeling well so enjoy this little cutie for today.

Black Monday

When Dlyn and I (by the way go check out her 1 year of daily blogging celebration give away!) went shopping on Black Friday I think I picked up the black plague somewhere in the mall. So today feels like Black Monday and I am on the couch napping, doing a bit of work and making lists. I will leave you with a few pics of the recent trip to Springfield and the largest AKC agility trial in the country.

Kindle our baby had a wonderful time staying in the motel. We usually take our travel trailer but it is put away for the winter. She did stay in a motel before when I picked her up in Pennsylvania at 9 weeks but she was not allowed free range at that time cause, well cause she was 9 weeks old. This stay she made good use of her time.

She hung out with the other cattle dogs and watched TV.

She was very intrigued with the bathtub, I kept finding her standing in there, just looking around. The other dogs were scandalized since they have to be dragged into the tub!

You can't see her in this picture because she is checking out what is under the bed. I really didn't want her under there and Tyler doesn't look to happy about it either. He is enjoying his new travel pad I got for him though from Comfy Critters of Cape Cod. I have 10 of their pads. They wash up just beautiful and as long as puppies don't chew them up they last for ages.

Ok, I hope you enjoyed that, I am going to nap. Go visit Dlyn.

Back to dog stuff

We say a fond farewell to Thanksgiving for another year. We had lots of fun, ate way too much and shopped till we dropped. So now that our company has returned home and the turkey has become stock for a soup later this week we return to normal life.
Well normal for us, back to the dogs!

The Thanksgiving cluster in Springfield MA is the largest AKC agility trial in the country so it is truly an experience.

The exhibitors and their dogs are set up in row after row where we wait for our runs.
Scott and Beta relax and chat with our neighbor.
We hang out and chat with friends
There are lots of vendors so we do a bit of shopping.

and we have lots of spectacular runs with our dogs.

Thanksgiving is over

I hope you all enjoyed your holiday. We had a wonderful time with my sister dlyn and her husband Big Lar. I am always sad when they go home but I am ready to get back to "normal" life. In the next couple weeks we will be preparing for Christmas and our annual Open house but here a few highlights from Thanksgiving.

Jackaroo was especially happy to see his Uncle Larry. Jack is the founding member and president of the Uncle Larry fan club.


It's hard to get clear pictures of them because Jack tries give Uncle Larry many kisses.
Kindle is new to the fan club so she looked on from afar with her dad. Though as the days went on she became the newest inductee.

We cooked and baked. Here are our gorgeous pies

Dlyn is of a course a baker and cook extraordinaire but our mama didn't raise no bad cooks, so I do hold my own. Between the two of us we created a wonderful feast.

My mother-in-law sent us a really nice bouquet for our table. Thanks Mad!
And the table looked very nice! I would have taken more pictures but this was about the time the furnace started screaming and we had to shut it off and call our furnace guy. The furnace is only a couple years old so we were a bit dismayed by this turn of events but probably not so much as our furnace guy who left his steaming turkey and stuffing to come to our house to work! He did get it going but had to come back the next day and charge us big bucks to replace stuff.

So Dlyn and Big Lar are on their way home and we a rattling around getting used to the quiet of our house again. Some of us are just exhausted!

Dog Agility is done for 2008

We had a great time at our agility trial this last weekend. It was a 4 day show we entered just 3 days and got home last evening. The show was held at the Big E fairgrounds in Springfield MA in the large building that houses farm animals at the annual fair. For our show, they truck in tons of dirt for the rings and pack it down, which makes for excellent footing. Nice and level and cushy to run on for dogs and humans. The drawback is that by midday a haze of dirt and dust fills the building making it harder to breath and everything gets covered with it, I mean everything! We had to bathe all 5 dogs when we got home.
We still love that show site. Its huge and the show is too! We had really nice courses and great runs. Jackaroo and I managed to qualify once on Sunday. The rest of our runs were really close with just little mistakes that kept us from qualifying.
Here is our one Q for the weekend.

It was a wonderful run though I see lots of places for improvements. Isn't Jackaroo a speedy little guy. Hard to believe he will be 9 years old the end of January!

Scott and Beta had some wonderful runs too which I will post about later this week or possibly next. My sister Dlyn and her husband Big Lar are visiting for Thanksgiving so we will be busy eating, cooking, eating, playing cards, eating, sipping wine, eating, shopping and oh we might go out to eat one night too. Should be big fun. (Go visit Dlyn's log she is celebrating her one year anniversary of daily blogging! Congrats Dlyn!)

Check back for more on the show. This was also Kindle's first stay in a motel since she was 9 weeks old. She made the most of it!

Even though this was the last show for us this year we will be back at it the first weekend in January. In the meantime I will be working on those improvements!

PHOTO MEME

My sister over at dlyn got tagged for a photography meme yesterday and because I read it, I am tagged.

Here is what you do: Go to your 4th photo file, then to your 4th photo inside that file and then post it.

Here is mine. I so wanted to cheat because though I love dog agility trials this is not the most exciting part of a show, waiting for your run in your tent in less than nice weather, but oh well. You can just see Scott and our friend Clee hanging out between runs.

Ok so you are tagged, go do it!!!

Wordless Wednesday

Gotta love puppies!

Enjoy!

Thank you veterans and soldiers

I am late getting here today but I just want to say a heartfelt thank you to all our veterans and soldiers who have sacrificed so much to insure our freedom.

Please visit our own soldier my niece Lauren and thank her for her service in Iraq. We are praying daily she will be home safe in 2009.

My little girls

I took these pictures back on Sept. 24th. I kept meaning to get them out here but got busy so even though they are a bit old (as puppies go anyway) I really love them.

Aren't they just the cutest?

They pose nicely.
Uh oh, I'm losing Beta.







I think she hears something....

Um, I think they both hear it.

I think the photo session is over.

Wordless Wednesday? I give up

I am just not a wordless kinda gal.

But I will only do a quick post.

A couple weekends ago I went to my church's annual women's retreat. Here a few pictures of the fun.
The Lake

My bible study buddies

There's always that one who won't let you take her picture. Geez!

The Group

No husbands no kids, dogs, cooking, cleaning, just fun and learning. We got through it somehow. Can't wait til next year.

Kindle does laundry

I heard a strange noise earlier today and went to investigate. This is what I found.

Kindle's impression of laundry

I miss blogging!

I have been so busy the last couple weeks I have neglected blogging. I am still here but our office manager at our dog training school has been on vacation for 3 weeks. I have no idea how we ever did this without her and I will be so glad when she is back on Monday.

In the meantime here a couple more photos from the Cattle Dog National Specialty.

This was Kindle's first foray into the conformation ring. We took 3rd out of 3 little puppy bitches. It was hysterical, she bounced her way through the whole class or was pulling to get to the pup ahead of her, so the judge really could not see her conformation. I know she is perfect though and she had a blast so that's all that counts.

At least I can control her with food. She does love to eat and look how big she is!

See you all again soon. I will have more photos from the Nationals and videos of Kindle's agility training . She is a genius!!!