Our wonderful groomer, Lori Fillion from Littleton, New Hampshire, came out today for her regularly scheduled appointment for the two blind Poodle sisters, Molly and Priscilla.  Those two girls take up much of the day, but Lori can usually fit in at least one more who might need a make-over, and today it was the…

Any time Kate calls me in my office late on Fridays, I want to duck under my desk.  Normally she will text me during the day with brief updates or if she comes across something she thinks I should know about.  She saves the rare voice calls for … well, horsey disasters.  So when my…

Now that more than a week has passed since I wrote the post about raising our own cattle, I wanted to follow up on a couple of questions people asked in their comments.  But first, that's Suzette above with her calf Suzanna in a photo we took late last fall.  I will admit, we posted…

I took our little old lady Samantha to the vet clinic this morning.  Despite her age, Sam has been a pretty healthy girl in the time we've had her.  But she's started peeing while she sleeps, which is something we've seen before in younger female dogs (and is easily treated with phenylpropanolamine — which for…

I didn't have any animal photos for a blog post today so I thought I would take a photo of the view from my office window.  Pretty nice, eh?  (Click on photo for larger image.)  Definitely a winter wonderland out there!  This view is looking east, and those are the White Mountains in the distance.…

To give you an idea of how much snow we've had, I took this photo this afternoon of one of the igloos in the dog yards.  As you can see, it is entirely covered, the access hole completely sealed.  Although this part of New Hampshire is definitely snow country, people keep telling us that this…

Peace Cereal has selected the ranch as the first beneficiary of the company's new Peace Cereal Giving Back Program.  We will receive a contribution for every Peace Cereal product sold during the first quarter of 2011! The Peace Cereal Giving Back Program is designed to raise funds for four non-profit partners each year that sync…

Alayne took this photo of me raking snow off the roof yesterday afternoon.  I'm joking when I call this a "New England custom" — I know this is done elsewhere — but until we moved to New Hampshire, we'd never seen anyone do it, let alone had to do it ourselves.  But it seems like…

Melissa McDaniel emailed to say that our promotion of her book sales resulted in proceeds of around $1,000 that will be going to the ranch!  Wow!  Thank you to everyone who ordered one of Melissa's beautiful books, and thanks to Melissa for doing this! Melissa also wrote, "I have to say, and I deal with…

Long-time blog readers know that we have always heated with wood stoves at the ranch in Montana, and we continued to do so in New Hampshire.  Indeed, one of the many wonderful advantages of our new location was having our own woodlot.  Last fall we installed a wood stove in the people wing and a…