A What!

Would you believe on Saturday on the way home from town Warren and I brought home a puppy!There was a note on the bulletin board at the Wagon Wheel, a garden/pet store saying "free puppies, too many to choose from". So we decided to check it out. The place was at the end of the road through three junk yards. Warren went in the "house", a 12' by 14' cabin, the man opened the side door and 14 puppies and 2 moms flooded out. It was incredible. The guy's two dogs had 8 puppies each a week apart and he had only gotten rid of two of them so far. We picked the smallest puppy from the smallest mom. Emerald promptly named her Rose, and she is about 9 weeks old. It is so cute to watch her running after everyone. One trip to the chicken house and she needs a nap. She likes to stay outside and runs to the door to be let out. She still cries all night, I gave her a stuffed rabbit and she snuggles with that when she gets lonely.
Wenge's kittens are doing great. She doesn't not like Rose and staunchly defends the house by turning into attack cat if she catches Rose inside.

We are having a lot of fun with this farm thing, but it has been a busy week, 58 baby chicks on Monday, 5 kittens on Friday, and a puppy on Saturday. The chicks are doing great, only one died so far, the bees are humming, and the garden is happy. Spring has sprung at White Mountain Ranch!

What a Day!

Friday, May 28th will be remembered for a long time. We rolled out of bed at 4:30 to go trolling for Kings. The water was calm and the sky was overcast but it was warm with no breeze. The gear was in the water by 6:30 and we caught a 25 lb king by 7. She was a beautiful fish, Yummy! We hooked a pollack, but we don't eat those so we threw it back. We didn't catch anything else for a while so Warren moved the gear down to the bottom and we picked up a little halibut.Then I drove us into an old buoy and line which we managed to untangle ourselves from without loosing any equipment. The 1/2 inch rope was covered with these creepy crawly things with hooks on the ends of their legs. They were so thick on the rope it was as big around as Warren's wrist. I have no idea what they are called, but they are weird. They reminded me of tiny scorpions. We trolled around for another hour and then when it was almost time to leave, we hooked into a nice sized halibut.Well you can't leave when the fish are biting so we made one more pass and got another halibut. Trolling for halibut is a lot more fun than bottom fishing for them. Alectra helped reel this one in, look at that effort.Another nice halibut, they both were around 30 lbs. Behind Warren you can see the buoy we cut off with the bugs all over it. Emerald kept washing the boat down to keep them from crawling around.
As we headed back to the spit we passed huge rafts of Sea Otters. Several had pups. They are so cute, they look like little people watching as you pass. This raft had at least 70 animals in it.Back at the harbor we had lots of visits from people that didn't catch anything. What a great looking bunch of kids and fish. Here is a picture of the boat all cleaned up and ready for the next trip. Who wants to join us?We got home and woke up from our naps to 5 new family members, Wenge had kittens! They are pretty cute. She killed a sparrow and took it in the box for an after labor snack, I guess.White Mountain Ranch is growing quickly this spring. Kitties and chicks, what fun!

Baby Chicks

Monday we got the phone call that our babies were at the Post office, 30 meat chickens and 26 Rhode Island Reds. What fun we had getting them settled. Warren's chicken house is nice and warm with all the sun pouring in. This is the south (bay) side. He boxed in one of the bays on the small machine shed, covered the floor with hardware cloth, insulated it and put plywood on the floor.Here is the front door, it's pretty fancy!
The inside is all insulated and cozy. He didn't get the nest boxes and roosts made yet. Here is another picture of the chick boxes.Jayce spent some of his own money to get two Americana pullets and a Rooster. We have to have rules so they don't get held every minute of the day. But chickens are just so cute and fun.We walked the hay field and decided it would make hay this summer if it got mowed. Jayce spent three hours mowing it with the trail mower. Now it needs to be raked but I'm not doing the whole thing by hand, it is over 5 acres. We raked a little bit up for bedding for the chicks and that was enough work for me.The garden is rotor tilled and planted. It is the biggest garden I've ever had. It will be mostly potatoes so I don't have so much to weed this first year. It was solid grass last year and it will be a constant battle this year. I got the raspberry patch all cleaned up and weeded. It will be interesting to see if they produce anything this year or if I need to start over with new plants.

We started pulling up the old fences, what a mess. There are posts every 8 feet and the barbed wire is held on with aluminum wire twisted around the whole mess several times. It is going to be a summer long project, cutting off the dead trees, getting the wire down and the posts out. Here are the girls and Warren in the field hauling away old fence posts.Warren's bird houses are filling up, there are at least 8 pair of swallows around and some other little sparrows using them. Wenge, the kitty, is going nuts trying to catch them but she is just too slow. She and a Northern Goshawk were trying to eat each other last week, the hawk would dive for her and she would jump at it. They are big birds, almost as big as bald eagles.Finally the hawk decided it didn't want to catch that cat after all and flew off up the driveway with Wenge chasing after, leaping up into the air at it. She was very pleased to have chased it off.

Salmon Celebration

To celebrate being done with school we went to the Salmon Celebration at Johnson Lake for the day with our friends the Stoll's. It was a great science field trip about all things to do with fish. The first thing we did was release Rainbow trout into the lake. They put fry in the bowls then we carried them to the lake. Several jumped out on the way but Emerald was great at catching them.
Then we spent the next three hours visiting 30 different stations on everything from fish identification, to watershed models, to flycasting, to rubberized scat identification.
Lunch time, which Jayce and Eli spent proofreading and correcting one of the handouts. Silly boys! The weather was wonderful and we left sunburned, tired and happy.

My living room

I had the camera out and the living room was clean so I took a couple pictures. I'm standing in the dinning room looking toward the bluff.Here we are unloading the last of the wood. We will have to cut some more if we want to stay warm this spring.This is what happens when we let the fire go out at night. "Mom, I'm cold!"
Emerald and Alexis offered to comb Daddy's hair and this is the final result.

Birds and Bees at the Ranch

Warren and Jayce spent several evenings this winter building 32 boxes to entice the swallows to stay around. The pond creates lots of mosquitoes and we are trying some healthy methods for controlling their population.This is about half of the boxes. Warren brought home some old fence from the job to build them with so their only cost was the time to make them.
We put them in a few of the trees and all the barns got at least 2 and the huge pole barn got eight or ten.Our other big excitement was the two hives of bees we got the end of April. We didn't have as much excitement as the airport did when they opened the cargo hold on the plane and discovered several of the bee boxes had broken open during the flight. The bees then proceeded to ride the luggage into the airport and make quite a disturbance. By the time we got the bees they were pretty calm. Warren dug through our hunting and fishing stuff and managed to find enough protective gear, clamming gloves work great. Jayce helped install them with his coat open and short work gloves. While he was holding the queen box, a few crawled up his coat sleeve but they didn't sting at all. They are the calmest bees I've ever seen.They seem to be doing well and on sunny day the hives buzz with activity. I love living on the Ranch.

Open House

The robotics season is officially over. The boys, Jacob Socha, Ethan and Tyler Veldstra, and Jayce persevered and learned a huge amount about programming and robot design. Jayce built and rebuilt at least three different prototypes to try and conquer the mission table. The robot has to maneuver the table and complete specific things to earn points in the competition. We missed the local and district competitions because of my ankle so we decided to have an open house for our friends and family.

The boys gave a presentation about First Lego League and the mission table. Then they had "Robo", "Bot", and "Ics" have a try at completing the missions. As usual some did well and others did not, but everyone had a good time. Here is Ethan getting ready for a run by "Robo".
Tyler and Jacob programing "Ics" to grab a loop off the wall.Jayce with "Bot2" working on the retriever arm.Another view of the table and "Bot2" with a loop, and "Robo" starting up the bridge.
Jayce and "Bot3" during the open house.

While the big boys were making robots the other kids spent some time with Legos too. The Veldstra's are studying American History so they built an Native American villiage. It was pretty neat.Check out the papoose below.
The kids also gave their piano recital, Kathy Beachy teaches the Veldsta kids and her son Jordan, and Jayce and Emerald played as well. We recited Ecc. 3:1-8, 11 and the Veldstra's did Ps. 8. Emerald perfomed a poem"Mr. Nobody" about the person who causes all the messes in a family. The younger kids all wrote a report about an animal and made a diorama about their habitat. They also brought a craft they made as well. We had about 35 people and yummy refreshments.
Alexis wrote about Ocelots that live in the American jungles and showed off her hat.Alectra learned about Hippos and decided they were gross but she liked making them with clay. She also made some owls to put in her tree because she likes owls.
Arctic Fox was Emerald's choice and she wrote a fabulous report.
She did a great job making lots of tiny kits. She made a fish for the fox to eat and an Arctic Tern in a nest in the tree and one in the air.