Dear Friends!  Hope this finds you well and happy!  We have been having snow and rain for a couple weeks now.  Very wet snow.  The creek goes up and down daily!  We keep the folks busy playing in the snow then getting dried off!

Woody ate a little hat that Mom made.  It was her fault for putting it where he could reach it.  He is a naughty puppy.  Always stealing stuff, still not completely potty trained, and he jumps on the bed.

While Mom was away for a  couple days, Dad decided that it is OK for us to get on the couch!  Yea Daddy!!  Mom was not happy.  She said that is my Christmas present for the rest of my life.  I'm OK with that.  I've always wanted a couch!

This is our Christmas portait! 

 Merry Christmas to everyone!  We hope to see you in the New Year!

 This year we actually had enough wine grapes to make wine!!!  We picked them before the birds and bees got to them.

 We made 4 gals of white and 7 gals of red!  Hopefully they will be drinkable table wines!

Things have been going well with Woody.  He just won't give up.  He is determined to get us to play so we're trying.  He loves to chase Osker.  I've been teaching him how to play games the way I like them played.  Teaching how to swim and dig for gophers.  He's leaning "hop in the tub" which is important for his furry little feet.  He's a little slow on potty training, and has been gettting in big trouble for chasing the chickens.

Mom and Matt are building a couple raised garden beds with a wire bottom.  Hopefully this will keep the gophers out of the onions, garlic and lettuce!

 Ugh!  It happened again.  Another puppy.  Something about a succession of dogs.  Me and Osker are not happy about this nipping, rambunctious, little shit.  He likes to chase Osker, but all I have to do is let out one of my growls and he's gone!!!

I suppose the good thing is that he gets lots of training treats, so now I get them too, and he needs lots of walks.

 His name is Woody and he's a male, cocker spaniel, 3 months old.  The folks had been looking for a while and this one caught their eye for some reason.

 Osker has been keeping an eye on this pumpkin that is hanging on the fence.  Seems like it will let go one day soon!

 We've been getting fresh milk from a local cow, "Little Deb".  The milk man may go hunting for a week so Dad and Matt offered to milk her while he's gone!  It takes lots of practice.

Dad always wanted a scythe!  He ordered one and has been practicing with that too!  He and Matt take turns whacking sections of the field.  They have a lot of respect for the old timers who did it all by hand!

It's mostly about me and Osker right now.   We both got stung by ground bees recently.  Osker had 6 of them clinging to his butt.  Now he is as freaked out about flying insects as I am.  He also gets grass seeds stuck in his fur and has to be combed daily.  He had one deep in his eye and had to go to the Dr.

Then, I broke a tooth playing fetch in the creek so I had to go to the Dr.  That turned out OK because I got a new soft floating toy!

Mom is slowly moving gravel, soil and mulch around the patio.  She moved the pile of leftover sand, but knew how much we enjoyed the pile so she made us a sandpit!!

She also finished the handspun latch-hook rug.  It's quite comfy, but could be a bit bigger!

Mom and Matt moved many tractor loads of gravel to bring the back porch up to grade, leveled it, compacted it, decided they had too much gravel, scraped it off, leveled it and compacted it again.  Brutal.

Then they put the sand layer down between two 1" pipes and screeded.  Laying the pavers on level sand is the easy part!  Just lots of bending over.  The pavers stay cool in the shade so I've been happy with them.

Matt drew the curve of the patio on auto-cad, then we transferred it from the drawing to the pavers.  Matt cut them; some were tiny angle pieces.

We're in full use now!! Picnic table, lounge chairs, a couple hammocks from our Maui friends.  Life is good!











The Wheeling University buddies were here last week!  They decided to dismantle the greenhouse and move it to the fenced-in garden area!! 

Taking it down happened pretty darn fast!
They rolled the plastic up, unscrewed the top pieces to remove, pulled up the side pieces, created a new layout in the garden area, drilled new post holes, set the posts, leveled them, put the top pieces back on, and...

Another task done!!  Now we'll order new plastic and get it ready for the fall.

 Hello friends!!  It's been a bit boring around here for me and Osker the last couple of months.  Mom and Matt have been building patios and Dad has been taking care of the mowing, weed whacking, and everything else!

 The gravel that was our patio was brought up to the correct height under the siding, and extended out 10 ft on the front side, and 12 ft on the creek side.  Matt runs the compactor.  Then they screed the area to level and get the correct slope (1/8"/ft).  That is the hardest job; adding gravel, leveling, taking it off, leveling, etc.

 This area off the mudroom is 20 x 20 ft.  The chickens are always checking things out.  They were very disappointed that the bucket-loads of gravel had no worms.

 We've had about 17 pallets of pavers delivered.  Of course I'm good at supervising!! 

After the gravel, an inch of sand is spread over the area and screeded to be level and sloped. Looks like I need a couple more process pictures to show this.

 The pavers are set down, compacted, polysand is spread, compacted, spread again, compacted, then watered to cement the pavers together and hopefully prevent weeds and bugs from getting between them.

The front and side are done!!

Now they're working on the back side!  This side has to be dug out first!

I've been lounging in my chair by the fire thinking about all of my friends.  It seems that the folks haven't been doing much lately, but then they reminded me that they haven't exactly been slacking off.

We had a quiet Christmas and a fun, but flu-ish New Year!!  We've had some rain and some gorgeous spring-like weather which has given us a jump on landscaping projects.

All the blackberries along the creek behind us in this picture are now gone!  You can't usually see the water unless we get a couple inches of rain.  Dad burned all the blackberries too.  Now we'll just have to keep up on the new sprouts.  There's still more trimming to do, but we have some beautiful creek beachfront now.

 They also removed the old, unmanageable, table grapes in the field near the house looking down to the creek.  Dad wanted them, Mom didn't.

The rock pile in the same field has been removed.  Mom wanted them, Dad didn't.

The field has been tilled once and will be done a couple more times as the weed seeds sprout.  Hopefully, when the wildflower seeds go in, the weeds will be gone!!  The goal is to have large areas of wildflowers and grasses that only have to be mowed once and don't use much water.