Today, we had our first snow this winter. The weather report called for some flurries tonight, but instead we had about a 1/2 inch of snow this afternoon.  I went out around 5:00 to see if I could get to the grocery store, but even Guess Rd. was totally covered, and so I turned around. [...]

If you have read my posts over the summer, you’ll know that we pretty much spent our summer vacation building a 1200 foot (400 M) pasture fence. Well, Google Earth noticed too, and took some great pictures of our work – from space! Google hat vor Kurzem die Satelitenphotos von unserer Gegend erneuert und mir [...]

Sunday afternoon we went Trick-or-treating in the neighborhood with some friends and with Waldo and Cleo.The horses behaved themselves as much as can be expected. The cars and dogs did not bother them much, but Cleo did not like the stop signs. After 1 1/2 hours it started getting dark and and they had had [...]

It’s fall and the snakes are on the move. A while ago, Laura and I saw a (we think) Northern Watersnake by the pond and recently, I had to kill a big Copperhead near the horses shelter (and hay storage). A few days ago, I caught a juvenile Ratsnake inside the hay storage, and today [...]

Leaving work this afternoon, I encountered this beauty in the parking lot; a 1956 or 57 Porsche 356 Speedster (early Type A). I think this is one of the prettiest cars ever built. Yes it was essentially a souped-up beetle. But as such it combined the efficiency and simplicity of the early beetles with the [...]

(Deutsch weiter unten) Cleo and Wally have been living with us now for 2 months and, I dare say, our horse-farm project is going really well. Laura has put a huge effort into training and care, to get our two new family members into top form. She (and Julia and Gaylen) have worked hard to [...]

Today we brought home our horses Waldo and Cleo! This weekend we got their run-in shelter (mostly) done, so we borrowed a trailer and brought them home from the place were we had them boarded for the last month. DE … Waldo und Cleo sind endlich zuhause! Wir haben die beiden heute abgeholt und sie [...]

Cleo – aka “Funny You Should Ask” – and Waldo … our two Tennessee Walking Horses. More pictures on Flickr hat noch mehr Bilder.

Here are more pictures of our new, 9-year-old Tennessee Walker “Funny You Should Ask” aka “Cleo” Click on the picture for a larger version. More pictures below …

… is the name of the 9-year-old, blue roan mare we bought yesterday. Her stable name is “Cleo” and she is a registered Tennessee Walking Horse, which is a peculiar, uniquely American breed. She is a very gentle, curious soul with an impressive pedigree. We had planned to start building the fence yesterday, but there [...]

One of the first things you do when you start a farm is to buy a farm truck. We bought the land a few weeks ago and last week we bought a 1999 Ford F250 pickup with a 7.3 liter  Powerstroke Diesel engine that produces 235 horsepower (175 kW) and 500 foot-pounds force (680 N·m) of torque. The odometer [...]

Today was a great day: we bought the property next to ours! That is a huge milestone towards our dream of owning horses, because that property includes a 2-acre pasture. When we bought our house, we were just excited about having a horse pasture next door. We befriended the two horses who lived there, Stormy [...]

Endangered Durham has a great post about the Watts and Yuille tobacco warehouses, nowadays known as Brightleaf Square. The post includes this aerial shot of the warehouses (this is just a cropped version). I was looking for some evidence of how old the trestle is. This question keeps coming up when people ask why the [...]

Last Saturday I participated in the second edition of the Doughman – but not in the competition this time around. Instead I helped document the World’s premier Quadrathlon  as one of four volunteer videographers. Due to our trip to Togo I was a bit late with the registration, and by the time I got serous [...]

Not to dwell on the weather, but this is pretty intense, even for North Carolina. Last week, the official low temp. was 18 Deg. F (-7 ° C) and today the high was 81 F (27 °C). In the 50 hours from Wed AM to Friday PM temperatures went up by 50 Deg. F. Right [...]

Sunday night central North Carolina was blanketed in 2-4 inches (5-10 cm) of snow. This is our third snowfall this winter, which makes this a pretty “wintry” winter for NC. Last year the temperatures hardly dipped below freezing. Last night it was 14 Deg. F (minus 11 Celsius). The kids enjoyed building their first snow-person. [...]

2008 was a pretty good year for us. We stayed healthy, sane (more or less) and employed. Jacob and Julia grew a lot. We had a great family vacation in the mountains of North Carolina and we did a couple of short trips to the beach. Both kids changed schools. Jacob and I started learning [...]

Meet Joey – he’s a 18-hands Clydesdale and a member of the Express Clydesdales Team. When the team visited Durham last weekend, we were lucky enough to know where they were staying. so we got a special, personal encounter with these amazing hoses. (see below)

We brought this plumeria back from Hawai’i in 2004 and planted the stem in a pot. For a while nothing happened. Then it started growing leaves. This spring Laura transferred the plant to a larger pot and it started growing more leaves. When we moved, we gave the plumeria a nice, sunny spot on the [...]

We had a rather dry spring, and so only last weekend we finally found an opportunity to engage in our annual post-solstice ritual of burning our yuletide tree. After getting two inches (52mm) of rain on Saturday last weekend, Sunday evening was calm and cool and it was pretty safe to torch the bone-dry Frasier [...]