In which we play the ten-year retrospective blog-hop (with photos)

The challenge:

Post the most significant photos from your blog from the last 10 years

...but only ONE PICTURE per year!

Challenge accepted!

This blog officially started in 2008, when we were trying to buy Haiku Farm.  Who knows what would have happened if the financing tanked permanently, or if we decided we wanted to buy a different place?  But none of that happened.  Instead...

2009

We bought a house and got a kid!

In March 2009, we not only (finally) closed on the purchase of Haiku Farm, we also added a family member:  Will came to live with us from Korea.

"Welcome to America, kid, now grab that furniture and help me load it into the horse trailer."

We spent the year helping Will learn to live in America and simultaneously built important parts of the Farm...like the pasture fence, and the chicken enclosure!  We brought the horses home in May, which was truly an epic day.  We bucked hay, and stacked firewood, and worked our tailfeathers off.

It was a good year.


2010

Welcome, Lisa!

Lisa joined us in September 2010, which was pretty amazing.  Her differences of opinion with Chicken #12 were epic.

Also in 2010, I returned to endurance competitions after taking THREE years to leg Fiddle up.  We could maybe have done the work faster, but we bought a farm that third year and didn't have any money.  The extra time for training and general twinking around on trails didn't hurt us a bit.


2011

A BARN!!!

We started 2011 with a roof-raising party, and we didn't actually "finish" the barn (mostly) until April.  It's so lovely to have this barn, I'm not sure how we ever survived without it.


2012

The book--and Santa!

2012 was a big year for new endeavors.  I wrote the first draft of Endurance 101 in November 2011, but in 2012 Monica and I decided to publish the book ourselves.  I never imagined how far our little book would take us--and continues to take us, still.

This was also Jim's first year as Santa.  Of course, he rocked it.

Fiddle got spayed.  That changed EVERYTHING.



2013

Our garden overfloweth

In 2013, pain in my arthritic hip slowed me way down.  I went from happily trotting down the trail to barely able to walk across a parking lot.  I was in deep denial for most of the year, and did all kinds of things to avoid surgery.  Some of it helped, but none of it fixed the problem.

But the garden did well, which was a comfort.


2014

Back in the saddle--hooray!

In early March (with a LOT of help from friends and family)  I finally sucked up some courage and submitted to hip replacement surgery.

25 days later, I got on a horse again.  3 days after that, I got on my horse and went for a trail ride.  That was pretty much the most awesome thing that happened that year.  I competed and stuff, but mostly what I did in 2014 was not hurt.


2015

Best endurance photo ever

I set a goal in 2015:  win the AERC Endurance Standardbred award.  The Dragon wasn't getting any younger, and there were some awfully promising Standies starting up their careers.  I figured it was now-or-never.  And we did it--as usual, with a lot of help from family and friends.  We rode through rain, sun, dust, sn*w, and everything else, and we did it.  

Oh, and two weeks after the last competition of the season was all over, I got my second hip replaced.  As one does.  

2016

A laid-back year with the Dragon

Fiddle had some lameness issues early in the year, so we took it pretty easy through the endurance season.  We went to rides, but didn't compete--and that was okay.  I never knew that not competing would be okay, but as long as my Dragon is still happy to get out and see what's happening around the next bend in the trail, it's all good.

I rode Kalief during Fee's rehab time, and then helped find him a home with the woman who gave the Dragon to me all those years ago.  That was a nice circle to complete.

2017

The state didn't burn down

We're having more and more smokey summers here on the West Coast, and 2017 was a bad one.  The garden didn't appreciate the pollution, and nobody else did, either.  Most of the smoke was coming from California and Canada, which is a good thing?  Meaning my state (mostly) wasn't on fire.

Overall, nothing exciting happened in 2017...which, when you consider that Living in Exciting Times is a curse, not a blessing, is okay with me.

2018

I actually took a road trip without my horse?

In 2018 I wrote a blog post that contained this sentence:  "I had a great ride, the trails are beautiful, the rain has stopped for a while, I'm so lucky."

The purpose of that post was to highlight how my life mostly goes now:  I ride, it's beautiful, I'm so lucky.   I go places I've been before with people I like to travel with and see things I always enjoy looking at and I usually take the Dragon along for the ride.

And sometimes, when things don't go the way I plan, I can still find something beautiful to enjoy, including a road trip with my dog to visit family in Oregon.

2019

Another good year of riding

Not one long ride, but two.

Fiddle is now completely retired from endurance competitions, but we both still love to explore new trails.

That's why we packed up our gear and (with some hiccups from the truck and other stuff) went to explore the Palouse-to-Cascades trail not once, but twice.


2020
Santa continues being Santa.  Monica continues making art.  I continue writing...and riding.

Ten years doesn't seem very long.  But I guess lots of things have changed, some good, some bad.

To all of y'all who have joined in the fun, whether you started reading this blog at the beginning, somewhere in the middle, or just today, thanks.

It's been so much fun so far!