December Photos

OMG I actually managed to keep up with my photo spam every month!!Here's the final photo dump for 2018.

Mike and I went to this great taco place by his work. The food was amazing, the service was great, and the decor was a nice touch. It was a little pricier than other chains in the area, but for me, it's worth it for quality ingredients prepared fresh. I was shocked that the place was completely empty when we went (lunch time on the weekend!)

Christmas Gunner

I'm not much of a holiday person, but Gunner's outfit this year is too good not to share!

Year in Review 2018

My annual Christmas Eve blogging tradition :) This year was a rough one in many ways, some of which I never discussed on here. Still, it featured a lot of good memories and wonderful people. At the risk of jinxing everything, it was also a financially lucky year for us, which is probably a first. Here's the month-by-month breakdown of 2018. Hopefully I'll tie up a lot of loose ends in this post, since I mostly blog in fits and spurts any more.

Hiking Merrill Creek

Now that the year is winding down and the weather is dreary, Mike and I have been revisiting some of our favorite places, rather than exploring new ones. Two weeks ago, we visited MCR for the first time in a long time. It was eerily quiet and empty, but we had a good time nonetheless. We parked in the field by the dam instead of the main visitor area. Then we hiked down to the Deadwoods and back (instead of trying to get around the entire thing before dark). We Geocached along the way, finding several on the long list of hides on the perimeter trail. We also saw one of the bald eagles, though only from a distance. He was returning to his nest, presumably after doing some hunting. Not too many exciting photos since everything was gray and there was no exciting wildlife otherwise. Still, it beats being cooped up inside with nothing to do!

Jockey Hollow

At the beginning of the month, I was going a bit stir-crazy. Between the mud, the short days, and the less-than-compliant weather, we haven't done a lot of hiking recently. Still, I needed to get out of the house and do something. Mike suggested we go Geocaching so I pulled up the GC map and landed on Jockey Hollow, a historic site not far from us. I actually spent a lot of time mountain biking there with my dad as a kid, but I haven't been back as an adult. After our visit (during the course of which we didn't actually log a single cache) I decided that we really need to go back and explore the entire park in the future.

We parked in the visitor center parking lot and started by checking that out first. I love learning things. It's ironic that I find history so fascinating as an adult since it was hands-down my worst subject in school. We learned a lot in the visitor center, taking the time to watch the 15 minute video about the property and the part it played in the Revolution. In the process, we got hiking recommendations from an employee, who said that the blue trail featured one of two scenic vistas in the park.

From there, we moved on to the Wick House, where the hints for our first cache were.

We quickly deciphered the clues and plugged in the resulting coordinates, only to find that the actual final cache was in the neighboring Lewis Morris Park (also on our to-do list). We started to wander in that direction and, in the process, crossed over the blue trailhead.

As it turns out, the blue trail is the only one in the park that doesn't actually feature a single Geocache, but we didn't mind. It was roughly a five mile hike from start to finish, and it was pretty tame compared to all the adventuring we've done this year, but it was good to get out in the fresh air, and get some peaceful walking in.

We got back to the car just before the forecasted rain started to spit down at us, and we were home just after dark. Winter puts a bit of a damper on our hiking escapades, but it's a good opportunity to explore some more local hot spots.

Jax and Dakota Photos

I am working on my ESCDTA championships post, which is long overdue, but I'm waiting to iron out some details with the show photographer before hitting "post". In the mean time, I'm going to dump some photos, as usual. It's the only way I know how to blog.

Juli brought her dog, Jax, to work to blow off some steam this week. I happened to have my camera because I was planning to take pictures of Gunner that afternoon (that post is also coming soon to a screen near you) so I took a billion photos of the dogs playing.

So here ya go... some happy-dog filler post for you're viewing pleasure.

I like this one because Dakota isn't touching the ground. She's the fastest dog I know and it's pretty hard to photograph her.

We walk silently, hand-in-hand under a star-strewn, moonlit sky; traipsing by memory across the acres we've called home for just shy of five years. As the pre-winter frost crunches under my filthy muck boots, I can't help wondering how many nights like this we have left. Though this tiny farm, carved out in between boulders on top of an unlikely mountain range, is such a prominent piece of our unfolding story, she is not our own. The end has been imminent for so long it feels like the walls have already come crashing down, and I fear the whole chapter is about to close, pages ripped from their binding, roof ripped from over our heads.

This place has been kind to us through ravenous winter snows, and oppressive summer afternoons when the concrete walls have kept us cool.

In between seasons, I've spent countless hours romping through the forest, faithful hell hounds by my side, golden-hour rays slanting dramatically through the oaks and maples and birches; then falling, dazzling, across dense underbrush where the does hide their fawns in spring and the bucks practice with their new antlers in fall. I've laid in fields of buttercups, flat on my stomach, watching the horses devour the emerald sprouts of spring, their tails twitching habitually at the memory of flies.

We've parked our rotating herd of cars under the half-dead magnolia tree out front, using high beams and head lamps to scan the dark horizon for eyes, both wild and domestic. We've learned to tell visitors apart by the colors of their reflective orbs in the night and their cries while we lay tangled up in our bed, windows open wide to the wilderness. The crickets and the screech owls and the foxes and coyotes singing a country lullaby, and the fisher cats with their mocking laughter echoing through the trees.

In daylight hours, Mike has hammered fence boards and mowed the lawn, scrubbed troughs and thrown hay, and listened to classic rock with the volume all the way up in his shop on the second floor of the cattle-barn-turned-warehouse.

In the dusty third floor loft, between long-empty swallows' nests, Ozzy's entire life is tucked away in little boxes, alongside trunks full of photo albums, books, and knickknacks from my childhood. Picture frames of varying shapes and sizes are stacked in the former dumbwaiter in our living room where chickens once laid their eggs. These are filled with more current memories, smiling faces, vibrant backgrounds, countless adventures, wanderings, moments in time. I long to hang them on our powder blue walls, but my hands can't seem to find the strength when I think of taking them down again.

I will miss the feel of the cream colored stucco, and the roof in a color Home Depot calls Gleeful.

I will miss the balcony where my little pink pitbull sunbathed herself purple, and where Julio barked at the ground hogs, and the rabbits, and Not Our Cat. I will miss the kitchen where we drank whiskey and slow danced while cooking with never-enough garlic and cheese.

I will miss riding bareback under Orion's belt after having a few too many; and the rise-and-fall rhythm of fly spray in the summer and thick, scratchy, fresh cut alfalfa in the winter, my coveralls swishing against the onslaught of the cold.

I will miss the ghosts that made this place locally famous, and the bold mouse in the pantry who we keep relocating to the pine tree outside. I will miss the crooked floor, the unfinished cupboards, the sticky front door, and Leroy, the shower spider.

But most of all, I will miss our moonlit walks at midnight, when we wander together, but alone with our thoughts...

Childhood Riding History

(This started off as a part of my 25 Questions post, but quickly took a life of its own...)

What was your riding “career” like as a kid?

Horses were not readily available to me as a kid. Horseback riding is expensive everywhere, but especially in north Jersey. I spent my early years reading every horse-related book I could get my hands on and memorizing every little fact I read. I tied a rope to a chair in my bedroom and pretended to trail ride and do dressage on my dream horse, a 15.2hh dapple gray thoroughbred named Pepper.