Yesterday afternoon we set out to take the pups for a much needed run up in the foothills. It’s been ages since we did some dry land mushing and it was pretty apparent right away that they had all but forgotten how to mush after spending the summer lounging by the pool, napping in the shade and cooling off in their misters.

Lucky for us (and them) we are just recreational mushers and aren’t looking to win any races anytime soon! They spent more time getting tangled up in their lines and finding mud holes on the side of the road to wallow in than they did actually running, which was fine.

With it being a holiday weekend there were too many people around anyway so we decided to pull the plug early and headed back home so they could go back to lounging by the pool. 😄

We had a lot of work to do around our little homestead still, like lots of corn stalks that needed bundling for drying so I can use them to decorate with…

I harvested the last of our tomatoes, a few cucumbers and I pulled some more of the carrots to use in my roasted chicken dinner tonight (yumm!)…

We had lots of corn left to shuck, so we spent the evening doing that and shared a few of the smaller ones with the pups (they love corn on the cob as much as we do!) and again with the ducks and chickens…

My little rooster hasn’t made a peep again after waking us up yesterday before sunrise, but I’m betting he’s going to be making it a regular habit soon. I really need to name him, he is just so dang cute!

As I was cleaning up around the flowerbeds today I noticed the black eyed susans I planted at the beginning of summer are FINALLY starting to bloom.

It took them forever it seems!

Contrast that to my morning glory girl who finally filled out up top just as the bottom leaves are starting to die off en masse so that made me a bit sad. Next year I will get an earlier start on her and hopefully it will turn out even better.

Same with the flowerbeds next to the duck pen. I’m hoping to keep expanding it until it goes all the way around the back side.

Speaking of expanding, we are really loving the new expandable hoses we bought to replace our old, rubber ones. They don’t get all tangled up or kink and they have valves at each end so you can turn them on and off which really comes in handy! They were well worth the investment (we bought six of them).

I hate buying hoses because they are expensive and they usually disappoint me within a short time, but these ones are great. They did scare the ducks at first because they look a bit like a snake, especially when you first turn the water on and they wiggle around a bit.

Honestly they scared me more than once when I saw them wriggling around out of the corner of my eye. 😅