With the new year comes a few routines: one being Suzy putting up the new wall calendar made up of pictures from the prior year, and another being me looking through the one we just took down. The 2025 calendar is coming off the wall, and that’s the one I’m looking over, each month chock full of pics from the prior year. So join me as I review some of the happenings from June 2024!

Our calendar has the top page that are large pictures from that month the prior year, and the day-by-day section has smaller pics stashed on the days. This month was special.

I’d made it back to Minnesota in June 2024, so the picture at the top is me with some of my family: my youngest sister, my mother, my oldest sister, and my younger brother. We’d gotten together (along with my taking-the-photo-so-not-in-the-picture other sister) to enjoy a riverboat cruise with my Mom … I believe the dock was in Stillwater, MN, so we must have been cruising the St. Croix River.

Suzy and I had been interested in a somewhat local reptile zoo (actually an animal rescue/sanctuary), and so Suzy posed with a large tortoise. While it was just a small daytrip of fewer than 50 miles there-and-back, it’s outsized in my mind. Just a nice outing with a special partner.

The photo in the upper right is of me at Granite Falls, the water feature giving our little town it’s name. Suzy is posed in the lower right, pointing to a small display my mother had sent out as a gift that we festooned to the back of her (Suzy’s) little greenhouse.

And rounding out the pictures on the top page is Birdie Bird (the speckled hen) reuniting with a Jersey Giant from her brood. Birdie had been separated while we tended to a little health problem she had as a chick, but this was the month we returned her to the flock and she’s flourished. Now she’s one of our larger hens and ready to hop into your lap if it means getting a little corn or some mealworm treats!

The bottom photos start with a bang … nearly literally, as the June 1st photo shows our goat Gibson jousting with Gramps. Unfortunately, Gibson has scur horns that are fragile, break off, and bleed like crazy when they do. The blood never seems to bother them, it certainly doesn’t stop them, and yet it’s always a bit disturbing to see a bloody goat (or two …  as Gramps gets smeared with it, too) in the pasture.

The pictures on the 3rd, 5th, and 30th all come from Suzy’s garden. In addition to lovely blooms, fragrant bushes, and lush trees, Suzy incorporates a lot of garden art. The 3rd shows a large crane statue through which flowers are vining, very much making this piece at home in the garden bed. The lumpy stones in the picture on the 5th are pillow lava, formed from underwater volcanic eruptions. We got these while touring a beachcombing museum in Forks, WA earlier that year. The final flower picture is just that: a pretty, pink flower; I’d guess tulip but honestly don’t know what it is.

The rest of the pictures are a smattering of happenings from the month: the 9th shows another shot from my trip back to MN, the 16th shows the remnants of some strawberries left by a Douglas squirrel who was raiding Suzy’s berry patch, the 19th is a saying on a cheeky birthday card I got for Suzy, and the 24th is an iguana’s head … another snap from our trip to the reptile zoo. The final two shots are the 27th showing the perfect s’more made at the firepit under a pavilion in our backyard, and then the 28th: a bench in the shape of a horse … which I don’t recall from our travels, but I’d bet it was a welcome resting place found at the Reptile Zoo. Just a neat place to take a little rest.

And with that, I’ll give you, welcome reader, a bit of a rest from my trip down memory lane. Thanks for dropping by!

We’re now into the fifth month of 2024, a review of our 2025 calendar. For those not following along, I decided to look through our 2025 wall calendar, month by month, and review the pictures I see in it. And why might this be interesting? Well, because Suzy makes our calendars each year by pulling photos from the previous year and placing them in the appropriate month for the current year. What this means is that, for this month, May 2025, we get to see images from May 2024. It’s a lovely way to remember that, even though we’re happy in our few little acres in unincorporated rural space, we still are enjoying life, both at home and on the road.

And in May 2024, I hit the road in a big way: a trip to Alaska!

A friend had asked if I ever had an interest in driving the Alcan Highway, a stretch of road the US helped develop to provide an overland lifeline to Alaska … and a bit of construction my grandfather helped create! And so I certainly was interested. That shows up large on the big photos atop our May 2025 calendar: pictures of me heading into Alaska, my buddy Ron gesturing to Denali from our campground in Denali National Park, and finally the sign I placed at the Signpost Forest in Watson Lake, Yukon.  All wonderful memories and more can be read about this adventure here and here.

The other pictures on the big page are helpful in reminding me that I don’t have to travel to lands-end to see beautiful sights: we enjoyed a northern light spectacle in our backyard, see beautiful sunsets nearly daily in that same backyard, and Suzy had a little helper chicken, Birdie Bird … the little hen in the photo at the top-left…  in the garden for a few weeks. More can be read about Birdie Bird in this post … and it’s a good one to read if you’re not familiar with Birdie Bird and her story!

In the day-by-day section, we have the usual: cats (Trasper in a tree-structure we built for him on the 20th, Trimble cuddled in on the 31st), goats (that’s Gatsby’s big snoot on the 1st), and chickens (Birdie Bird takes center stage on three days: the 4th, 14th, and 29th)! We also introduce bees into the “what animals are on our property” mix … that’s right, mason bees! The 9th shows a bee flying for one of the holes in one of the bee boxes we put out for the mason bees each spring. At the end of the year, Suzy will harvest well-over a thousand bees, as she encourages our early-season pollinators! Those same bees will be released on our property for the next season.

The final three pictures … on the 17th, 22nd, and 25th … are all blooms from the garden. And while I can’t reliably tell you what they are, I can tell you they are quite welcome and a little something I look forward to seeing for months. The spring color and texture is amazing in the spaces Suzy curates.

That’s it for May 2024: just a small peek through the window of our lives.