Welcome to Antelope Hill and the new home of Clan Duncan Shelties and Art. I KNOW it is no longer winter, but I wanted you, dear online friends, to share the winter with us and am just now able to upload it. So here is winter 2006/2007 on the new Hill. Summer will not be far behind!

This is our first winter on Antelope Hill -- and above you see our new home, or at least its unpainted shell. I was not able to update the web site for several months, so it is time for a long-overdue look at the affairs of the Hill.

Because it has been so long since I have been able to update the site, I will recap this year's story a bit and add new information at the bottom! The old Hill is no more, destroyed by the county in the process of making a new landfill. Gone are the frogs, toads, salamanders, lizards, snakes, fish, and most of the trees and wildflowers of the old Hill. And gone are we because we were forced to leave. When we learned that the county was going to destroy our house, we decided to take it with us. This was not the easy choice! It is one thing to buy or build a new home and another to move a house to a new site and add many rooms to it. Several tasks faced us, but eventually we got almost everything out of the old house. We had a new, small pre-built building moved to the new Hill and set up for the Shelties, complete with play yard. Our friends Marj and Ric loaned us their little travel trailer to live in, and the trailer was set up near the play yard. It's not possible to say, "We would like to rent a house for a few months -- and by the way, we have a clan of Shelties!" So we knew we would be more or less without a home until we could get back into the old part of our house.

Scott designed a new home built around the old one, our architect turned the design into blueprints, and our builder began to create the new daylight basement set into the gentle slope of Antelope Hill. During this time, we moved everything we possibly could from the old Hill to Antelope Hill: 27 trees (ranging from 6 feet to 22 feet tall); garden plants (including my mother's columbine); goldfish (note the three black tubs above), water lilies, and aquatic snails from the outdoor ponds; every rock we could get our hands on that had been brought to the old Hill; baby trees found growing under the mature trees; fencing and fenceposts; gates; wild roses and bitterbrush; the snowplow; our 1948 pickup (See "Betsy's Bad Saturday Night" on the Stories Page.) and the 1963 Scout -- everything we could move. The large trees could not be moved, and it was heartbreaking to see them chainsawed down around us. As we entered autumn, the pace escalated until we were exhausted all the time, but we got just about everything moved that could be dug, caught, lifted, dragged, loaded, or pulled from the old Hill!

Eventually the new daylight basement on Antelope Hill was finished, and it was time for our old house to depart. In early October, the old house was lowered onto two enormous steel beams, ooooched sideways uphill from the daylight basement, and then a heavy truck moved the house down off the old Hill. It seemed very strange to see our home moving through the remaining trees.

And afterward, it seemed even stranger to have our home sitting on the great beams on the flat area below its former perch on the Hill. With the house gone, our old daylight basement looked like a bomb crater, and a raw scar where once we had lived, gaped like an open wound on the Hill. It was disturbing, but there was no help for it. We had to leave the place we had loved so much for so many years.

A few days later at midnight, our home began its 45-mile journey to the new acreage. Festooned with lights, our house moved slowly down the gulch. Before following, Scott and I looked back at what was left of the old Hill for the last time, then started the pickup and escorted our house down to the highway in the dark. It was a wrench to leave the gulch; both Scott and I had lived there longer than we have lived anywhere else in our lifetimes: 16 years. Under a waxing moon, our brave brown house traveled toward Antelope Hill through the sleeping city. A few hours more, and our house passed through the desert where I work, moving on the little dirt roads I have known so well for almost 30 years. A highway bridge with railings two inches taller than the house mover had remembered, caused an unscheduled delay. From the little trailer where we were living, we could see our house marooned on the far side of the highway two miles from us -- very strange. Another day and the house made it to Antelope Hill. A few days later, the old house was eased onto the new daylight basement, and work began in earnest.

As you can see, the old house is considerably smaller than the new foundation. After the old siding came off, the old house looked very tattered and worn, with its peeling tarpaper and shreds of old insulation piling up around the new foundations.

Soon the old roof came off, three feet more height was added to all the walls, and a new roof was built. The new wing was framed in. Above is the deck: Left, old house only. Right, old house covered with new wallboard and a door to the new wing visible past Spot the cat. The ten-foot overhang of the new eaves makes a roof and sunshade for the new deck. It seems very odd, since the door to the outside from the old kitchen now opens onto a one-story deck; that same kitchen door used to open out into the back yard of the old Hill near the house pond and flower beds.

We watched the progress on the house anxiously from the little trailer as the weather turned cold in late October.

Sitting in the trailer during the evenings was very cold. Ice froze in the sink overnight, and though we went to sleep inside our best sleeping bags, we were too cold to be comfortable. (The dogs were snug and toasty in their new building, however.)

There were nights when we felt like squeezing in with the dogs to sleep and having a real dog breath experience, just so we could be warm! However, on Halloween night, Scott solved the problem of the very cold humans by buying a little generator. The generator ran lights and a space heater in the trailer, and a measure of comfort once again entered our lives. Halloween 2006 was a far cry from the huge party we had hosted on the old Hill for so many years, but it was just lovely. We carved our jack o' lanterns, lit their candles, heated water for our hot water bottles, climbed into our sleeping bags, and by jack o' candlelight, watched scary movies on the portable DVD player! As the familiar scent of slightly scorched pumpkin filled the warming air in the little trailer, we knew everything was going to turn out all right. Below are our four 2006 jack o' lanterns cheerfully smiling from the small table in the travel trailer.

Fall shivered itself into winter and snow fell on Antelope hill. Deer passed nightly through the frozen grass and the dogs grew very furry. The frosty port-a-potty was an experience to be feared! Our niece Joy, husband Rob, and two girls Megan and Madison let us invade their lives for Sunday dinners, at which time we did mountains of laundry! Our workplace has hot showers, a blessing indeed. Scott had had the foresight to have a water-pipe and pump head installed near the trailer, so we had running water -- we did the running, with buckets! We learned to put on many layers of polarfleece before stuffing ourselves into the sleeping bags for the night.

As soon as we got home from work each evening, we would feed the sturdy little generator some gasoline and start up the space heater in the trailer. You can see above the little generator "cubicle" that Scott made from panels of dog runs covered with a brown tarp. (The generator is cable-locked to our snowplow, the strange pale thing you see in the photo, part of which is triangular.) Then dogs were let out to play for the evenings, and we would read for a while and then place the DVD player on the cooler (which needed no ice!) and watch a movie or two while the dogs ran and played outside. After the dogs were fed, let out once more for a while, and then tucked up warmly for the night, we would heat water on the propane stove for our hot water bottles, take the DVD player with us to bed, and watch another movie until we drifted to sleep. Behind the DVD player in the photo above, you can see the hot water bottles waiting to be refilled. All night, the space heater, powered by our steadfast generator, worked hard to keep the cold at bay. Sometimes ice still froze in the sink overnight, but it was quite tolerable. This is how we have lived for exactly four months.

. . . And this is where we lost our dear Merlin. Here is the last photograph ever taken of Merlin, snug in his fleece bed under the table in the trailer in front of the space heater. We would have given anything had Merlin lived two more weeks, so that he could have moved back into his old home with us. However, Scott took Merlin into the old part of the house a few days before Merlin died. His wagging tail and busy nose told us that he remembered the house where he was born in 1994, so at least we have that to remember. Merlin now sleeps the long sleep, and is buried on Antelope Hill near a grove of trees that we moved here from the old Hill. Sleep well, Merlin, until we meet at the Rainbow Bridge! To go to Merlin's memorial page, please click the bat button near the bottom of this page.

To cheer our days, we have Merlin's daughter Miranda, seen above in the play yard in her "short outfit" at age 1.5 years. Miri looks and acts much like a frost-colored, feminine version of her sire.

We are discovering who else lives on Antelope Hill. Harvest mice have moved in under this small pile of salvaged lumber, and we had to remove a deer mouse who had made a nest in the Toyota. Mule deer and antelope cross the property often, and so do red fox and coyotes. Nearly every morning we see a short-eared owl hunting low over the sage, and in the dead of night we can hear the great horned owls courting as they sit in the middle grove of trees that came from the old Hill. Kestrels, harriers, and prairie falcons are common visitors, along with small flocks of horned lark and meadow lark. It's good to see that there are other creatures living here on the new Hill.

Greggie and Wolfie came to the new house on weekends to check the progress of the workmen.

Pale winter sunshine streams into the new daylight basement. This is to be studio space for Scott and for me, as well as a gallery space, and a place for furry animals to stretch out and sleep in the sun while we work on various projects.

As I write this, we have been inside the old part of the house for three nights. We find it indescribably comforting that though the old Hill is no more, we can still walk down the familiar hall to our comfortable kitchen, make tea in our well-used kettle, and place our cups of tea on the same old walnut countertops. At times the new views from our old rooms are startling, since for 16 years out those windows we saw the old Hill and its hundreds of trees, but we will become accustomed eventually. Above is our bed after the first night back in our old bedroom.

Above, Spot catnaps on some plasterer's dropcloths. Strange things happened to the house while the roof was being replaced and the walls made taller -- so now the old rooms are grubby with globs of plaster, plaster dust, and construction debris! We will be "camping" in the old part of the house for many months as we finish remodeling it. Then we will be finishing the interior of the new wing, and last but not least, will be painting the outside of the house and doing the landscaping outside. It will be a challenge and an adventure!

In the meantime,little Imp is in the kitchen after a bath at our friend Lacey's house, learning to bait. She, too, is from Merlin's only litter. You can see the state of our damaged floors! Oh, well, everything in good time. Imp has the right perspective -- she doesn't care!

In the clear light of an early winter's morning, we find that a skiff of snow has fallen overnight, the new roof glistens with frost, and white-capped old sunflower seed heads sway in the slight breeze. At last, in February, we are tackling the inside remodeling of the old part of our new house. It is been a long road home from the old Hill. We are almost home. Almost.

Dear readers new and old, a tiny twinkle of light is now visible at the end of this long, dark tunnel. We hope for a new year bright with flowers, puppies, and friends.