Snapshots of My Summer

My house (bottom left corner) as the flood water started receding.

This summer started out by my family moving into our new house. Last summer, our house was flooded out during the June 2012  flood and has since been torn down. We had all of our possessions packed away in a storage locker and stored at my grandparents house where we were staying while they were in Florida. We moved all of our stuff into a storage building in our new house. That meant we had to load our three family vehicles, with the help of family and friends, completely full and then take a 20 minute drive to our house and then unload all of the stuff we just loaded up. We took a total of 7 trips from house to house until we were done; after we finished unloading the house, we had to unload our storage unit that we rented. We took another 4 or 5 trips from the storage unit to our new house. Our new house is located 5 minutes out of Cloquet and sits on forty acres of land that we own. On that forty acres, we also have two barns, one that is in poor condition that we will tear down and another that is in good shape; two storage building; a sauna; and a big garden that we were not able to plant in this year. We have trails run throughout our forty acres. Next to our forty acres, there are another forty acres that the owner is allowing us to use. In that area, trails run from our house all the way to a creek located at the end of the other forty acres.

A view from my bedroom window; the sauna is the building you can see.

A picture of our three cats Aggie (far left), Suzie (top of stairs)
and Darby (bottom of stairs).

This summer we also got three new pets: two kittens, Aggie and Darby; and a dog ,Moose. The kittens are both female and are now about four months old. The dog is also female and is about a year and a half old; she is a Newfoundland Mastiff mix. Our cat that we have had for 15 years did not get along with any of the new pets; she hissed and paws the new kittens and ran away from our dog. Now she still dislikes our dog but allows the kittens to be in the same room as her. The dogs and kittens have become best friends and the kittens now lay on our dog.


Me walking my dog Moose.

The best thing I did all summer was play dodge ball during our parties on the weekend. My mom would bake and make desserts and my dad would grill brats and fish. People would start showing up around noon and everyone was eating by one. At around two-thirty, the dodge ball games would start. We play dodge ball on a custom-made court that my dad  and I made. We put poles in the ground three feet deep and attached grouse netting to the poles to stop the dodge balls from becoming lost in the woods.  We would then play dodge ball until it got dark when we all moved to the bonfire. We sat around the bonfire until everyone left around two or three in the morning.