If all goes well, we will be on the road tomorrow heading south to New Mexico! The weather's been frightful here the past day or so with ice and sleet and wind; we've been keeping an eye on the National Weather Service website along with 511mn.org for weather and road conditions!

We spent the past couple days getting the sheep all set for our absence although we do have a farm manager who will take care of them along with the rest of the farm but we try to have all the details worked out to make the process simple! You just never know if there will be an early lambing!

Here are a couple pictures from last year; one is of ruins near Mountainair, the other is of a small herd of Oryx that were near Corona, NM.

My NM phone number is on the homepage of my website but if you lose it: 575-682-3992.

Thanks to Beth for sending along this picture of Tulie (in black) and her younger blonde dog as well!

My son Miles lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and works for the Routt County Sheriff's Department. This evening he sent along this note: "I was doing snowmobile patrol yesterday and a friend and his sister (she took these pictures) were along when I ran into this bull elk that wouldn't get off the groomed snowmobile trail. I'm on the left in the blue jacket, we finally snuck around him through a small meadow....he was getting agitated and at one point I thought he was going to charge us......oh well, excitement as a cop in the mountains of Colorado!"

As parents out there know, there's nothing quite like having our kids come visit. Seth, Bonnie and grandson Anthony arrived yesterday morning; Anthony with a sled which was put to good use out back of the house. Bonnie settled into the house with a book (Olive Kittridge) and Seth helped me with the hay bales. Supper was cold ham sandwiches (remembering Spot and Red) along with potato salad (our own potatoes, onions and eggs!) and followed by sweets a friend had sent over. A good time was had by all!

Happy Holiday to everyone from those of us here at Briarlea Farm. The snow is coming down this morning in big clumps and as there is no wind, it is calm and beautiful. The dogs managed to contain themselves until an hour or so ago then convinced me it was time to take them for a gallop down the road. It's quiet here as those of you who have visited will attest, so a mile run is a common morning activity.

The barn seems lonely now with no friendly goat faces to greet us in the morning but we've been assured that they've settled into their new home. For that we are thankful. The sheep are looking fat and warm in their heavy woolen coats and the barn turkeys have figured out how to roost above them as well as how to bully their way to the grain feeder. In the henhouse the peafowl are looking sleek, we're getting eggs still although not nearly so many as in the summer. The old pair of geese are already looking forward to spring.

Our friend Lee from Pennsylvania sent this picture of Bruta, Zeke and Sam. Bruta and Sam are littermates to Margeaux, Trouble, Bennie and Kaida....can you tell?!

We will be heading south next week this time, to places warm and sunny - a welcome respite for me - and an opportunity to work the dogs on dry land. We'll keep you posted!

From Tilly in Montana:
Merry Christmas to you all. As you can see, I LOVE the snow, love chasing my brother, love going on hikes, love to chase all the deer in our yard (& get yelled at!) love Montana and LOVE my family! Thank you for finding the perfect home for me. Love Tilly.

A note arrived in the email box this morning from John down in N.M. "I hope you are having a happy holiday season. I wanted to send you a photo of Margeaux. She is doing very well. She is living with me in Santa Fe and is having a wonderful life."

Also from Reed in Illinois: "Cooper is growing on us every day. Quite a dog. Smart, attentive, affectionate, good house manners, a great traveler, and starting to show a little protective streak but has been so well socialized that he has not been over the top with that. High energy but we walk and/or play frisbee everyday. Still has his orchids and is finally starting to muscle up a little. Guess he's up to 65 pounds but will weigh him at the groomer tomorrow. Expect to neuter between Jan and April."

And from Ezra in Montana: "Jubal, our brindle male is now not quite 7 months. He has just the personality we wanted and we thank you for the good match. He is loving and attached to my wife and I but already showing the signs of a good watch/ guard dog. When a stranger comes he will get in between the stranger and us and bark at them vigorously. We take him out in public with no problems but If someone tries to pet him he will bark and back off but then comes up to them on his own terms. This may be too aggressive a dog for some families but for us, living in the country and having had 2 encounters with unwanted visitors over the years I think he will be just right for us. So far a great match!"

Thanks to everyone who has been sending email updates about their Bouviers! I so appreciate hearing about them! We're busy poring over the Seed Savers Catalog that arrived this week; lots to look at and dream about!

One of our favorite things about the holidays is that folks send us updates!
From Oregon comes this note:

Hello, this is the first tree for the pups. Notice the lack of presents. Rey is a collector and we were wondering how the ornaments would hold up. They are doing fine, it is the packages that thrill him. Jaz is her wonderful self, not sticking her nose where it doesn't belong. Even when he stole a great squeaky toy for the neighbor dogs, she would not be party to that kind of behavior! They are as different as night and day, yet look how similar they appear. I could have spent years trying to pick two dogs that are so close in size, color , texture, etc. It has been an interesting two years, bringing up two pups without an older, wiser dog to help me. As Rey approaches his two year mark Dec 30 and Jaz will be 3 in April, I am finding myself with some of the best Bouviers ever. Love, Janet, Dave, Jaz and Rey

A busy weekend, it began Saturday morning with the sale of our little goat herd. Between life changes and farm management changes, the decision was made to sell them and we were fortunate to have them all go to the same farm in Iowa. We'll miss their caprice. We managed to finish up some holiday shopping later in the day and finished up with lamb and barley stew. Sunday we got the snowblower going on the tractor, Jim hooked up the dog trailer and readied it for our trip to New Mexico next week. I cleaned the barn and hauled some bales of straw to the henhouse which is now deep in litter and warm for the hens. We worked and worked at clearing snow from the big hay bales and are now feeling more confident that the sheep will be able to eat without getting their heads stuck. With another big snowstorm poised to hit us tomorrow, it is a relief to have that chore done. We will need to figure out this whole hay situation better next year; going from small squares to big round bales has its challenges. Assuming the snow holds off, I will be taking Solo into town for training and Trouble to the vet for hip xrays tomorrow. This evening I was delighted to get a little note from one of the folks we placed a dog with - we are always thankful and appreciative when we see our old friends and hear how they are faring.

Our best wishes to all our Bouvier friends across the World!

May Peace be with you in 2011

News on Rustic Road #4:

We enjoyed what seemed like too short a summer this year, between gardens and goats and the little Cafe! We did make time to travel to Istanbul in the autumn, accompanied by our grandson Anthony ~ opening all our eyes to a new part of the world. The Cafe is doing remarkably well considering the economy and the shrinking business base in our little community. It is very helpful to be able to provide produce and milk-fed pork from our little farm which continues to be a source of great interest and delight to us and our neighbors.

We were saddened to lose one of our neighbors, Terry Upthall lived down the road from us and was a very interesting character, a kind of Euell Gibbons personality. He'll be greatly missed as will our other neighbor Kristi Teigen who succumbed to pancreatic cancer. Our lives are smaller because of these losses.

Even closer to our hearts, Jim's mother Nancy had a heart attack after Thanksgiving. Jim traveled to Milwaukee and spent 2 weeks with his parents. His mother was discharged from the hospital and is currently stable despite some problems with one of her feet. We hope she continues to grow stronger and will be with us for many years to come.

On a happy note, the dogs are doing well, Una is as always, full of beans, Trouble continues to work well as our chore dog and Solo came back home after a successful trial season. I continue to train and may go to France in November 2011 to participate in French Ring with him. Noche, Ruby and Birdie are also doing well with a litters planned from both Trouble and Birdie this year. Our puppies from the past couple years are doing well from all reports thus far, and our litter from Alta and Tarzan is just growing up with four of the youngsters beginning their trial careers with great results ~ Bennie is doing agility, Kaida is doing french ring and Sam and Trouble are both trialing in herding. We'll see a number of Una's pups on the trial field in 2011 with pups coming up from her last litter to Urki (Ziva and Rey) as well as from Banjo (Solo) and Ali (Breeze and Nina.)

2011 promises to be another full year; we have reservations already to travel to Alaska in September in celebration of my 60th birthday. Jim, Miles, Seth and family will be coming along so it should be a grand adventure! However, that's a long ways off - we will be home most of the year working with the natural cycle of rural farming in Wisconsin with lambing in mid-March, incubating eggs, tapping maples, starting seedlings, gardening, harvesting, haying, making firewood and shipping stock to market. Oh yes, and mowing lawn! Maybe even house painting this summer!

Our boys, Miles and Seth are doing well - Miles continues to work for the Routt County Sheriff's Department in Colorado and Seth's sauna building business continues to grow. My mother, now well into her 80's, traveled to California from her home in northern Minnesota for a visit this winter and is very active with literary societies, politics and other mentally stimulating enterprises! She's doing well and for that we are grateful.

Before we forget!! Thank you to our friend Nancy Culley for the great holiday card she sends us each year. Nancy provides secretarial services for agility trials and is an accomplished artist as well. If you'd like to contact you for custom work, let me know and I'll put you in touch with her.

Enough about us though! We'd love to hear how you and your dogs are doing!

Sunny and Jim

Thank goodness for the Sauna! We'll be firing it up tonight - the water's been frozen in the shower for 2 days now! This is one of my son Seth's barrel saunas - he was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal regarding them. We've got our eyes peeled for the article at some point in the future!

- thanks to my husband Jim for coming home early from work to help blow some snow!








After the storm - here is the henhouse; we still need to plow it out, in the meantime there is a little path I trundle through to feed the hens, the peafowl and the geese. I have moved Jim's turkeys over to the barn where they are doing fine sharing the back of the barn with the sheep.





This is the rootcellar that was built into this hill back in 1940. We have potatoes in here along with some cannas; last year I used this cellar for aging cheeses - it worked okay but it was kind of hard to manage the humidity. The little shed in the foreground is one of Jim's smokehouse projects. Everyone thinks it is an outhouse but it's not. In the summer it is covered with clematis and is quite lovely.




Here is the house - now wouldn't a soft yellow with plum trim look great?






And the barn - I still can not get the door to the milkhouse open and I'm beginning to worry since the snow is beginning to harden over and it won't get easier. This morning it was -23F; it has warmed up to the minus teens but we'll need to wait another day or so when it is due to warm up before tackling this project!

Just West of us in the Twin Cities ~ Solo's boy Cooper!!

Solo, out on Rustic Road 4!

a last update for today, around 4...it continues to snow steadily and blow.




updated at about noon..it continues to come down..and now the wind is picking up!






Blizzard conditions today - we already have around 8 or 9 inches of snow; it is wet and heavier than last week's snowfall. The plows likely won't come down the road until sometime tomorrow so it will be a bit of a challenge to feed the stock. I was prepared however and the goats are indoors with plenty of food and bedded down in preparation for the windchills that are predicted. The poultry are also indoors and dry. The dogs have just come inside and covered the kitchen floor in snowballs!

Here are a couple of pictures, one down the road towards our neighbors Melvin and Sylvia, the other down the road to the west.

This little quote came up on my facebook page this morning. I liked it!

There comes a time in life when you walk away from all the pointless drama and people who create it.

Surround yourself with people who make you laugh so hard that you forget the bad and focus on the good.

Life is too short to be...anything...but happy

As such, we're having Larry Painter out to Wisconsin for a working clinic this summer. He's a great clinician as well as a very good person to be around!

We are in the middle of a blizzard today; my 85 year old neighbor just called to offer help - there seem to be good people all around!

Noche came out today with Susan to work with Phyllis. Noche' is from Solo and Ruby's litter and is just 6 months old. She's showing natural talent and we look forward to watching her mature and progress.




It began snowing hard and blowing up a blizzard but you can't keep a good dog down!

Remember summer?

From New Mexico, the word from Nancy Culley that Riker earned an agility leg in Open Jumpers (1st place!) The picture here is from February 2010 when I met up with Terry and Nancy in Tularosa, NM at a trial. Riker is by Blitz v Bertrupaty x Zonnetje. Blitz just passed on last week at a ripe old age.

...and while we're up here in the North freezing, Vespa is living the good life down on the track in Florida :0)

Solo says that 4" of fresh snow is fine by him! It was a warm day, around 20F; I took a gift of 5 hens and 2 bales of straw to our friend Stephanie - it was a sort of 'gift pack' with one each Arucana, Brown Leghorn, Australorp, Partridge Cochin and Speckled Sussex. These hens are all laying now so it will be a fun addition to their small (1 hen, 1 rooster) flock.

Congratulations to our friend Lynn and Briarlea Ziva on her Agility debut and her first Q (Qualifying score) today!

A clear morning and 10F - we go to Phyllis' farm this morning to work sheep and I'll need to have my Carharts and muckboots on- not a pretty picture, I can assure you! Solo had a good training session yesterday; I hope to enter him in an AKC obedience trial in January in El Paso, TX so we are working on those exercises as well as his french ring work.

The garden catalogs have begun to arrive; general vegetable catalogs, tomato specific catalogs and, a first this year, a snap bean catalog. Who knew?? I have dragged out some paper to begin to design a new garden on the south side of the house, the older I become, the less I enjoy mowing grass. We have ostrich ferns working to take over the entire back yard and that may be the ultimate decision. We also plan to paint the house next summer; I've been given carte blanche to take photos of interesting color combinations on other folks' houses as I suggested that it would be fun to have a house color other than white!

I need to put the bee hive away; it was not a huge success what with a weak colony to start, and a cold and wet spring. I rationalize by thinking that at least we helped with pollination and will try again next year.