sat, 23-feb-2008, 15:46

Tired Nika

good doggie

Andrea is out racing in North Pole and had plenty of handlers, so I decided to stay home. Instead of taking Nika for a regular walk, I waxed my skis and tried skijoring. Andrea taught her to do it almost ten years ago, but Nika hasn’t done it since, and she wasn’t very good at it back then anyway. Today I took her down to the Creek, put on my skis and hooked her up. She knew right away what was going on and she ran straight ahead and pulled like a champion dog. I have a two mile trail that starts on the Creek and then crosses up to the mushing trail in the forest for the return trip home, and Nika was hooked up for about two-thirds of it. On the mushing trail, she was pulling me fast enough that the wind was whistling in my hair and I was worried about what would happen if I fell down (I haven’t been skiing in ten years either…). Luckily, I managed to keep my balance, and except for dipping for poops, she kept up the pace the whole way.

I’m very proud of her. She did a very good job, and both of us had a good time.

tags: creek  Nika  skijor  trail 
fri, 23-nov-2007, 12:41

Dogs running on the creek

dogs running on the creek

Buddy got some of his stitches out earlier in the week and was given permission by the vet to go for his first run of the year on Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, it was 34 degrees above normal yesterday and above freezing so we decided to take him out to the Creek instead. Piper and Nika have been going with me on most of my trail walks, but this was Buddy’s first experience off the leash. He was nervous at first, and kept running back to the dog yard, but eventually settled into it and had a great time warping around the Creek with the other dogs.

Nika was going crazy; click on the image below to see a close up of her craziness. Piper looks a little freaked out.

Nika, Andrea and Piper on the Creek

nika, andrea and piper

sat, 10-nov-2007, 14:55

Bridge and house from the creek

bridge and house from the creek

I took Nika out on the Creek today to see how far we could get on the ice. All of the open water on our property had frozen more than a week ago and we’d noticed bicycle tracks and footprints in the snow, so I figured it was probably safe to walk on. Plus I wanted to see where the bicyclist was coming from. The photo on the right shows our bridge and the house from down on the Creek, and the photo at the bottom of the post is a Google Earth view of the GPS track we walked. The red dot is our house, and the blue dot is where we got off the Creek.

I would have kept going on the frozen Creek, but there was a small dam at that point and I could hear running water just below the surface. Just past the dam was a hole in the ice with water running underneath and I didn’t want to take a chance of falling in or having Nika break through the ice. It turns out that were we went back up onto land is a section of trail between two roads that were originally supposed to intersect. At least that’s how it looks on the map.

The bicyclist is using this trail, the Creek, and our road to travel between the two roads that don’t intersect, which is pretty clever and is probably several miles shorter than where they’d have to go to get around the break.

Garmin hasn’t come up with the software for my GPS for Linux or OS X, but gpsbabel lets me download the data from the GPS and will also convert it into a KML file I can view in Google Earth. It works really well, except that in our area Google Earth isn’t perfectly geolocated, so the GPS track isn’t lined up with the satellite topography shown. The commands are:

$ gpsbabel -t -w -i garmin -f usb: \
    -o garmin_txt,date="YYYY-MM-DD",datum="WGS84",dist=s,prec=6,time="HH:mm:ss" \
    -F out.txt
$ gpsbabel -t -w \
    -i garmin_txt,date="YYYY-MM-DD",datum="WGS84",dist=s,prec=6,time="HH:mm:ss" \
    -f out.txt -o kml -F out.kml

You could take the GPS data directly to KML format but it’s handy to have the text version first so it can be edited before generating the KML file. The -w flag to gpsbabel causes it to download all the waypoints from the GPS, and I usually want just the waypoints relevant to the current track (the -t flag). The text file makes it easy to remove the waypoints you don’t need.

Creek walk, Google Earth view

google earth view

tags: creek  Google Earth  GPS  gpsbabel  house  KML  Nika  trails 
fri, 19-oct-2007, 08:44

view out the west window

view out the west window

We finally started getting some of our winter snow. It started yesterday morning, and it’s been snowing pretty hard ever since then. By midnight yesterday we’d gotten an inch and a half, according to the Weather Service, and I’d guess we now have four to five inches on the ground.

Earlier in the year we went to a garage sale and scored a snow thrower for cheap. Today was my first opportunity to see if it actually worked. As promised, it started right up, and did a great job moving snow around. Unfortunately, the snow isn’t packed down much at all, and so it was perfectly happy to pick up and fling frozen dirt and gravel from the driveway. I think it might be a good idea to drive on top of the snow for awhile, and start using the snow thrower once there’s a better base underneath it.

The water delivery guy said that he used to “plow” his two mile long driveway by running his snow thrower out on one tire track, and then back on the other track. Driving over the cleared areas caused the berm in the middle to get spread out evenly over the driveway, resulting in a nice flat surface. I doubt if I’m going to go the 1.2 miles from our house to the nearest plowed road, but I might try this on the worst section of it. Or the worst section of it that’s close to our house, since there are so many bad areas…

snow dog

snow dog!

Nika enjoys hanging out in the snow, and since she’s black, she’s really good at demonstrating how hard it’s snowing outside. This isn’t the greatest photograph, since I took it through the sliding glass door, but after I let her in, I was just about to snap a photo when she shook all the snow off on my slippers. Thanks Nika!

tags: dogs  house  Nika  slough  snow  snow thrower  weather 
sat, 22-apr-2006, 18:37
six dogs

We got a new dog named Koidern today. She had problems with other dogs in her previous kennel, so we're hoping that she does better here. So far so good, but we're still in the early phases of the introduction. From left to right in the photo, there's Kiva, Nika, Buddy, Deuce, Koidern and Piper. Andrea is on the couch petting as many as she can get her hands on.

Koidern will be four in June and she's one-quarter saluki.

tags: Buddy  dogs  house  Kiva  Koidern  Nika  Piper 

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