Three Dog Morning

Add Kitty to my pillow and you can see the extreme bed edges Dave and I are left to during the night. (Jumping up onto the bed is getting hard for poor old McKenzie. She rarely rarely contributes to the crowd. Instead she sleeps on her dog bed next to me where she can nudge my draped hand).

 Time to move so I can make the bed - "yeah sure".

 "How about this? We are almost off."

Once off the bed and while I made it, Trask located one of his many bones to chew on in comfort then leave for me to find for him later in the middle of the night.

 

Strawberry Feast

This year a patch of wild strawberry plants appeared in the Rhody garden beside the house. The tiny berries have been totally ignored until this morning.

Koyuk and Trask in search of more treats.

McKenzie came over to check out the new sweet smell.

 For an old lady, McKenzie is still a beauty.

Trask is growing up. He now stands taller than McKenzie.

Proud Day (sans dogs)

Today my niece V graduated from college. I couldn't be more proud. She has worked with mentally/physically handicapped children and young adults for years. Her life goal has been to get a degree to allow her to work with this population as a professional. Today she earned her B.S. in Community Health Education.

Of course, there was a party to celebrate her accomplishment.

My sister - very proud mother of five, now all college graduate, daughters.

My niece K - mother of two very active four-year-olds.

Niece N - with a M.S. in Social-work and in search of Mr. Right

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"bet you can't get a picture of me" speedster, great nephew L

 My beautiful, much quieter than twin brother, great niece A

The happy graduate who will take her next trip in the limelight down the isle with...

my about-to-be nephew E

Tule Loowit Pup-Play-Date

For a day that started with a carton of sour milk and a coffeemaker that died before making my morning coffee fix, it sure turned out to be wonderful. Unfortunately the day ended with blogspot refusing to work in any mode but HTML (yea-sure, my last computer class was DOS) and not post my pictures.
(This morning is still milkless and involved good, old perk coffee using my camping coffee pot but blogspot is back to it's normal quirks which I have figured out how to work around - and the ground-laden coffee is not bad).
Last evening Tule Loowit came over for a pup-play-date bearing margaritas for the humans and an overwhelming abundance of energy for the canines.
The dogs and I lounged in the summer sun while waiting for her visit.

 "where is Tule?"

We were treated to an amazing aerial show during our wait. Two Osprey and a Red Tailed hawk did battle right over our heads for about 1/2 hour.

I don't know if this was a territorial dispute because of the loss of habitat next door or what but, these guys were serious.

The battle included a lot of screaming, dive-bombing and talon clashes with one bird flying upside down. Look closely at this picture and not only can you see the larger hawk chasing the Osprey but the white spot on the far right is actually an Osprey with folded wings dive-bombing the hawk.

After a time Cedar grew tired of the wait and commotion overhead.

TULE IS HERE! Koyuk, Trask and Tule look so much alike. At times their collars are the only way to differentiate them.

Play action was fast and ferrous. This blurred picture is the only I got containing all 5 dogs.
Trask and Tule or is it Tule and Trask after a swim to cool off.

 A very happy mom Koyuk after her swim with the kids.

 Wet and invigorated - back to play

Tule wants Trask's ever present chew bone.

 Two and 1/2 hours, miles of zooming, multiple swims later it was time to quiet down and go home. Tule is standing on Trask who is sitting on Greg in this picture.

If I was doing a cute, fictional post, I would end with this picture as being a good-bye kiss. While it was my last picture of the visit, in reality it was just a brief interlude of quiet. The actual good-bye involved frantic howls of protest and me using all my strength to hold Trask back from following screaming Tule down the drive. These two really have a wonderful bond.

Logging Saga

Two days ago the ground shook while I was weeding eating in the garden. A minute later it shook again. Weird earthquake! I turned around and saw this right over the fence

This machine grasps around a tree; cuts it off; and then drops it onto the log pile - about as fast as I can type this it is on to the next tree.

I drove down to the bottom of the property being logged.

It is pretty easy to see where our fence line is.

The next morning when I looked out my office window I saw this:

On closer inspection it was a new machine that picks up the logged tree; strips it of all branches; cuts it to the desired length; then drops it onto the cold deck.

The machine in the distance is picking up the trees from a lower cold deck and loading them onto a log truck.

Koyuk and McKenzie in amazement while watching all the action 10 feet from them.

Today the air was clear enough to see if we have a view of the Three Sisters mountains. We do! - if we lean out over our fence.

I fell in love with this tree years ago.  The "platform" is about 15' off the ground. This old lady is about to build a tree house-with-a-Sisters-view.

 Once complete, the view should look something like this.