September 15, 1999

Sorry to be so long with diary entries. As you will have noticed, I moved the diary off the Geocities site. I'm having a little disagreement with Geocities and am unable to do any updating of the pages there. 

Watch for everything to move to this site within the next while.

Everything else here is going well. Training is progressing. August was a little warmer then I would have liked, but I am making up for it this month! The dogs are up to 12 mile runs and pulling really hard. I'm surprised at how much stronger they seem then last year! Grover is showing strong signs that he is the next main leader in the kennel. I am AMAZED at how quickly he is picking everything up! I only started him up front at Jamie Nelson's in March! Speaking of Jamie's....we are heading off for there next week. I'm looking forward to training with her again!

We have had a few new additions to the kennel. First Rowdy, a Spud son, came back to live with us. Don't know if he will stay for good, but he is enjoying running!! I was lucky enough to pick up 3 dogs from my friend Vivian Delude of Lethbridge. Jetty, Mannie, and Spider are all fitting in very well. I should have pictures of them up soon. I took Mannie to the Peace River Show in August and put 6 points on him! I look forward to getting him out more next year! We also have 8 really exciting new additions!! Breezy delivered 8 puppies on July 27. We decided to name them after Norse Gods and Goddesses, so the pups are Thor, Loki, Oden (Odie), Hugi, Freya, Skadi (KD), Kara, and Mist (who we usually call Stripey!). We still haven't made final decisions on who is staying, but Hugi is moving to Red Deer next week to live with his new family!

Iditarod entries are filling up quickly. Already there are 72 mushers on the list. A record 64 signed up on the first day! It is pretty cool to have my name up there with so many of my heroes! Less then six months to the BIG DAY!!!

Well, I need to run and work on packing for Minnesota. We just got our dog truck back. Our good friend, Roger Morey, has completely redone the boxes - they look so good! We also needed to get the deck sandblasted, painted, and some new mirrors and body work done on the truck - so we had it repainted at the same time. When Mark pulled in the yard with the 'new' rig, I thought I was going to have to run and buy a new dog team that was as professional looking as it was! :) We took some pictures yesterday, I'll try and get them online as soon as we are back from Minnesota! In the meantime, if you pass a fancy looking red/black dog truck with spiffy looking maple leaf cutouts on the doors - make sure to wave!!!!