It has been a long and arduous winter in New Hampshire, one that has seen record snowfalls. We have over a foot of snow still on the ground, often hard-frozen and crusty but slowly dwindling with warmer days. Our horses have given up doing much wandering, it is too much effort for too little gain. They have eaten all the tree bark they can reach, they can’t dig through the crust for leaves or dead grass, and life seems pretty boring in general so they hang around near the barn hoping someone will throw them some hay.
On the good side, snowboarding has never been better than this year, with a longer than usual season as well. Plenty of base, plenty of fresh snow, great conditions for riding. We finished up our last runs at Mount Sunapee this year…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfXBanwJYo4
this is Hubby’s top to bottom snowboarder’s view from one of Sunapee’s slopes, with me trailing down to the lift at the end. LOL. He is faster than me even when he’s shooting a video on the way down!
We’ve had a decent run of maple sap and the sugaring is over for us… it wasn’t a great season, lost a couple of batches due to inattentiveness to the boil-down, and lost some sap when buckets blew over due to the sinking snowpack. We’ll end up with maybe 2 gallons of syrup, where usually we get at least four gallons.
Looking forward to post-mud season, we have ordered pairs harnesses for the boys and a pole for the Eagle 4-wheel carriage. We have pretty ambitious hopes to hitch Gilford and Glendale together before the end of the summer. This will all depend on how things go of course; we will seek professional training assistance for the first few times hitching them as a pair. Glendale has only been hitched to the training cart maybe 6 times in our lower pasture, so he needs a lot of road miles put on him first.
Some carriage driving/training manuals advise thoroughly training both horses individually before putting them together as a pair. Old time methods however put a green horse with a more experienced driving horse in ORDER to train the newbie. So we are thinking to try it, with due caution and the advice of an expert.
With that in mind, we will soon begin separating the mare from the two boys in their turnout. We do that to prepare her for their leaving the barn when we’re training them together, but mostly so that they can become more bonded to each other (desirable for a driving pair). This will be tough on the mare, who suffers a lot from separation anxiety. Hopefully she will end up bonding with her two boyfriends across the fence and find solace there…
The horses have started shedding out, and have already gotten their spring shots, Coggins tests, and recent trims and hoof-shaping. I’ve been doing some tack cleaning and conditioning, checking for repairs needed, ordering bug spray and fly trap bait juice, and dreaming of warmer days when the mud is mostly gone!
On our second excursion out in the Piper Warrior Feb. 17, Ezra flew me up to Maine to buzz his favorite place, the Sunday River ski area in Bethel where he loves to snowboard (and so do I, but lucky dog Ez has a season pass!)
Ez always checks the updated weather before our departure, both for Laconia and for where we are going.
A pilot navigates by homing in on airport beacons (if they have one) and by using flight navigation maps.
Some of Ezra’s flight and route prep notes.
our takeoff from Laconia airport…
Mount Washington was sure pretty clear this day!
Circling above Sunday River ski slopes, Bethel Maine.
Buzzing Sunday River, saying hi to Scott!
Ezra’s buddy Scott was on the mountain skiing and watching out for us to fly over as Ez dipped his wings a few times. Minutes later Ez received a text message that Scott had seen us! Too funny!
This flight was different in character from our first time out and had some interesting incidents. Leaving Laconia heading northeast we had a terrific tailwind, averaging about 140 knots groundspeed, so we reached Bethel Maine REALLY quickly. Ezra had intended to do a practice landing on Bethel’s air strip, and he made a steep approach after buzzing the ski slopes on the mountains; however, the little-used runway looked excessively icy and caution won out, so we just did a flyover at Bethel.
Steep approach to Bethel runway, bailing out when observing too much ice on the runway for a practice landing!
I am happy to say that Ez IS cautious, and methodical to a fault, so he has all the qualities to make a skilled and also a SAFETY-conscious pilot. There WAS a little incident starting out– before we left the ground, when he first fired up the plane’s engine for the routine high-RPM engine check, the thing ran really rough, shaking the whole plane, and we both were startled. Ez even told me then we might not be going up after all…
But he fiddled with the throttle and fooled with it and tested it several more times revving it up, and decided it was OK after all… it smoothed out and ran fine on those succeeding checks. Afterwards Ez explained to me how the engine has two magnitos (things with spark plugs in them, you fly on one, and the other magnito is a backup) and you test each one individually before takeoff.
The problem had been with one of the magnitos; he figured that a spark plug had gotten carbonned-up from running too rich on the plane’s last flight or on landing, and by adjusting his fuel/air mixtures while on the ground he was able to clear it up by running the engine hot for a while.
Turns out Ez had read about this happening sometimes, and how to fix it, in a flight magazine; it was not part of his flight training lessons per se. So it’s sure helpful to know something about engine mechanics as well as operating the controls and reading the gauges and navigating! And he loves flying so much he reads a lot about it.
Anyhow, our other interesting incident was on our return flight. We knew there was a huge front approaching from the southwest (hence that terrific tailwind on our outbound leg) and Ezra knew when the front was expected to set in at Laconia (having dutifully done his weather checks before takeoff). The issue was, we had to be on the GROUND in Laconia before the ceiling (cloud layer) coming in on that front got too low for a VFR landing (Visual Flight Rating), because Ezra is not rated for IFR landing (INSTRUMENT Flight Rating). In other words, he’s not trained yet to land through a cloud.
The cloudbank moving towards us while we were flying towards IT!!
Well, flying INTO this headwind so reduced our groundspeed (to less than 80 knots) that it was taking twice as long to return to the airport as it took to get TO Bethel. And that was a LONG flight back let me tell you, because we were both looking at the approaching front the whole time, and Ez was periodically checking with Laconia station reports for how LOW the ceiling was at Laconia. If I could have been a passive passenger, I never would have known to get nervous about it, but I had to know what was going on and so I WAS a bit nervous, and so was Ezra a little.
The ceiling at Laconia was about 3,800 feet when we made our landing, and Ezra says he needed about a 3,000 foot ceiling for landing, so if I should have been sweating bullets I didn’t know it. We came in under a solid cloud layer that stretched away in three directions. Ez was calm at least outwardly, and everything was cool. I’ll tell myself he planned it just right and not that he was cutting it close that time.
I guess worst case scenario, if Laconia had gotten socked in before we made it back, we would have had to backtrack and land at some other airport that was clear enough to land at, and then we would have been stuck there until the weather cleared… not anyone’s idea of a good time, and possibly an expensive mistake too if Sky Bright wanted to charge extra rental time on the plane for that!
I did say he wasn’t foolhardy, didn’t I???
See more videos of small plane flights in my youtube videos.
We were on the bay in dad’s 1935 GarWood antique wooden 20-foot utility boat.
People honk their boat horns after the finale… ours sounds like an old Model T!! The really loud blast is the Mount Washington cruise ship. Awesome!
Updating last summer’s report from friend C! on the truly unusual occurrence of not one but THREE baby albino raccoons living in her neighborhood…
Cat meets raccoon!!! Big OOOPPPSSS!!
These pix of C!’s from July - November 2007 show the progress of all the coon babies. Sadly, one albino they called Cecilia began to visit in October without her mother, although she was too young at three months to be without her mother.
C! speculated that mom coon had met her demise, leaving Cecilia orphaned. Despite C’s best efforts providing food and water in a very dry fall, Cecilia began to show up solo, acting lethargic and looking less and less healthy in early December.
In this shot I count sixteen including the albino!
Finally it was realized that Cecilia was blind. Not long after, she passed away, perhaps from some raccoon ailment or else from lack of a mother, and received a solemn burial in C!’s backyard. They are not sure what has become of the other two albinos, Pinky and ???.
UPDATE (after posting the entry below):
Two things lead me to believe these albino moose pix were NOT taken in New Hampshirel… Jana commented (see Comments below) she noticed a magpie in the fourth picture, placing the pictures in British Columbia (area) because she says magpies are not NH birds. I researched magpies and that appears to be true, their range is the Northwest and western Canada.
Also I checked on snopes.com, and they report about “white-haired” moose reported in Canada, Alaska and Idaho. (So I was right in that this one is not a true albino.)
___________________________
Pictures reportedly taken in Boscawen, NH, circulated by email…
Now let’s speculate… are the other two meese her youngsters? They are certainly a whole lot smaller. And I hope they have learned to steer clear of barbed wire fencing…
Is she a true albino? Her eyes don’t look red or pink…
They are eating like my horses… maybe our equines are part moose instead of beaver!
Once on a trail ride, me on Willy mare and a young friend on Odie, we encountered a moose statue up a cleared gas line right of way. A moose statue is one who stands so still you start to wonder if she’s a statue! She stared at the horses, and they stared back, and she didn’t even flick an ear for 3 or 4 minutes!
Meanwhile, to either side of her at the treeline were her two calves, chomping away. We did not dare approach her. The horses didn’t know if she was real, but they paid attention to the babies. Finally she moved her head, and we turned our horses and walked away slowly in the other direction!!
We have encountered meese in our area, one summer we were blueberry picking on a mountaintop and so was the moose. And once Hubby and I were spring hiking in the Belknaps when we started hearing a bleating noise, sounded like a goat. On getting closer, we observed an almost-newborn moose calf teetering in the woods, with momma nowhere to be seen. We watched and listened to baby crying for a short while, then quietly left the scene so momma could return! Nature is so wonderful!
THANKS to HorseGal for sharing these pictures with us, as passed around in emails!!!
The website Whatkindofworlddoyouwant.com allocates money to autism research, Save the Children, and other charities for every video viewed, and is described as legit by snopes.com. Details of How This Works are found on the site.
John Ondraski and the pop group, Five for Fighting, are donating $0.40 to Autism Speaks research for “each time” this video, Change her world, is viewed. There are over 8,000 comments on this video alone, and there are currently 205 videos on the World site.
Tell the WORLD “What Kind of World You Want” and raise money for charity!
Our three stooges were photographed by neighboring Gilford photographer John Gill. He dropped by on a foggy morning recently and spent a while with them as they munched their breakfast in the snow.
John’s website features outstanding nature photography, especially lots of wonderful birds, and scenes from New England and around the country. They are available as fine art prints; please visit johngillphoto.com
