My New Pavilion

Every year since 2002 I have held two obedience classes a year.  A spring and a fall class.  Because my classes are held outdoors, I had to pick the best time of the year to get a ten week class in, so spring and fall weather worked best.  When inclement weather threatens I postpone class until the following week, and this worked fine until last year when a ten week class took over four months to complete.  I thought we’d never get to graduation.  This year I am liberated!   I can hold classes without fear of being rained on or having the sun beat down in 90 degree weather. My husband, Mark and new neighbor, Robert put up a 30x32 pavilion last fall, working on it a bit at a time.  Everything but the floor was done when bad weather halted construction.  Dave, our concrete guy, came out yesterday to take a look at the job, and put in his order of lumber to frame it out.  He should start tomorrow, and the floor should be completed and ready for use by April 16^th, the date my Spring session is due to start.

WhooHoo!

Spring

With the onset of spring, I decided to tackle and hopefully finish a project I started last spring.  It involves taking up landscape timbers and moving them to allow for my kennel yard gates to open and close without striking the timbers.  The past winter's freezing and thawing shifted them somewhat causing the gates to strike them and bind up.  Not a good thing when you're trying to manuever dogs in and out.  So last spring I pulled the timbers up to set them back away from the gate opening.  Then it got HOT! and DRY! and those timbers set on the ground the entire summer, fall and winter.  The ground needed to be leveled before I set them back, and hand digging was out of the question.  Even the tiller couldn't budge the hard ground.  So this spring, I tackle it after a nice rain, the ground is workable, and in I jump!  Well, it has ended up being a superhumongous project!  All the landscape timbers were pulled up and put back in, LEVEL this time, and not just laying on the ground.  The landscape paper underneath, that several dogs found and decided to pull up for me, came up.  The rock was shifted to another part of the yard to act as fill, and new landscape paper is down.  The timbers I pulled up to 'move' are still not in their proper place, but the rest of the yard is just about ready for new rock.  The fence posts have vinyl sleeves on them, and they're all level now.  So by the end of this week, I should have this project, that's taken two years, DONE! 

So what's up with blogging?

I'm not one of those persons who can do anything on a daily basis, so this blogging stuff is really going to be a challenge for me, but in the interest of being at the top of my game, I'll give it a go....

This morning's turning out to be a taste of things to come, Springtime!  The grass is showing a bit of green, the animals are becoming more active around the homefront, and the sunshine in the blue sky lifts your sprits as the morning awakens.  The cockatiel is nosy, the roosters are crowing, and the wild turkeys are moving across the back field.  But, as I allow the joy of the morning to momentarily lifts my spirit, the loss of our two newborn goats last night, brings us back to reality on the farm.  It's an everchanging balance of Life's give and take.  I hope everyone takes a moment to reflect and see their lifes' problems and failures as God's way of keeping you centered.