A wonderful friend and supporter of the ranch, Margaret N. from Seattle, has been sending big boxes of fleece blankets for the animals for a number of years now, and her latest shipment just arrived.  I took these photos yesterday afternoon of blind Goldie inspecting the goods.  Rather than let Goldie "open" the box herself…

One of our blog readers asked for an update on blind-and-deaf Duchess, better known as Granny, our resident breadaholic.  I asked Cindy to take a photo of me with Granny today, except I hadn't allowed for the fact that she (Granny, not Cindy) might be in the middle of an afternoon nap in the sun. …

I had just finished dragging a pasture this weekend and was heading back to the house on the tractor when I looked over at the hay barn.  Something had caught my eye.  Yep, there they were — Rocky and Joshua, two of our barn cats, way up high on the hay stack.  These two boys…

This weekend I hauled our chain harrow out of the vehicle shed and began the fall ritual of dragging the pastures.  The harrow has tines that point down and into the ground, and as you pull the harrow along behind the tractor, the tines break up the horse manure clumps and scatter them across the…

I mentioned in a post last week that we had someone coming out this weekend to meet three-legged Honey Girl for a possible adoption.  Well, Keithi W. from Missoula arrived on Saturday as scheduled, and Honey Girl was everything she usually is … sweet, affectionate and full of antics as Keithi loved her up.  It…

The National Weather Service had forecast a low for us last night of 21 degrees, but I could tell when I was putting the dogs up at 9:30 p.m. that we would get colder than that.  Sure enough, when we got up this morning it was 13.6 degrees (-10.2 C).  The photo above is what…

I took three animals to our vet clinic in Helena today.  Goldie was due for her next round of chemotherapy, and our internal medicine specialist in Missoula, Dave Bostwick, had been treating her cancer.  But we had two cats who were also due for their annual vaccinations and health exams, and both were pending adoption,…

There’s no "official" end to the fire season … it just depends on the weather, but with all the moisture we’ve had in recent weeks, the wildfire danger is definitely over for us.  That meant it was time to drain out the water tanks on our fire trailer, which is what we did today.  With…

Although our little valley is called Kleinschmidt Flat … named after the first settlers out here in the 1800s, the Kleinschmidts, and Flat because … well, it is pretty flat … Alayne and I have often wanted to call it Rainbow Flat instead.  That’s because we frequently get stunning rainbows that sometimes take your breath…