Lots and lots of rain

So the past 48 hours has brought first several inches of wet snow, and now torrential rains.  December was record dry but this might catch it up pretty good.  Spent the day clearing gutters and down spouts to get it away from the house.  Just went down to check the creek.  The banks are overfull, the pond is at full pool and 1 of the concrete retaining walls of the spill way is partly collapsed.  I have a new leak in my garage roof.  Whew...fun had by all.

Frosty fog

It has been socked in for the last couple days with freezing fog.  Pretty but kind of chilly...its a wet cold ya know.

This is Layla

So It occurred to me that the last post was kind of a downer... I miss Jada but life moves on.   Here is the new pup for the farm.  This is Layla.  We are going on a year (in February) since we got her.  She came from a shelter that brings dogs from southern California where they put down a lot of animals.  We were told she was boxer mastiff mix-likely the boxer but probably not the mastiff.  The ears point toward American Staffordshire terrier.  But I guess we will never know.

This is her in the first month we had her around

The rest were taken today.

She is a lot "muscleier" now eh?

We have had several sessions of training and she does pretty well.  Unfortunately she is a chicken chaser so doesn't have free run of the place just yet.  She does like chicken poop though...  She is much smaller than we thought she would get but in a way it works better.  She likes riding in the truck and is great at jumping in on her own.  She chases the deer but hasn't caught one yet.  At about 45 pounds she can really pack a wallop at times.

One year ago today...

Jada met her demise on the road in front of the house.  We got Jada while living in Albuquerque NM.  She was a nervous city dog moderately afraid of cars.  We taught her to swim in the Peralta river drain that was Ariel's study site.  She got to do some good hiking along the way.  When we got the farm she kind of was in her element.  She would swim circles in the pond by herself, roam the grounds and likely kept the coyote and deer to the edges, both became problems after she was gone.  She knew to leave the chickens alone, and the cats, but some how manged to find several possums to harass.  She was a good dog.

But she decided that part of her area was the road ditches, full of food wrappers, dead animals and all kinds of good stuff.  She would stop at the gate if we were around, but go on through if we weren't.  In the end she jumped out of the ditch at the wrong time.  She died quick.  The freaked out kid driver stopped and apologized. We buried her near the edge of the pond, possibly her favorite place.


Rest In Peace Jada

Some more chicklets on the ground

Well, Little Red stayed tight and hatched 6 of 7 eggs we gave her.  Nothing from the golf ball...

Cranky chicken gone broody

Little red went broody really fast, but was incubating a golf ball.  We gave her 7 eggs to sit on, but she still looks unhappy.  Check back in 21 days to see if they hatched.

A Day at Gold Beach

 
Ariel had to work for a day at gold beach putting a creel survey together, so I got to tag along.  Lindsay came up to dog sit (thanks Linds) and we left on Sunday.  I went to Otter rock beach and wandered there for most of the day.
It kind of secluded and pretty neat the tide was out so there was a lot of beach.

After the beach I looked around town a little, checked out the Mary B Hume historical site. Unfortunately the boat is rotting into the bay due to a unclear notion of ownership and a bunch of lawyers.

This western gull hung out on the rail of the hotel balcony.  We didn't feed him.

After Ariel was done we just kicked around the area a little and hung out for another night.  We had dinner from the Barnacle Bistro which was great.  All in all a nice little trip.