April 5 - Dad's Birthday

 Well when you are three hours from the nearest Walmart, and more to the main shopping town, you tend to bundle a whole bunch of stuff into one day, so then you go long periods of time collection activities, lists, and needs until the much awaited day when you go to town. You leave very early in the morning and are lucking if you make it home very early in the morning of the next day. Today was such a day!
Now while these days tend to be strenuous, but they always include lots of laughs and memories!
For today's agenda we are hauling some steers for the Ranch that dad works at, delivering the last pup from the litter, and best of all, celebrating my wonderful Daddy!

Dad, when asking for a day off, told his boss that we wanted to take him someplace special for his birthday. His boss paid for our trip by having us drop off the cows and as a birthday gift for dad, he bought our lunch! 

This is where the pup rode all day, he did great! It sure is fun to have a pup along! 

At the thrift store he "helped" with the shopping.

 Lunch was at a family favorite, Olive Garden.
But before we went in, Dad got his gift.

Gabe, Shea, and Garrett keeping dad from the van while the girls got it ready for him. 

I love this face! It isn't often that we can surprise dad! I think he likes it!

He actually came home and broke it in by running his new weed-eater all afternoon. The pasture looks amazing now! 

I so love these two!

 Dad's boss made the joke that we needed to take dad to a Mexican restaurant so he could wear the sombrero. Well we went to an Italian Restaurant, so this was the best he could do. 

 We ended the day with some shopping and the opportunity to meet some wonderful people who were excited to get their puppy!

We are daily blessed with the Daddy that God saw fit to design for our family! I am so proud of him and all he does, it is so wonderful to have a day set aside like this for such a special man!

March 10-12 - Puppy Deliver Trip

Early on the morning of the 10th, Shea, 9 pups, and I headed out to Portland. Most of the buyers for this litter live nearer to Portland than they do to us, so it made sense to meet there... or so I thought. This trip really taught Shea and I about how to work together as a team better, and to handle emergencies far from Mom and Dad's ready help. A huge thank you to a family friend who were just amazing through all of it! But I'm getting ahead of myself.
If you've ever driven through East Oregon, you will know that cell service is questionable to say the least. Heading from Kimberly to Portland, the windmill farm is always a mile marker, one of the first reliable places to contact home and let them know how we are doing. Zach answered when we called, and in a goofy conversation with Shea, he requested that we "take a picture of a windmill for him..pwease." So we took a picture of every type of windmill we saw just for him.

We arrived without issue in the park where we planned to drop pups off. One pup went off the 10th and the others would go the 11th. Both humans and dogs were desperate to stretch their legs after a 5 hour drive that we played in the park for a bit.

Shea, in a moment of mania, wanted to climb this pipe. And do you know, it was full of water!

He had more energy than he has a right to.

 So now the fun starts! The reason Shea went along is because he bought a part car on craigslist to fix up the one he already has. After we left the park we headed over the U-Haul place to pick up the car dolly. We arrived at a very run down gas station manned by two very...um...how shall I put this...unprofessional young men. They hadn't rented out a U-Haul vehicle in a while, and when we saw the dolly, chagrin set in. The lighting cable was nonexistent, the wheel guards were in bad need of something, like duct tape, lots of it. The gas station attendant told us where to go and walked off. I asked him after we hooked up if there was some sort of checking out we needed to do. And he said that not only did he not know how to check us out if needed, they didn't even have the computer facilities to do it.
So, probably foolishly, we headed out on the road. We were headed toward a part store to fix the wheel guard, and lights, when another U-Haul driver drove up next to us on the busiest highway we had been on all day. And he started yelling something at us. We were pretty freaked out as you can guess. For a while we tried not to look at him, until Shea saw that he was pointing toward the trailer. Thinking something was wrong with it, we started trying to read his lips. Or I did, Shea firmly kept his eyes on traffic, finally after he repeated it several times, I realized what he was saying. "Your trailer is stolen!" Immediately I knew what he was talking about. We found a place to pull over with him following us. It turned out that he was a manager of U-Haul, had seen the state of the trailer, and called in to see what was going on. He was super nice about it all, and sent us to a new place to swap out the trailer. We still made it to the place to pick up the car on time too. We kind of figured that this was going to be our challenge for the trip, little did we know.

Beautiful Sunrise that our Lord painted for us!

We planned on staying at a friend's house that night. They have a farm out in the country, so we could have a place for all the pups to stay. It was a 2.5-3 hour drive to their place, and we didn't get started until about 6pm (we were way over on the other side of Portland at this point picking up the car). We stopped to get supper on the way, and by the time we got to the town they live near, we were exhausted. That's when it happened. We were coming up to a sharp corner on the dirt road leading to their house. Shea forgot about the corner (as it really is no issue in the daylight) and I was pretty drowsy. By the time he saw it, it was too late. With the added weight of the car on the back and the bad breaks of the truck, we slid through the corner and totaled 3 mail boxes nailed to a post!
There is a huge bumper on the truck, so when we started coming out of the stupid shock that this caused Shea said, "Well, the front is okay at least." Ha, the cooler for the transmission had been sliced by a piece of metal...you've got it, on the bumper. Praise God, other than the damage to the cooler and the mail boxes, we were okay. The pups, in a kennel in the back, didn't even wake up.

We walked to our friend's house as we couldn't move the truck. The dad and two of his sons came down to help get us out. By then it was nearly midnight, and I had a early appointment for one of the pups, so we went to bed.

Early the next morning, while I was taking care of the pups, Shea was taking off the cooler. Our friends let us borrow their car to head to the Dalles for parts.

My hero! He has such an amazing ability!

Little GemmaPearl riding to meet her new family, through all of this, it sure was nice to have puppies to cuddle!

After the meeting, and a very fruitless search for the right part, our friend called and offered to let us use the car to deliver the rest of the pups. They truly went above and beyond the call of duty in all of this! We are so honored to have people like this to help us out!
So off the Portland again we went. The rest of the day went off well, and everyone was thrilled with their new babies. Though I was having a hard time letting them go. Shea said that all the stress may be God's way of keeping me from crying in public...I guess that could be so....

We had planned on shipping one of the pups by air on the 10th, but due to a mistake on the paperwork, it didn't work out. As bad as I felt for his new family that was waiting for him, it sure was nice to have him around all day!

We headed to the hardware store to pick up some more mailboxes, and supplies to fix them. To the car wash, to wash and vacuum our the car. It was fun for the two country bumpkins in the big city.

The pup slept through the whole car wash, I guess he was as tired as we were. 

Back to the parts store to get the parts we ordered to fix the truck we went. By this time we both were pretty much whipped out. We got back to our friend's house at about dark, and Shea, being the mechanical genius fixed the truck that night. It meant another "past midnight" day, but the truck was running, and we were ecstatic!
The morning of the 12th we were up long before light to take care of those mail boxes, and we were nearly done by the time the sun came up. After a thankful Good Bye to our friends, we headed home at last! We made it home to the loving arms of the rest of our crew at last at about 2 o' clock that afternoon.

It truly was a magnificent experience, where we had to continue to move forward even with the mistakes we made along the way. I tell you what, our God blessed Shea and I immensely through the whole trip. 

August 22 -24 - Puget Sound

Several years ago, while our family still lived in Colorado, our music teacher and her family moved up to Washington state. We haven't kept in touch very much since they moved other than once or twice a year.

Well now that we live in Oregon we all have wanted to go and visit them, this weekend we all headed up to Puget Sound, which, by the way, is almost literally right out their back yard. We had a blast with these wonderful people. They were so great about taking us to so many of the landmarks of Puget Sound.




Janessa brought her camera along and got some really beautiful pictures of our trip.

The bridge over Deception Pass.

Our first stop on the tour was Deception Pass, which had the magnificent bridge spanning the inlet! The monument to the history of this pass reads as follows: " Named by Captain George Vancouver 10 June, 1792. Felling that he had been " deceived" as to the nature of the inner waterway. Port Gardner (now Saratoga Passage) he wrote on his chart "Deception Pass". He honored Master Joseph Whidbey who found the passage while commanding a small - boat crew of explorers, by naming the island Whidby." 

While we were walking on the bridge, Garrett yelled, "Hey guys, I think I see an otter!" and sure enough, we got to watch a couple otters playing and eating about 4 stories beneath our feet.

After that, we headed to the beach that was down a ways from the passage to have lunch and play. Even though it is August the water is still frigid! But even still there was no way we were passing up a chance to play in the ocean.

Zach playing with the "Bull Whip Kelp" that was laying all over the beach.

The Pogue family and Friends on the beach.

Being used to seeing wildlife Eastern Oregon, we were having so much fun seeing the creatures Oregon Coast style. Every tide pool had so many weird and amazing creatures!

Next stop was one of the many forts along the coast, that had been used to train troopes for years. The all time favorite part of the fort for all of us was the guns, which were huge! The nearby lighthouse had been turned into a museum for both lighthouse and fort. One of the stories we heard was of an attack on the US by a foreign sub and this fort and the one across the sound both opened fire on it and either sank her or sent her packing. 

View of the Sound from the top of the lighthouse.

Afterward it was back to the house for burgers and friend time.

The next morning we headed back home with a small detour to Mount St. Helens.

Our family had a fantastic time and are so looking forward to the next visit!