Trip to the East Coast

Last Monday, we came home from a week long vacation in the east coast. We flew into Boston, drove up to New Hampshire and spent the week there. We drove to Vermont a couple times as well.

The first day, we spent the whole day on the plane. Or, most of it.

The second day, we drove up to New Hampshire. It was about a two hour car drive. When we got there, we got a tour of the barn that was a two minutes walk away from our friends house (where we were staying). That night, we all helped make dumplings for dinner.

The third day, I went with one of our friends to the barn for a day. I wasn't able to ride that day, but I did get to help out, take pictures, and watch the other riders do cross country jumps.

 

On horse back, cross country is a long course of jumps which might include logs, ditches, large obstacles to jump over, and water, which your horse has to wade through.

We swam in the pool later that night, and after dinner played games outside.

On the fourth day, I got to ride. I was the only western rider out of the group of girls in the riding camp, the rest rode english.

Here is a picture showing a western saddle and an english saddle. Sorry the english saddle in the picture doesn't have any stirrups!

Usually, only English riders jump, because their saddles are better designed for jumping. I did a few low western jumps on a horse named Jaws. 

That afternoon, we swam in a pond.

On the fifth day I tried out riding English and did a couple more jumps. The stirrups on an English saddle (where you put your feet) were a lot thinner than on a western saddle, and my feet kept sliding out of them. Also, the English saddle doesn't have a horn, so it was weird at first, not having anything to hold onto while I was mounting.

On the sixth day, we watched one of our friends and several of the horse campers do a horse show. We saw them do cross country and jumping. Afterwards, we went mini golfing and swimming at another pond, with several small water falls.

On the seventh day, we had a lazier day of watching Olympics (go America) and filming a video we have wanted to make for a while. 

On the last day, we did a quick trail ride. I got to ride Jaws one last time. He had been a very good boy all week.

   

He's the tallest horse I've ridden. 17 hands!

On our way to the airport, we stocked up on these delicious maple candies you can only buy in New Hampshire. 

Yum!

Oh Deer

There are a lot of deer living at the horse stables this year. There are at least 3 bucks (maybe 6 depending on if the group of 3 bucks I've seen twice are the same or not). There is a doe with two fawns, I've seen a doe with one fawn (or maybe thats the same deer with only one fawn with her), and one doe without any fawns.

I mostly see the deer on trail rides. Sedona is usually fine with me taking pictures of the deer, unless they jump out at us, then she freaks out.

This was the doe without any fawns. She let us get pretty close to her before running away.

The same doe, posing for the camera.

Unfortunately, I didn't get any good pictures of the mother of two fawns, or the doe with one fawn (as she jumped out and totally spooked Sedona).

201

Today was Buddy photo shoot day. Guess how many pictures I took of him on my phone. If you guessed 201, you are correct. I just threw the kitty toy and left the picture button pressed down. Most of the pictures were blurry, so I only actually kept 22. I didn't get any good ones of him chasing the toy. But with 201 pictures, your gonna get some accidental ones that turn out to be funny. 

Buddy, using his magic powers to make the ball levitate.

This one is funny in a creepy way.

He looks like he's in the middle of talking.

Either looks like he's yawning or screaming at someone/thing.

This one isn't funny, just kind of cute.

Animal Update!

Here's yet another summer animal update (if you remember, I did a few of those last summer).

Starting with Buddy. He was sick last week, but now he's fine. It took me a long time to get this picture of him because he kept moving or blinking right before I took the photo. I think my camera was blocking his view of Coale, who was watching behind me. He kept moving his head so he could glare at Coale, but he eventually got annoyed with me for blocking his view, so he just gave grumpy looks to the camera. So yeah, Buddy's good.

The brothers. They look identical in this picture. Well, not quite. Coale got whatever kitty flu bug Buddy had last week on Thursday. Coale recovered in a day and Nono hasn't shown any signs of it himself, so hopefully we won't have any more sick kitties for a while.

The horses are all okay. Last Wednesday, there was a fire at the stables, but no one (horses

or people) were hurt. But 4 acres were burned. Kona was very upset during the fire because it was so close to her pasture. The picture above is pretty recent. It was taken on Monday, or yesterday.  We round pinned Sedona and Kona at the same time. The Sedona was trying to bite Kona for most of it though. Wings moved away in January, and I still need to arrange a day to go visit her.

I haven't seen Teddy for a while now. I know Teddy has a new home with a student from his class (he was a class pet).  It was nice to have been able to pet-sit a class pet who could (and was willing enough too) play with our cats. Hey mom, can we get a hamster?

Trips this year

Since I didn't blog from January on, there are a lot of things we did that I didn't get to mention.

Starting in February. We went hiking. I took a ton of pictures. Unfortunately, most of them either weren't very good, or were of Kira posing randomly. Here is one I got that I do like

 I call it "Up". (Sorry, that's an inside joke that only Kira will get)

 We went skiing in Colorado over our winter break. I didn't get many pictures (I didn't really want to drop my phone in the snow or take off my glove in the freezing temperature to unlock my phone) but I did get this one of the scenery on our way up the mountain.

Colorado is really pretty. 

Only about a week or two after Colorado, my grade went to Yosemite. It was a long bus ride there and a longer bus ride back, but it was worth it. Yosemite was beautiful. We went on long hikes every day (we went from Sunday to Friday), and on Thursday, we went on a challenge hike. On Wednesday, we went cross country skiing. (Warning: Here come a lot of pictures)

This was a picture from one of our first hikes. I think it was on Tuesday. The water fall was called Bridle falls (or maybe it was Brindle fall, one of those). Unfortunately, you can see my thumb in this picture. I took a lot of pictures with my thumb in them with this camera. 

Anyway, on Monday, we went into the spider caves. It sounds like a cave crawling from floor to ceiling with spiders (or at least that's what I expected) but it is not. It is a small cave that you have to crawl through in pitch blackness. We had the person in front of us guide us, and we had to guide the person behind us. I don't know why it's called the spider caves. Maybe because you have to crawl like a spider.

  

This was a picture from our skiing day. My hiking group loved to have snowball fights. We picked up old, melting snow up as we hiked. So it was no surprise that we had a huge snowball fight during lunch.

This was just a tiny waterfall we passed sometime on one of our hikes. I think it was the Challenge hike.

I think I took this picture on the bus rid back from the skiing place. 

Towards the end of our Challenge hike, we got so high up, there was fresh(ish) snow. 

Yosemite falls! I don't know how to turn this picture, Sorry it's sideways!

Random pretty picture of Half Dome. I think this picture is my favorite that I took in all of Yosemite (which is why it is so big). I don't know where I was when I took it though.

In April, we went to DisneyLand! My favorite ride was Tower of Terror, but I also liked California Screaming. Tia likes roller coasters (like me). Kira doesn't, but she enjoyed the character themed slow rides. I also liked the Ariel theme ride, Indiana Jones, Haunted Mansion, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

I went back to Disneyland in May for a Band trip. Our school's band and orchestra went to Disneyland for 2 days to play in a workshop. We got to learn easy music and record it to the Disney movie it came from. We played the background music at the end of the Lion King, from Atlantas, the song "When you wish upon a star", and background music from Cars 2.

We got Mickey Mouse ears from the Band trip!

In June, Tia and 5 other of my friends went to Girl Scout camp together. We did a high ropes camp, so we did high ropes every day. On the first day, we did a tour of the camp. On the second day, we hiked to Inspiration point (a very pretty view) and played some games. Next, we had Challenge course, where we balanced ourselves on a wobbling platform, swung on a rope and landed on a block, and did a low tightrope walk (with ropes to hold onto). After lunch, we did high ropes. I did another tightrope (with ropes to hold onto). The next day, we did Double Trouble on the ropes course. In that element, you tightrope across (holding onto one very wobbly rope the whole way), and switch ropes with your partner halfway across. Tia and I were partners. However out of all the elements, my favorite was the Leap of Faith. You jump off a tall tree (attached to a rope of course) and trust your group to lower you to safety.

I don't have any pictures yet from this year (they need to be developed), but this is the picture of our tent from last year.

Oh yeah, we had to set up tents this year and ours didn't have any poles!

The weekend we got back from camp, we went to Seattle Washington celebrate our Grandma's Birthday! We came on Saturday and went out to dinner with our Grandparents. The party was on Sunday, and Grandma got an iPhone. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from our trip except one of Tia and our Uncle playing Ping Pong in the backyard. 

Sorry that whole Blog post was ridiculously long! Next year, I'll try to blog as we do trips and Vacations so I don't pile them into one post.

An unlikely cat treat

Sorry this picture of the kitty boys is so blurry. It's of them begging for a treat. Coale (back left) is a proud carnivore. If you show him a vegetable or fruit to sniff, it will offend him. The only fruit he will eat is pumpkin.

 It turns out, a little canned pumpkin is fine for cats. Even a little good for them. Too much can cause diarrhea though.

Even though our cat's have been eating pumpkin for a long time now (Every time we make something with pumpkin in it, the kitties get a little bit of pumpkin), it still surprises me that our might hunter Coale likes a plant food.

Vegan Mini and Mickey Pancakes

Last Sunday, Kira and I made pancakes with a frozen strawberry banana spread kind of thing for breakfast. I was going to blog sooner, but with all the craziness with Buddy, I didn't.

Vegan Pancakes and Frozen Banana Strawberry spread:

Ingredients:

Dry:

1 cup of dairy free milk

2 tablespoons of olive oil

2 tablespoons of maple syrup or sugar

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Wet:

1 cup of Whole Wheat Flour

1 tablespoon of baking powder

1/4 of a  teaspoon of salt

Instructions:

1. In one mixing bowl, mix the dry ingredients, in a separate bowl, mix the wet.

2. Pour the wet into the dry and stir. The original recipe says to wait five minutes before putting the pancakes on the pan, but we didn't do that and our's turned out very fluffy anyway.

3. Let the pan heat up. We used a low medium heat on our stove. Make sure the pan is hot enough to sizzle a drop of water before adding the pancake batter.

4. You can use as much batter as you want per pancake, but Kira wanted mini pancakes, so we used a 1/8 of a cup measure of mix per pancake. Cook the pancake until golden brown on each side.

5. Eat the pancakes.

We made mini pancakes. We made Mickey ones too! Pancake art.

And for the Strawberry Banana spread...

Take about 10 frozen strawberries

1 1/2 frozen bananas

Blend in blender or food processor.

If you want more of less of one frozen fruit, you can adjust the recipe. It's not very exact as you can tell.

Blend in the food processor for a long time. I almost gave up, and my mom had to help.