Thank you

Thank you so much to everyone for all of the loving and helpful comments. It means very, very much to me, well to all of us really.

Today the babies are doing good. Justin buried Gretta out by the pond, and he noticed that she seemed like she had some kind of infection, and that's probably what caused her to die. So he was talking to his mom, and when their goats have done that in the past, they give the babies each a couple drops of tea tree oil, and that helps them get over any of that that they might have gotten if Gretta was infected. I think she probably just had ketosis - she had 4 live births (mom thinks maybe a 5th was stuck or dead inside), and sometimes when they have that large of a brood it is too much stress on the body, and they build up toxins and even if you catch it in time, which is very rare, they usually die, because their bodies are basically poisioning themselves. Anyway, whatever it was, at least the babies are doing good so far. Thank you Carol for letting me know about the colostrum, I was really worried about that, and how I was going to dig up the energy to feed them every 2 hours for 2 weeks. That was pretty daunting.

Anyway, babies are good, they're inside enjoying the warmth. Mya is pretty sure she needs to love them and lick them clean, so I've been trying to slowly teach her how to love them without getting too excited and scaring them. She's a good dog. I think she would snuggle them all and love them if we had a way to do that. 2 just stares and sniffs them, but Mya is really worried about them.

This morning was pretty much the perfect ending for the week I've had. I woke up after sleeping from 3am - 4am, and I was just sick, I'd been so sick after Gretta passed, and the stress of everything else that I started throwing up, and pretty quick I was throwing up red, so after trying to lay down and calm down I decided I better go to the doctor, and since it was Saturday I had to go to the ER (that'll be a nice couple thousand dollar bill) and after a bunch of blood tests the Dr. said everything looked really good except I have an ulcer, and the throwing up had just scratched my esophogus, and that was the blood I was seeing. He said not to worry about the blood, and he gave me 2 acid reducers, and 2 anti-nausea pills, and told me to eat a bunch of small bland meals, so my stomach will stop attacking itself. I really liked the Doctor. He's an ear, nose and throat specialist, and I'd been wanting to see him anyway, for myself and Justin - me for my tonsils and me ears, and Justin for his nose (its been broken at last count 26+ times poor guy!). So it was nice to meet him and know that he's a good doctor. So someday when we have a little disposable income we'll both go in and he'll get his nose cartilage re-attached, and I'll get my tonsils out.

Sorry for all the bad news, I hate to post bad stuff, but I guess the bad stuff is important too. Thank you again for all of your kindness and love and prayers and support - its much appreciated and helps a great deal. Love Alicia

Oh, little good news, the local radio shack/computer store was having a Mother's Day Sale, and we got the laptop we've been needing so that I can do the accounting we need for a really good deal. So we have a nice, BIG, hp laptop. Justin got the one with the 17 inch screen, almost full size keyboard, and it has the 10-key keyboard for numbers, so that will be really helpful. So at least we had something good. :)

My goat

My momma goat died tonight, at about 1 am. We hope we can save the babies, if we can find some colostrum milk, and formula for them in the morning. I am so completely heartbroken.

So stinking cute!!

This is Edie closest to the camera, she was trying to head butt me to give her some milk. She's the runt.

This is Edie after Justin's mom taught her to nurse. That's Susan behind her.

Edie is closest to me again. Susan is the black and white. Mike is the red one, and Bree is the blondish one close to Gretta. Sorry about the placenta in the picture.

Oh my gosh they're so cute! And we have four of them! Four desperate housegoats! We were so blessed to get 3 girls and one boy, so now we'll have at least 5 nanny goats we can breed and have milk from, so we'll be able to have milk year round if we schedule it right. So cute, and so fun. I was going to work at the boat launch, and as I walked around the house to get in the car, I heard a really high pitched goat whinny, and I thought, well that's odd, I wonder what's wrong with the goats. And I went in and here's all these little babies! The one was outside, and really cold, so I picked her up and started rubbing her and snuggling her. So then she warmed right up and started walking around. Mom came downstairs with the camera, and helped snuggle the cold one, and Justin's mom came right over to the house from the beach, and checked them all over, and said they looked great and Gretta's a good mommy goat. Gretta's so tired though, we finally got her to lie down this evening after we milked her a little and gave the runt some milk. Edie is the runt, she was the one laying outside, and she's pretty cute with a strawberry blond body, and yellow blond face. Then there is Bree, she looks just like Edie, except she's not got the yellow blond face. Then there is Susan, and she's the black and white goat. The boy is named Mike. He's a beautiful red color, with black and white accents. Really attractive. So this is our herd! They're so cute. We've got about 3 weeks left before Gabby has her babies, but Gretta was a week early, so we'll see what happens.

Yes indeed

Yes indeed we are alive, although you couldn't tell by our blog. We've been so swamped working on getting our business going. Justin's family got here the day after Easter, and we've been running non stop building bunk/office buildings, trying to get money organized (and located), finding machines, paying for machines, outfitting machines, clearing rocks off the beach, getting set up and all that. We opened on Friday May 1st. We launched 3 boats the first day. The second day we launched 13, third we launched 11. Today we didn't have any, there was a pretty good wind storm, so no one wanted to go out. That was okay though it was nice to have a day "off" even if it wasn't really a just do anything day. We did get a lot done, and it was nice to be able to have some say in what I was doing, instead of running headless chicken trying to keep up with everything all at once.

We've been having some fun getting everything going, even if its been a lot of work. It will be nice next year when we dont' have to do all this preliminary stuff, and when we'll have more time to be ready, instead of having 3 weeks to do 2 months worth of work. But we're having a good time. I've had some trouble because I don't do well on small amounts of sleep. When I don't sleep as much as I need to, or I get nervous in my sleep, then when I wake up I throw up, off and on for hours. Its no fun. So I've been trying to work through that, and not let that get me down. I think I'm going to make some ginger snap cookies, and put them in little bags in the freezer, they really seem to calm my stomach. The spices keep everything working better. But that's a project for another day.

Justin, me, Justin's sister Talatha and her husband (Jerid) and kids (Cordell, Mariah and Wade) went to the movies tonight since we had the night off. They were showing the new Dreamworks cartoon "Monsters vs. Aliens". It wasn't as good as I thought it would be, but it was okay, and it was nice to be out and away from everything for a while.

We had the most BEAUTIFUL weather this weekend, I got sunburned, and even started to tan. The water was flat calm, and the mountains were out. We saw a sea lion eating fish in the water right out in front of our beach. There were tons of migrating sea birds, and geese, ducks, etc. Its a really really beautiful place to be 'living" for the summer.

Our goats are about ready to give birth. Gretta has about 10 days or so left. She's so big and fat we feel bad for her, she's not really loving life right now. We're pretty sure she'll have at least 3 hopefully 4. Then Gabby is due at the end of the month, she might have 2, that would be good for her first time, but she might just be having 1. We'll just have to wait and see. They're pretty funny though. Our chickens are being WAY lazy. Out of 35 chickens, we're getting about 10 eggs a day. I'm about ready to kill them all. I keep telling them that either they lay eggs and make food, or we butcher them and THEY are the food. But they just don't get it. Hopefully they will pick up soon. If not we'll be out of the egg business soon. Can't afford to keep feeding them just for nothing.

I guess that's about all the update we have. We're just running around crazy, but we're hopefully getting set up so that we can get out of debt, that's our major goal. here's hoping (and praying really hard) it works! Love you all.

Justin

I got up the other morning and here was Justin asleep on the floor, a dog on each side for company. If anyone sits or lays on the floor they are right there to be with you. They love when we sit down there with them. Funny dogs.

Rolling up the tape measure after measuring out our beach space for the boat launch.

I got some good pictures of Justin this week, and thought I'd share them. Plus we got some good pictures of this cool ice thing that happens to Justin's truck. We've had it happen before, but we never have the camera with us. But lately we've been taking the camera with us all the time because of the volcano and wanting to take pictures of it. So we took some pictures of the ice thing. The ice builds up on days that its warm enough for water to thaw, but cold enough in the wind that it freezes again. We went to Soldotna and his truck ended up covered in these little ice things. They cover the whole truck, and they point towards the front of the truck, and they get an inch long at least usually. They're frozen hard in big sheets. Its pretty neat. the other thing, is an ice wheel thing that develops on the center spindle of the wheel. And makes a spinning ice amoeba thing. Very cool.

Random volcano pictures

The picture above is Augustine volcano, taken from the beach in Anchor Point.

Wanted to share some pictures that I've been taking over the last week or so. I've gotten some cool ones! Mostly the volcano just chugging and steaming away.

Redoubt Rocket

Hey you can see Justin walking in this picture on the right there.

You can really see the contrast between where the sky is already light (or what the sky should have looked like) and the ash cloud.

Here's the view to our right, on the other side of the ash cloud from the picture I took above. You can totally see that the sun was up, and how light it was before the ash.

Straight at the ash cloud.

More ash cloud

This is as the ash was falling, taken out mom and dad's bedroom window. You can see the contrast of lights, and the dimness of the ash falling, and locking out the light.

Those upper pics are all of the ash falling out mom and dad's window.

This one is out the kitchen window at the sun. You can see the computer screen reflected on the kitchen window.

More out the kitchen window.

This picture above is out my kitchen window downstairs. It was SO bizarre, I looked out the window and it looked like a sepia toned world. The whole world was brown, just like an old fashioned sepia tone photograph.

You can see the white of the window frame, and the contrast of the brown outdoors. That's really what color it was outside.

I think you can see in this picture how dirty the snow is outside the window. It just looks dingy - that's the ash.

Out the front door downstairs towards the end of the ashfall.

Poor car! Bill's car has just gotten hammered by ash the last couple weeks.

Its hard to photograph the ash, and make it look like its not just dirt or dust. So I took pictures of things that you can compare it with. The above picture is our neighbors house - see how white the roof is? Their roof is brown in "real" life, like their house.

Some ash holes in the driveway

The neighbors house above has another "white" roof. Their "real" roof is dark purple.

Just the driveway.

This above picture is ash accumulated in some footsteps up at the tubing hill.

Dad and I walked out today and took pictures of the mountain puffing away. Today the steam cloud is going towards Kenai/Soldotna. Its just steam, and a little gas, maybe a tiny bit of ash today.

Its pretty cool! Usually this mountain is snowy white, year round. But not now!

I have to say HA! I knew it was going to erupt. For a day or two the volcano seismometers had these little earthquakes, 3-4 per minute which they said was it building a new dome. Just rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat for a couple of days. then they stopped friday night, and I said the dome is done its going to blow up big really soon. And mom said, yeah maybe. But I said, it will. Mark my words it will. The Volcano observatory lowered the code to orange from red, friday night, but I said its not done, and HA it wasn't. Ok, I feel better now. Had to do an I-told-you-so, even though there really was no one to say I told you so too. hehe.

This has been so fun! I always hoped that at least one of the volcanos across the inlet from us would erupt while we were living here. I hoped it would be Illiamna which is directly across from us, but its been Redoubt instead, which is still pretty cool. I think yesterdays explosion/eruption thing was the coolest. About 6:15 or 6:30 the dogs started barking, which they don't usually do in the early morning. They are usually pretty soundly asleep by then. But they kept barking and running up and down the stairs. I could hear this rumbling sound, that sounded like someone walking on fresh snow, or on the stairs, and I thought well I better get up and see what it is. So i open the curtain in our bedroom, and there's nothing there, and its pretty light out because the sun is getting ready to come up. And I look but there isn't any one out there, but I know I heard something, so worrying that there was still someone out there, I opened the window to hear better, and I hear this long rumble rumble rumble. As I'm starting to wake up a little more I realize that I'm looking at a long black cloud coming over the house, directly over the house, coming from Redoubt and maybe there's something fishy going on.

At first I thought it was the volcano erupting, but then I realize that I'm hearing thunder coming out of the ash cloud. So I wake Justin up, and go start the computer to see what the volcano observatory says is going on, and then I go upstairs to see Dad who got up because of the dogs, and we look out and we can hear more thunder, so I went and woke mom up. She was funny, she said " is it worth getting up for?" and I said well yeah I think so, but its up to you. Eventually everyone got up, and it was SO COOL! Dad went out and got the paper. We asked him if he saw the lightning, because we'd seen some right over the neighbors house. He said he had, he said the whole thing was "eery, eery as hell". I think the lightning lasted for about 15 minutes, and then as soon as it stopped Justin and I went out to move his truck under cover. We wore our cowboy hats to keep the ash out of our hair and stuff, and we could hear it hitting the felt. It was much bigger pieces than when it happened last week. So about, I'd say 15 minutes after we get the truck moved and everything, the ash starts to fall, and it fell in sheets, like a blizzard of snow, only it was just ash. It was really heavy, we could hardly see the road, and all the big trucks going by slowed way way down as they went past the house. It also got completely dark here in the house, and it had been daylight, the sun was up, it was dark as could be. I hope you can see in the pictures what it looked like.

After general conference, Justin and I went north to Kenai/Soldotna to do a little grocery shopping, and to go to Home Depot to do a little scouting for our office/kitchen/bed buildings for the boat launch business. The ash stopped about 5 miles north of the house, and it was clear all the way up. After we went up there, we came home, and went south to check out the tubing hill, and the ash was pretty thick between here and town. It was very interesting. It was kind of hard on the lungs after a while, so I wore my mask on the way home. I kind of felt silly, but it stopped the burning so whatever works.