Rebecca Loses The Love of Her Life

Rebecca our 18 year old daughter lost the love of her life, well, he is not lost  -- we know where he is, he is in another woman's barn in Michigan.  We sold her first love, her horse, Fred, that was a sad day around here, we all loved Fred, but not as much as Rebecca did.  Since she is going off to school and wouldn't be here to smother him with attention, he needed to find a new home that would. He has a new home now in the arms of a woman that loves and rides Fred more than Rebecca could have hoped for.

As a Hen Gathereth Her Chicks

Maybe you've never seen a hen gather her chicks under her wings and protect them from predators and cold or hot weather. It's quite something to see the natural instincts of hens. But this isn't a common sight in our world today like it would have been for almost all recorded history. This photo is of a hen with older chicks (she's down to two in this picture) and she's roosted up on a fence outside of the dairy barn. It's totally dark and it has started to rain. So she is protecting her chicks. The white spots you see in the air are raindrops.

The Johnson's Go To Colorado

We took a week long camping trip to Colorado this Summer. We went to Westcliffe and stayed in the Alvarado Campground. There were no hot showers at the campground, but we had everything else. Including a bear that walked right into our campground on the last day. I've got pictures of that bear check it out right here.

From Colorado Camp...

We hauled our 4 Wheelers up there (Noah calls them fourlers). That was a lot of fun. We also hauled our canoe with us. I swear we looked like the Beverly Hillbillies on our trip up there we had so much stuff piled on the 16 foot trailer! But we ended up having a great time.

We took a train ride through the Royal Gorge one day. That was spectacular. We followed that up the next day by going river rafting down the Arkansas River. The older kids braved the Royal Gorge and the younger ones took a slightly lesser Big Horn Canyon trip. But it was thrilling for all concerned.



The nights were in the 50's and it was so nice. We left (and returned to) temperatures in the low 100's so we were loving the change.

Now we're back and it's nice to be home. Thank goodness for wonderful neighbors who made sure all the animals were taken care of. What a blessing!

Eric Takes A Mighty Fall

If he had gotten hurt, it wouldn't have been as funny. But since he was fine, then there's no problem putting it up here right?

The setting is the Horn Creek trail, near the top. Eric and I have been hiking for several hours in mid June, 2008. We encounter a lot of snow obscuring the trail. We tried to make the best of it, like a couple of sea otters or something.

Check it out here!

"Catastrophic Power Outage in Houston" Means SteakBurger Website Down

I noticed on Saturday that we weren't getting any SteakBurger emails and then Sunday night I got a call from my brother informing me that the website was down. I tried but could not even get to the hosting company's website. I tracked down the Admin's gmail address and sent him an email asking for a status update. I got this reply last night at 2AM.


Hello Andrew,

There was a major power outage in one of the data centers where we maintain many of our servers in this case the H1 data center in houston. Although we own our servers and have our own datacenter staff we lease access in the datacenter to supply our access poin to the internet backbones (level 3, savis etc) and to provide us with power for our server racks.

The Datacenter has N+1 redundancy and does have UPS battery backup and Backup generator capability but a completely unusual occurance happened where the main Stepdown power transformer shorted resulting in an explostion and small fire in the electrical interface room. Normally when Power goes out the network swiching swiches over to the UPS which is a short term 2 hour battery system while the backup generators go online and are cut into the master power buss.

The problem was that the explosion destroyed the Power panels where the generators connect to the main power busses. This outage effected not only Lowesthostings servers but 40 other major hosts and over 9000 servers so it was a major unexpected outage.

The good news is the new Transformer has finally been aquired and installed and the switches and routers and hvac have been restored and power is now being restored in the data center. We are told it will a systematic powerup and various switches & routers brought back online and tested before power is sequenced to our server racks so it should not be more than another 2-3 hours from now (12:10am pst) before your server comes back online.

Once power is back, your server and all data will come online as before. Anyones mail server that has attempted to send you emails during the outage window will automatically attempt redelivery so you may get a few 18 hour old emails but none will be lost.

Our main Lowesthosting.com website does have an emergency backup server in our other Datacenter but it takes 24 hours for that to propagate so our main customer portal has been down which has frustrated our staff and many cleints for our inability to post news or reply to tickets during the propagation to our emergency server.

We appologize for this window where you were unable to reach us and although we have never had a catastrophic outage in 8 years and pride ourselves on average a 99.84% cleint server uptime we will be installing a new high availability cluster on our main website so should we ever have a major outage our website and news and ticketing system would not go down for even a minute.

We realize the problem is not that the server is down so much as our main site being unreachable and many people didn't print out our phone number.

You should know that we not only backup all of your data in our data center but maintain an emergency archival copy off network so we really do maintain the integrity of your data.

Again we appologize for any inconvineience. Its been a long difficult sunday for our staff as well and we will be posting a full story and pictures on our website shortly.

Regards,

Ray Alin
Assistant Manager
Lowesthosting.com

I did verify for myself that there was such a catastrophe. Here is the AP News Story from www.allheadlinenews.com:


Texas-Based Server Provider Explosion Affects 9,000 Servers, 7,500 Customers
ShareThis

June 1, 2008 12:50 p.m. EST

Amy Beeman - AHN
Houston, TX (AHN) -- An explosion Saturday evening at a Texas-based, privately held server hosting provider has caused server outages effecting 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers.

According to The Planet's website, at about 5 p.m. Saturday electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room.

No injuries were reported and no servers were damaged or lost.

The Houston company, which provides servers for small and medium sized companies, said it has its entire support team working around the clock to get the servers back on line.

They estimate they will be up and running by Sunday afternoon.

Rebecca and Russell Run the Cattle Thru the Scales

Two or three times a year we run the cattle through the chute and weigh them and look them over carefully to see if they need any particular care. Maybe they just need to have their ear tag renumbered.

Sally Working the Cattle

Sally is one of our mini Australian Shepherds. She has a strong herding instinct and loves to get involved any time we move cattle. She's quite the fast runner too. She's a real sweetheart.

Diane's Cakes for the School Fund Raiser

This one looks like a giant SteakBurger.

This one is a perfect likeness of our milk cow, Sugar.

You Just Have to See this Snow

I thought I lost this picture, but here it is. It was taken in April, 2007. The Blue Bonnets were in full bloom, the trees had all their leaves. Then this snow storm hits and it snows all day, the day before Easter. Diane and I went out that evening to get some pictures. I was amazed at how hard it snowed that day.

Prepping for the MHS Homecoming Bonfire

The football players and cheerleaders wanted to make this year's homecoming bonfire the greatest of all time. They also did a nice service to come over our place and gather up loads of fallen limbs.

Not everyone was up to the work. Avery was suffering from a massive toothache and had to take a break.

Eric took a couple of the guys around on the Ranger, "looking for more wood". But a lot of wood got collected. Unfortunately, the bonfire was cancelled because of high winds that day. It will be rescheduled for a pep rally preceding the playoffs.

Noah Turns Five and Eric 15

This is exactly the creature Noah requested that Diane put on his birthday cake. He's thrilled!

Eric's also happy about his "football" cake; don't let that expression fool you.

Friday Night Lights

Eric (#42) is one of the players on the sidelines taking a knee while an injured player is cared for out on the field.

Rebecca and her cheerleading squad pose for a picture while there's a break in the action.

The Milford Band performs during halftime and throughout the game. A few members of the band also play football so those guys have to lose the shoulder pads during halftime and run over to the band and help with the show. Eric is the Tuba Man. If he misses a note, it's pretty obvious, since there's only one tuba in the band. A few of the cheerleaders also play an instrument in the band.

6 Man Football - Eric Plays JV

I wanted to capture this picture of Eric (#42) playing nose tackle on defense for Milford High's JV team. This game was played against Blum High School JV. They won :-(

When You Live Out in the County, This is What Can Happen to You

You probably can't tell what this picture is unless you look real closely. But a few weeks ago, I was sitting in the driver's seat of our van the Waxahachie YMCA parking lot, minding my own business. Well actually I was waiting for Diane to come out. Then I felt something kind of hit my foot by the brake pedal. I couldn't imagine what that would be. When I looked down, I was a little shocked to see this rather large toad. I'm not sure how it got there. It would certainly fit Noah's profile to have brought the toad into the car in the first place. But the old ticker did skip half a beat while I tried to process what live animal just dropped out of the steering column and onto my foot! I can only imagine if that had happened while driving at full speed on a crowded freeway!

Can You Trick or Treat in a Horse Arena?

Our indoor arena provides a great place to trunk-or-treat. Rain or shine, the show goes on. This time we had perfect weather, but as soon as I took these pictures, we turned off the lights and turned up the atmosphere.

The Blankenships had a scary trunk!

Here's Eric and Rebecca's age group posing for a picture after they participated in the costume process.

Homecoming Royalty

At Milford High School and maybe lots of places, I don't know, they have two big sets of awards to be given at homecoming, one is for "Cheerleading Sweetheart" and "Cheerleading Beau". I'm not sure what those are, but, Eric was one of the nominees for the "Beau". The other set of awards is for the more familiar Homecoming Queen and King. Rebecca was nominated both Cheerleading Sweetheart and Homecoming Queen.

Well, surprisingly enough, Eric was voted Cheerleading Beau! The surprise on his face when his name was announced told the whole story. This picture captures that look, that says, "What? Me?" Whisper Thomas was given the Cheerleading Sweetheart award. And she's a great cheeleader with lots of school spirit and enthusiasm. Good for her!

Rebecca was nominated as Homecoming Queen and was escorted by Ruben Garza. She told me that Dad's weren't invited to escort their daughters for this event. I felt like it should be a Dad's privilege, but she assured me that it wasn't her choice and if she did have the choice, she would have asked me first. Oh well, I'll take her word on that!

And believe it or not, she won! And Derek Williamson was crowned the Homecoming King! How cool is that?

Milford Dominates Morgan High School in Cruising to Homecoming Victory 48-0

Here's a cool banner created by the Milford Cheerleader squad. This was a nice production with lots of music playing and the crowd making some good noise.

The team blasted through the banner and then throttled Morgan High School's varsity team. Earlier in the day at the pep rally, the coach told the fans that Milford's team is ranked second in the state in Division 1 (6 man) and it's not hard to imagine it's true. Our team is really fast has at least 3 quarterbacks that can really run and throw the football -- a real embarrassment of riches compared to most teams.

Milford Homecoming Parade

This was one of the entries in the parade this year. Sky and Sapphire and yours truly at the helm. This year we carried school dignitaries, including the Principal, Mrs. Byrne. What an honor!

Hay Maze is Complete!

You'll have to click on this picture to see it better, but here is a part of our hay maze or Haytrix. I'm standing on the roof of the arena to take this picture and have positioned Robbie, Peter and Noah inside the maze so you get a sense of the size of it. If you could see it from their perspective, you'd realize you couldn't see over the tops of the bales, since they're 5ft tall (the bales). So it's great fun for all kids. We tell them over and over not to get on them and mess around, but sometimes the warnings go unheeded ...

The Mud People

I reported in earlier posts about how much rain we had this summer. Well, I knew I had this picture somewhere on my computer but couldn't find it til now. This is Justin Parr, Kirby Buchanan, Eric and Rebecca after going for a somewhat wet and muddy four-wheeler ride this past summer. What a mess!

Road Work is a Constant

Pot holes just seem to show up in certain spots constantly. We fill them up and after a while there they are again! It's a good job for Russell to work on.

Bountiful Hay Harvest

We made about 600 round bales this year. That's a lot of hay -- maybe 600,000 to 900,000lbs of hay (or 300 to 450 tons). Consider that probably our previous biggest harvest was about 200 round bales and you'll see what I mean. And this is really good stuff, baled from a non-fertilized, non-pesticized mixture of bermuda and Johnson Grass. The cows are going to love this. Now what do we do with all this hay.

You have to put it somewhere where the animals can't just get to it whenever they want, or it will become a giant mess. We stash it in lots of places around the ranch, but right now, with the Halloween party coming up this Saturday, we ought to make a maze for the kids. How about it?

Time to Start the Hay Maze or Hayze or Haytrix

We'll take about 150 rolls and make a hay maze for the kids to play in. We've done this several times and the kids really love it and it's a big hit at the Halloween party. I came up with some names for the hay maze -- how about "hayze"? Ok, what about "haytrix"? That's all I could come up for names. A Hayze or Haytrix is time consuming to design and put together, but it's worth it. Even in the early stages it's fun. Here's Noah hamming it up.

Benjamin and Zachary are over for a visit. Looks like Russell is about to pounce.

Red even jumped up on top of the bales. He didn't stay up there for long. The bales are about 5ft tall by 5ft wide.

Making Hay in the Sunshine

This has been an extroadinary year for grass growing. We've been making hay as much as the weather will permit. And when it is dry for a few days, we get busy. This is my brother Steve coming through with the wheel rake and making windrows. You cut it one day and let it dry for a day or two. Then you rake it into windrows in preparation for baling.

This particular hay pasture is across this creek. So I wanted you to see the baler being towed through the creek.

Now the baler kicks into gear. It's really an amazing piece of machinery. It sucks up all the grass and starts a roll spinning and keeps adding hay to it until it's a giant cylinder weighing about 1200 to 1500 lbs. When it's fully formed, the alarm sounds and then you stop to let it wrap up with twine. Then you're ready to eject the roll and start again.

Here comes the finished product out the back of the baler. It's a marvel of engineering this baler.

Naval Air Museum Pensacola

We took a quick trip down to Pensacola, FL this past summer to pick up a van. People told us we needed to see the Naval Air Museum down there. We are glad we listened.

They have lots (and lots) of incredible airplane and helicopter exhibits there. The kids can climb inside and imagine themselves as fighter pilots.

Outside the museum was an actual aircraft just recently mothballed. Wow!

And here's an current Blue Angels aircraft on display. We didn't have nearly enough time at this museum.