Grandbaby & Graduate!

Wilder with his Nana and Papa

 Finally!  Sam and I both got to go and meet the beautiful grandbaby whose birth I missed by hours in early May.  His name is Wilder James Delmore Redding and he is just wonderful.

Since my last post, we have been busy on the farm.  Not as busy as we would like to be because we have had excess amounts of rain, which has kept us from cutting and baling hay and getting to work on replacing bridges that were washed out in last month's flood.  Sam should have done hay a month ago, but it is still standing in the field as we need at least 3 consecutive dry days in a row in order to have the hay dry properly and that still has not happened.  At this point Sam is debating whether to try to bale it or just cut it and let it lay.  That does not bode well for the second cutting.  

Unfortunately, the day before we left for Oregon we lost one of our 2 remaining alpacas.  Sadly she was the last of our original stock, and probably my favorite of all of them, Peg.  She came to us in 2000 from a farm on the Oregon coast and had many crias for us.  I think most of my photos from her are on old flash drives and I need to go through and find some to memorialize her with.  That will have to wait for my next post.  Peg would have turned 19 this week. We have only one alpaca left, Truffels, who will be 14 this fall.  She and Apples and Star are all that are left in the alpaca barn.
  

Jethro Tull in the rain with my boys

Our trip to Oregon commenced with flight delays, as usual, which got us into Portland a good 2 hours late.  We stayed in Portland that night and the next as we were attending a Jethro Tull 50th Anniversary concert on Saturday with both our sons.  I picked up younger son, Sam/Zac/Satchmo at the airport Saturday morning and when I got back to the hotel, Ian and Michelle and baby Wilder were there to meet us.  

The next day we went to Corvallis after checking in to our airbnb accommodations near Independence, OR, about 20 minutes from Corvallis.  It was hard to find a place to stay in the Corvallis area because most of the hotels were booked due to the Oregon State commencement which we were there to attend.  We lucked out with the place we stayed.  It was built as a wildlife observatory on a hilltop on 50 acres and had spectacular views in all directions.  The owners were great and while we were there they were putting up 3 tipis that they are also going to rent through airbnb.  We could see them from our place.

We also watched a pair of owls hunting in the field below us and sheep being herded in another field a little ways  away.  The sunsets were spectacular and there was a hot tub on the roof so you could really enjoy them if that was what you wanted to do.  We made use of it only one evening and it wasn't the best sunset evening.  We will definitely stay here again if Ian and his family stay in Corvallis.

 
On Monday I had to drive younger son Sam back to the airport for his flight back to California because he had to work that night.  We were just glad he was able to come and attend the concert and meet his nephew.  We are so seldom all together as a family anymore.

Then on Tuesday evening, I had to go back to the airport yet again and pick up my mom, who would be with us the rest of the trip.


Very close to the Observatory was the Rogue Hop Farm and tasting room.  It was way out in the country and there were acres and acres and acres of hops.  We went there one day for lunch and some craft beer and to check out the hops, as Sam is an avid home brewer and also a hop grower.  It was a really fun place, though on a Thursday afternoon there was almost no one there.

We had a good week. We did some hiking, went out to a really nice dinner at a farm to table restaurant (and Ian cooked for us one night), and then Friday was the commencement dinner for the College of Forestry, which appropriately was held in a tent in the college's research forest.  



 

Ian and my Mom

I am proud to say Ian was awarded "Outstanding Senior" in his major, Recreation Resource Management.  I am a proud mom, indeed.

Graduation was the next day.  It was held in the football stadium and was a huge event, lasting about 3 hours. Ian and Michelle and Wilder came over to our place for a cookout later that afternoon.   It was a really nice day and I am so glad we were able to be there.

 I think I have mentioned in past posts that I had been working on a "secret" project.  That project was my very first quilt.  I saw a quilt kit that made me think of Ian and just had to buy it and give it a try.  I am very pleased with  how it came out.

It has a woodland theme and one of the fabrics is a topographical map.  The lumberjack applique even looks like Ian.  It was fun to make and I like how it turned out.  I don't know that I will become a quilter, but now I know I can do it if I want to.  

That was pretty much our trip in a nutshell.  We are enthralled with little Wilder and look forward very much to spending more time with him as he grows.  It would be nice if there were not so many miles between us, but at least we are in a place in life where we can go visit when we want to.  Ian has yet to find a job, and maybe his career will bring them a little closer to us, though they would really prefer to stay in the Pacific northwest.  However, they are willing to move if need be.  

My brother Larry and his two sons stayed here on the farm while we were away.  This was truly a twofold blessing as I think the stress of conventional boarding would be extremely detrimental to Rowdy's health  His special diet also requires a bit of preparation at mealtimes.  I felt so much better leaving him in his own home.  And Larry also got to spend quality time with his two sons.  So the animals were well cared for, my mind was at peace and Larry and the boys had a great time. 


We are home and have no big travel plans in the foreseeable future.  I do have some agility trials upcoming, but the soonest is mid-July.  Sam will be going to the Dayton area in a couple weeks to help my brother Larry with a rather large home-improvement project and right now he is trying to get bridges across the creek replaced.   Sam is using the I-beams that used to support the larger bridge to replace the foot bridge and he plans to use culvert and cement for the "drive-across" bridge.  It would help to get all this work done if it would just stop raining.  But I am afraid that when it stops, it will really stop and we will be dry until fall.  I would really like a good garden harvest this year.  Last year was too cool and wet resulting in a poor tomato and corn crop.  I am hoping for better this year.  Time will tell.

The Big Flood & June Arrives.

At least it is less than a month since I last posted. For the past 8+ years I have written my blog posts while I was at our Real Estate office.  It was easy to sit at the computer and organize my thoughts and edit photos between phone calls.  When we had a lot going on on the farm (as in breeding, raising and taking care of 50+ alpacas and all that that required) I liked to post on a weekly basis, because something was always happening.  As we reduced our herd of alpacas I found there was less of interest (at least for me to write about) on a weekly basis and reduced my posts to about every other week.  I would like to keep to that schedule, but now that I am no longer captive at the office a couple of days a week I am finding it difficult to sit at the computer for the amount of time required to do a decent job.  I think the fact that it is summer also makes it more difficult to commit to the time because there is so much outdoor work to do.  As I write this, I can almost hear the weeds growing in the garden!
 
So much has happened since my last post.  It got kind of crazy around here for a while.  Really crazy, which had nothing to do with the fact that Sam left on a Friday to go to fishing in Canada with three other guys.  He has done this before and I felt I could handle things pretty well since we no longer have the office to man or any baby alpacas due.  All I had to do was take care of things at home, which was going to require a lot of mowing, planting the garden and weeding, going to agility class on Tuesday night and spending time on my own projects, such as plying some nice alpaca silk yarn, which is what I was doing in the photo above on Sunday afternoon after a nice long walk.  Little did I know that in just over 48 hours, the view from this deck would change quite a bit.

On Tuesday, I left in the evening for the 1 hour drive to Parkersburg for agility class which goes from 7 to about 8:20 pm.  It was a nice evening and there were possible thunderstorms in the forecast, which is a common evening occurrence at this time of year in Ohio.  When I headed home from class around 8:30 it was still light but it looked dark off to the north which was the direction I was going.  As I got closer to home, it got darker and darker and there was a lot of lightning going on.  About 2/3 of the way home, it started to rain and it rained like I have rarely experienced, and it was truly frightening.  The water started covering the roads and I was very happy indeed to be driving a big Ram 4 X 4.  I just wanted to get home.  I drove through a couple of sketchy places without issue, but when I got to the beaver pond, less than a mile from home, I stopped and contemplated whether I should continue on or turn around and take the high road, which would add 5 miles to my drive.  It was dark.  It was raining, and the water was rushing across the road and it looked deep.  It didn't take long for common sense to prevail, and I backed up to a place I could turn around and went the long, safe way home.

What I found when I got home was incredible.  I drove past the house to see how high the water had gotten and saw it was up running through the poly-shelter where we keep our tractors and trailers and various other machinery and equipment.  This had only happened once before when we were hit with the tail of Hurricane Ivan in 2004. That time we got about 5" of rain in one day.  And all this had just occurred in less than 2 hours!  I parked the truck and went on foot out to see how high the water had gotten.  It was 10 pm and quite dark and the rain had let up, but it was still coming down pretty hard.  This was what I saw as I looked across the creek toward the chicken coop.  The water had already receded somewhat, but the chicken coop looked wrong.  It had actually been picked up and turned 180 degrees!  Both our bridges were gone, so there was no way to go over and look more closely.  As I passed  my newly planted (now flooded garden), I heard a sharp hissing noise above the sound of rushing water and I feared a gas line break, so I returned to the house for a flashlight and went to inspect further.  Where the line from the gas wells goes into the pressure tank before going to the house there was indeed a leak, caused by a valve breaking open when the pressure take was moved off the blocks it sat on by the force of the water.   This really worried me because Sam was away and I have no idea how to repair a major break in a gas line.  And it was after 10 pm at night.  So I formed a plan for morning, had a nice glass of whiskey and went to bed.

By morning, the waters had receded greatly, as they usually do.  The water runs downhill, for the most part, to the Ohio River about 30 miles away and it does go down as quickly as it comes up.  But we had had so many of these drenching downpours this spring that the ground was saturated and, according to the local weatherman, we had gotten over 2.6" of rain in under 2 hours.  The water had come up under our deck on the house and washed all kinds of debris out from under it.  It had run through my gardens.  It had washed away both bridges.  It had picked up our hay rake and put it in a tree in the creek (the hitch end is circled in blue in the photo, the rest is  buried in debris or underwater).  It had run through the barn where Apples the pony and our last 2 alpacas and Star the guard dog live.  Thankfully our power never went out.  However, I had to get the gas back on.  I called the local gas and oil baron who has several gas/oil wells leased on our property, though not the one in question.  He was kind enough to send the  guys who do his well maintenance out to my place and they had things fixed up in no time.  They were able to find everything they needed in Sam's supply of fittings and they used our tractor to lift the pressure tank back up onto its blocks.  It was very nice of him to help me out, especially since Sam was not due back for 4 more days and I didn't relish having no hot water for that long.

In this photo, you can see the footbridge in 2 pieces on the far bank of the creek, one right next to the creek and the other above the pile of debris a little further down.

Another shot of where the larger bridge used to be.  One metal I-beam is still underwater and the other is exposed.  In the left bottom corner is where one end of the bridge used to be.  Part of the footbridge is up on the far bank.

The same view from the other side of the creek a little later in the day.  The water has receded a lot.

Later the in the day the day after the storm, I got the tractor out and hitched up the portion of the footbridge that was parallel to the creek and dragged one end across so that I would be able to cross the creek without wading. This is something I need to do at least twice a day since we have animals on that side of the creek.

The chickens were a bit confused about how to get back into their coop, since their entry door was now on the opposite side of the building.  Their enclosure was no longer enclosing their yard.  I keep visualizing the wild ride they must have had when the water picked that coop up and swung it around.  I think the only thing that stopped it from going further was the buried electric line that goes into it.

Once Sam got home Sunday, we got busy .  There is still clean up to do and bridges need to be rebuilt.   But the hay rake is out of the tree and appears to be repairable and the chicken coop has been returned to its proper place and the fence fixed.  There was a lot of damage to a fence in a pasture across the road from our other house as well and Sam has repaired that already.  Hopefully it will be at least another 14 years before we experience this much flooding again.

In other news, Grover and I attended a 3 day agility trial near Youngstown, Ohio this past weekend, where we earned our QQ # 20!!!!!  We also got another QQ and a Jumpers Q and earned 50 MACH points.  We now need 119 points to earn our MACH title.  It is within reach.  I am SO excited!

Our next trial will be at the same venue, but not until the middle of July.  This weekend Sam and I are heading to Oregon to meet our new grandson and to attend the graduation of our son, Ian, from Oregon State University, with a bachelors degree from the College of Forestry in Recreation Resource Management and a minor in Geographic Information Science.  We are so incredibly proud of his accomplishments and are very much looking forward to our trip  We will be joined for a short time by our other son, Sam/Zac/Satchmo and also my mother.