This winter has been below zero one day to 40 the next. Since this makes it difficult to plan anything we have just been hunkering down and life keeps moving along. Tess and Eric have still been trying to get in as many rides as possible. Here is Sugar (in foal for the Spring) with Clay, her colt from a few years back, and a dog the size of a horse! For the record, a dog the size of a horse eats like a horse.

And needs a giant dog house, which E and T put together the other day.

Tess and I went ice skating the other day with some Douglas friends.

Surprise! sometimes there is even a picture of the mom.

Its not Halloween anymore!

Merry Christmas from the Palen house, Eric, Wendy and Tess and a few four-legged critters. Since we have been absent from the blogosphere for a time, here are some very random photos of some of the more interesting (I hope) things we have been up to.
It was chariot race time again in the Horseshoe Valley and Santa made a special visit.

A person just can't dress warm enough for the chariot races!

MEAT! This is the prime rib I cooked up for Thanksgiving dinner. I tried to have a mostly local food Thanksgiving and this nice prime came from one of our steers. I had our neighbor Frank feed him with some others that he was feeding and now we all have a freezer full. I also have a pig and a goat that I bought at the 4-H sale. The fact that I have announced that we will be having leg-of-goat for Christmas dinner is likely why everyone is going to Herb and Phylis's this year again. If you are afraid of expanding your culinary tastes, please don't come to my house when we are having meat loaf. "Goat Loaf" as my dad calls it, is actually very tasty.

Tess performed "on stage" at the Glendo School Christmas program. She is in the front row on the left. We were happy to report that she did not fall off the stage and the little guy to her left only suffered a few elbows to the nose. He started it.

This summer we got an additional 10 chickens and they finally began to lay a few weeks ago. Well, at least those that aren't roosters started to lay! This was the first tiny egg that Tess found.

We are already thinking about our garden for next year. Eric is quite the green thumb..here is one of his artichokes that we let flower. Notice the bee.

Have a peaceful holiday season.

Ghouls and Goblins

Halloween seemed to last all week, but Tess loved it. Here is her pink fairy costume. Dad liked the costume too.

Coleman's had their annual Cottonwood Hall party Friday with games, food and a "guarenteed spooky location."

Tess ran into a zombie that looked a lot like Cousin Brock.

The school party was Thursday followed by trick or treat for Unicef. She didn't even make it up the stairs before she was out!

Sunday night Tess had her ballet lessons, but she got to wear her fairy costume. Then we stopped to trick or treat and deliver some of Tess's art work to Aunt Clara Lou's in Wheatland, then on to Phylis and Herb's and Grandma and Pops. Phylis and Herb gave her the cutest bucket of Halloween candy, it was like a bouquet.

Meanwhile we shipped our calves on Sunday too, so we spend the morning making bierocks as my "treat" to the crew. We always had bierocks at Glendo school lunch when I was growing up, but they must be a rarity as it is hard to even find a recipe on the internet. In sum, they are hamburger, cabbage and onion inside a bread-dough shaped like a rock. In school we would take the pointy end of the ketchup bottle and squirt ketchup inside too. Tasty.

Elk hunting from our porch

Five Bulls last week. Look hard and you can see em in this photo.

These photos were all taken from our east deck. 60 head this morning, they divided into two groups. This is the one that landed closest to the house. I think the majority of the bulls went with the first group, but still several bulls in this one.

We've never had elk in these parts, maybe a sighting or two, but about 3 years ago we began to see a few here and there, but never in these numbers. They are awesome to look at, so awesome in fact that Eric, who has a landowner permit, hasn't had the heart to shoot one from the porch so that they might come back by. This however, may be short lived once they start doing a number on our fences and hay. We lease our hunting rights, so to have a respectable number of hunters without having to pick and choose amoung others. But I still made Eric wear an orange hat today on his horse ride, just in case.

Fall!

Have I mentioned I love fall? I do. My favorite season by a mile.

I got a new phone and the camera on the new phone has more megapixels than my normal camera...of course this requires learning to move photos from phone to computer. I bought a cord that is suppose to move movies from my phone to a tv...but moving photos from a computer to a phone it does not...so with some end-runs around technology I finally got some photos to share. Oh, and my tv is a 900 pound giant anyway so I'm sure I now have a fancy cord with nothing that it plugs into.

Eric and Banjo are more entertaining than tv anyway... McCormick's summered their pairs around our place this summer.

We shipped them out on Saturday.

Tess sat on the fence and told us how it was, when we ship our calves couple of weeks she will probably be standing by the gate yelling "Steer!" or "Heifer!"

Eric and Clay

Along with bossin' Tess rode with us as we moved our heifers over.

We had some nice fall weather.

Greener Days

Fall is my favortie season..love it! But we've been so busy enjoying the fall weather and the fruits of our garden I haven't had the chance to take any pictures or to figure out how to run the camera on my new phone...so here are some photos from earlier this summer.Tess and Peanuts, Eric and Bobby on a solo ride
Blue skies, tall grass and cowgirls - perfect.

Vacation Pictures

Our ten year anniversary, celebrated at George's restaurant in La Jolla, CA. Best fish ever! We stayed at the Grande Colonial right on the water in La Jolla and they were great -- set up all our day trips and dinners, champagne for our anniverary and trips around town in their funky English taxi.
We went sea kayaking and snorkeling. Eric enjoyed the snorkel so much he went back the next morning. I could live without snorkeling ever again..but I loved the kayaking.

Sunset sailing. This was THE BEST. It was Eric and I, one other couple and the captain. 3 hours, beautiful boat, beautiful waters and sights of downtown San Diego with Sail San Diego.

Plus, Eric got to drive practically the whole time. I only drove long enough to get my picture taken!

First Day of School

Tess started school Monday. She really didn't have time to fuss around with her mother wanting to take photos. We walk down to our mail box and she gets on the bus at 7. Goes all day everyday to Kindergarten. So far she seems to be enjoying everything except the getting up and going to bed early part.

One of my favorite going to school songs...

3 shovels, a skidsteer and a telephone pole....

make for a fun Saturday afternoon working on the corrals. I will not go into details about WHY this pole needs to be replaced other than it involves a stormy night, a big mud puddle in the center of the gate and me thinking it would be a good idea to ride the gate over the puddle...

I will mention, however, that I spent a substantial amount of time on the tractor bringing in sand to fill the mud hole so not only is there a new pole, there will no longer be a mud hole to tempt me into destructive gate swinging.

Besides...doesn't planting this pole look like fun!

And there is plenty of time left for playing in the dirt looking for dinosaur bones!

Portraits

Unplanned portraits of my crew on a Saturday afternoon

Fabulous Fourth

We hit the road to the black hills for the fourth.

Which face is the silliest?
We saw plenty of dinosaurs on the trip, with adventures at the dinosaur park in "Rabbit" City and then the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs.
But what Tess wanted to do the most is go swimming, so we had to stop at Evans Plunge and get our fill of the hotel pool.

Our garden is growing like mad. Unfortunately so are the weeds. I made blue-barb jam the other day with our rhubarb crop. We are currently eating lettuce and spinach. We also got 11 new hens. They are small and able to crawl right through my electric netting so we have been doing a lot of chicken wrangling and herding to try to keep them from being dog snacks. The bees are doing good and enjoying all the sweet clover that is around this time of year.

How high's the water Mamma?

The puppy has grown! Tuffy and Eric will graduate from obedience school next week. Life is rough for this dog!

Glendo Lake is the highest it has been since 1973 and perhaps the highest ever. (Debate is still out among the old-timers.) The majority of the campgrounds are closed, some of our neighbors now live on islands and some have basements full of water. Tess, Eric and I went and took some photos last weekend. Won't be much picnicing going on here! Heard that there were 3 boat vs. large-objects-hidden-underwater collisions last weekend. The picnic tables won and at least one boat went down like the Titanic.

Reports of E-coli are showing up this week. This is likely why. "Warning! Do not expose body to water." Ewww.

This was once along-side the boat ramp road. Don't think we will have to worry much about vehicles waiting and parking on the ramp.

Don't think this no parking sign was intended for boats.

Spill way as of the 27th, I have not heard if it has gone over yet. Supposedly the army corps of engineers takes over if it does so the Bureau of Rec is trying very hard to keep it from going over so they stay in charge.

Reports are that the water will start to go down next week and back to "normal high water" by the end of July.