Sunday, June 21, 2009

Happy Anniversary!

For our 12th wedding anniversary Alana and I went out to see the latest movie in the Star Trek series.

As we each grew up watching re-runs of the original series, we both toughly enjoyed this evening out and the movie. It was extremely well done with excellent story, acting and of course special effects.


Live long and prosper!

Tom

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Happy Birthday Anna!

Anna had a few friends over today to help her celebrate her birthday. They had a lot of fun playing games and making crafts. The best part, according to Anna, was playing the High School Musical sing along game on the Wii.



Anna's cousin Delaney was also in town and joined in the fun!


Here is Anna enjoying the best part of birthday parties..the cake!




Anna opening up her gift from Nanny and Papa....this beautiful quilt!




Tom

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Camping Trip

The weather was looking nice this past weekend and Alana only worked a bit on Saturday, so we decided to take the family out for 1 night of camping at a local campground.


Here is Anna and Matthew setting up their tent:


Matthew and Anna at the campfire:


Anna and Mommy helping out with dishes:


The weather was great and a good time was had by all!

Additional pictures can be found our our Flickr pages by clicking here.

Tom

Monday, May 18, 2009

The garden has been planted!

With the hope that Jack Frost is on vacation until the fall, we have planted our small vegetable garden today.

We transplanted cherry tomatoes and hot peppers that we started from seed. We planted seeds for beets, scarlet runner beans, winter squash, carrots and several herbs.

Anna was a great help in the garden all weekend.

Here is Anna next to the tomatoes she planted:


Here is a picture of a very fragile hot pepper plant. I really hope it stays warm!


Here is Anna playing in the grass (mostly weeds actually) in front of mom's flower garden:




And finally, here is Anna resting well on our deck after a day's hard work in the garden:


It was a great day for planting. Let's hope that we can feed ourselves out of this garden and not just the neighborhood gophers!

Tom

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Happy Mother's Day!

We made Alana a double-layer chocolate cake this year for Mother's Day. Yummy!


Nothing like smarties and sprinkles for decorations!

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Spring Visit to the Hunt Camp

Yesterday Matthew and I went to visit the hunt camp with our good friend Rick. The original plan was to take Rick's canoe, but as the weather was poor (rain showers) we decided to take the camp boat instead.


We arrived at the landing on the other side of the Madawaska river by about 10:30am. As this is the shady side of the river, there was still lots of ice as you can see in the pictures below.





The camp was in great shape with no leaks and it looks like the camp had no visitors (human or otherwise) over the winter.


We were quite surprised to see some very fresh moose tracks along the creek right in front of the camp! The first picture below is showing how big the tracks are (that is Matthew's Size 7 boot for scale) and the second shows how widely spaced they were. Wow, nice sized moose!





After a short rest at camp we hiked along the "Main" trail up to the "Y" trail and stopped at "The Balsam" for a break before meeting Rick at the "W" for lunch. We were pleased to see many deer tracks (and what looked like a wolf track) along the trail. We also heard several Ruffed Grouse along the trail which we took as a good omen for this fall's hunt.

In general the trails we walked were in excellent shape with only a few small trees blown down across them. We did however, as you can see in the picture below, see lot of pine cones and pine branches across the trail. There must have been quite the windstorm to bring these down!


As the spring run off is still in high gear the creek was running very well. Along the trail close to camp there was is a spring which was full of water as can be seen below. The last two times I visited the came in April this spring was active, but not was never this deep! I expect this water would be very clean and fine for drinking. To bad this spring is not active in later summer/fall!



It should also be noted that we saw quite a bit of deer "dirt" along the trail around the "W" and also on the north trail down to camp. Considering this is a deer hunting camp, we were quite pleased to see some deer sign! ;-)

After lunch we headed back out to the boat and crossed the river. We were home by mid-afternoon.

Given that the weather was gloomy, this was still a great visit to the camp. Deer season is only 7 months away!

If you would like to see additional picture CLICK HERE to be taken to my Flickr page.

cheers!
Tom

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Seeds started!

For many reasons we did not plant a vegetable garden last year and we really missed it! This year we planned ahead and today we started some seeds indoor. We planted some cherries tomatoes, hot peppers for veggies and also a small herb garden of oregano, basil, echinacea and thyme. We also started 18 marigolds.

Here is Matthew, Anna, and their Lego toy showing off their gardening skills:


Here is a picture of the min-greenhouses all setup. It will be fun waiting for the seeds to germinate and then grow!


We are also planning to plant some beets, scarlet runner beans, squash and lots of sunflower, but these will have to wait until the grown has thawed and warmed up ;-)

Tom