Pictures from the old computer ...

I was looking back through some of the photos that were stored on the hard drive of my computer that crashed 6 months back.  I thought all those pictures taken over the previous two years were gone forever, so I'm incredibly thrilled to be able to look at them again. 

These photos were taken last year around Christmas during an actual, honest-to-God snow storm in south Louisiana -- the only one I've seen since I got here in 1974. 

The farm in the photos is the one where we are boarding our horses until we can manage to get our own barn finished, our property graded so it will drain (no simple thing in flat, flat, FLAT south Louisiana), and our horse fencing put up.    Al's place is beautiful -- full of live oaks and wonderfully maintained.  Al and Ellen are retired and use that giant red barn to board horses and bring in extra cash.  When I got my very first horse back in 2006, a rescued Tennessee Walking Horse, I brought it directly there and Al was a huge help to me as a complete horse "newbie." 

This photo of Ladybug and me was taken just two days after the snow pictures!  In fact, the area where I'm riding is exactly the same one in the photo to the right of it.  I'm riding down the middle of that double line of trees in the snow picture. 
During the snow storm, the temperature was just below freezing.  Two days later it was back up in the high-80's!    You can tell it's December because I'm wearing my Christmas-wreath shirt.  But otherwise, it could have been taken on a lovely summer day.  That's the other great thing about south Louisiana -- there are so many Live Oak trees, Ligustrums, Cherry Laurels, Russian Olives, and other trees and shrubs that don't lose their leaves in the winter that the place is a lovely green all year round.

South Louisiana is very special.

This is a picture of Gracie, our boxer, when she first wandered up to our place years ago.  (Yes, I'm still looking through all those old pictures.)  You can see how thin and suspicious she was at the time.  It took days to even get her to come close enough to the house to eat food we left out for her.  She wouldn't let anyone approach her.  Even using my zoom lens from some distance away, she's obviously getting ready to bolt in this picture. 
She's come  a long way since then -- as you can see from her chubby, cheery self ensconsed on our bed!  She's a bit damp around her neck and head in this picture from having been licked and gnawed on by Bruce Lee, our Rottweiler.  They were great pals and really loved roughhousing together.  Gracie and I both miss Bruce a lot.

    In memory of Bruce Lee.

Here are Niki and Rocky in their escape-proof dog yard.  Mark attached a 2-foot strip of chain link fencing to the bottom of the 6-foot high fence.  The extra wire drapes out into the yard and is held down in place by those 18" concrete pavers.  Eventually the grass grows up through the chain link and you can't even tell it's there.  But it makes it impossible for a dog to dig its way out since none of them (so far) have been smart enough to know that to escape they would have to begin digging  two feet back from the fence!    Actually, all of that is completely unnecessary for these two.  But Pete, a Catahoula we had before Rocky, used to be able to escape from darned near anything!  We should have named him Houdini -- except that his escapes were hardly as pristine as a magician's!  This was the fencing system Mark came up with to confine Pete.  That 6-foot chain link kind of made the place resemble a prison yard, but it DID keep Pete home.  (Come to think of it, when Pete was there, we had those additional arms along the top that leaned in and kept him from climbing over, as well.)

Here's a picture of old Pete, looking innocent as a lamb as usual.

But Ask Mark about that!  That dog cost us a small fortune in repairs.  Check out the picture below.  We left Pete inside that day and apparently he decided that he would prefer to be out instead.  Can you believe the destruction???

For a while when Mark was at work offshore I used to take Pete to "doggie day-care" when I went to work so he wouldn't be able to destroy things at home or escape from the yard.  But he managed not only to chew his way out of his chain-link run at the day-care center, he also chewed through another dog's run and let it out, as well!  He was banished from day-care after that, needless to say.  That's when Mark devised that "escape-proof" fencing system to keep him in.  He still managed to destroy a couple of back doors trying to get back IN the house (he always wanted to be on the "other" side of the door, no matter which way that was), but he was never able to escape from the yard after that.