Hallelujah, we've got WATER.....

I am SOOOOOO glad to not be up at midnight boiling water to de-ice frozen water buckets! Not to mentions just lugging 5 gallon buckets morning noon and night. We put in 11 heated nelson waterers, all 6 stalls and 5 run-in sheds. They've all figured them out (Lyric, of course, was a goon, and now drinks and drinks and drinks just because he likes to trigger the water to fill the bowl...what a strange horse.... :)

we do ride outside sometimes!

that's Michelle riding Kate. Michelle is on break from college, and between a semester in China and a semester in France, she's getting the fat pony in shape!

Got Indoor?

Wow, we are having a great time riding inside! a few pictures of putting down the base and footing (I had nightmares about the dump truck crashing into the roof!).

Here are Manuel and Frank helping spread 4,000lb of fiber and 10,000lb of rubber chips (that was nearly 150 bags!)

Visitors....

We've had several visitors (and would love more!) since we moved:

Summer '07 - Monica Davis came out for a few days while we were doing inpsections (before we even bought the house :)

Fall '07 - Dee Keyes was visiting family in Maryland, and its so close she drove up for the day....Lots of good dog-advice and catching up!

Spring '08- Paul and Dianne Toma (Mike's folks) took a long vacation and drove their motorhome across the US, visiting may friends along the way and staying with up for a couple of weeks. Mike and Paul had a great time (!) doing repairs to the dam in our stream.

Summer '08 - Martha Vaughan had a class reunion on Long Island and stayed with us for a day and overnight....I got her up on Kate (who needs breeches?).

Such a good girl, could care less about the construction, she just thinks she sees grass!

Plants and Animals

Spring brought so many visitors - I didn't take many pictures (we were pretty busy!), but here are a few things that caught my attention:

Snakes outside and in the basement (of COURSE Mike was out of town that week and I had to relocate the little critter myself...)

More Spring stuff.....

We were so looking forward to opening up the pool this spring.....yuck! Since it freezes out here in NJ, in the fall the pool guy "closes" the pool (empty the lines, add winterizer, put on the cover, etc). In the spring, it should look pretty normal.

We have no idea what went wrong, but we had to drain the pool and start over...

Spring '08

Spring finally arrived - what a relief to slowly thaw out. We didn't get much rain (for NJ, anyway) - in 2008 we "only" got 50" of rain!

Down by the pond is pretty marshy, and after a HUGE thunderstorm we woke up to a downed tree - the entire rootball just tipped up out of the soil.