Welcome to our home of unruly beasts and rurally challenged humans (admittedly, I'm the rurally challenged one). For those who haven't been following the Staven household's travels and travails from the beginning, here's a quick synopsis to bring you up to speed:
1. Karen pulls up stakes in L.A. in 2004 and moves herself and her 2 newly adopted rescue dogs to Canada (Calgary, Alberta) to live with her new husband, Kurtis, and his dog.
2. Fast forward a year and a half. Both parties tire of Calgary's climate (drier than the Sahara, colder in winter than wherever you are unless you're in Barrow, Alaska), type-A a-holes, L.A.-style traffic, and out-of-control tract home development. And an ever-expanding array of bylaws to micromanage it all.
3. Visions of rolling pastures, open roads, self-sufficiency, off-grid living and grass-fed raw milk dance in their heads. Yes, they're idiots.
4. A lovely cedar A-frame on an acreage is located and purchased in a small mountain town in southern B.C. The house has a colourful botanical history, one involving hydroponic trays and an RCMP raid. More on that later.
5. Renovations begin, and haven't stopped.
6. Free-range laying hens enter the equation.
7. A dairy cow that can run like a racehorse is trucked in. She escapes, hoofs it over the U.S. border, and is returned after 3 months. More on that later.
8. Four Toggenburg dairy goats are trucked over. So far, so good.
9. Somewhere between entries 6 and 7, dog #4 finds its way here from the SPCA. His organizational and engineering skills are highly developed, even by human standards. More on that later.
10. Suzy the Jersey arrives from Saskatchewan, and she is MILKABLE!!!!
11. Ellie the Jersey is chauffeured in from Grand Forks, and joins Suzy in her willingness to be milked. Raven, BTW, still hates all humans.
12. Present day.
Note regarding the schizophrenic spellings on this site:
I'm having an identity crisis. Having been born and raised in the U.S. and only living in Canada for the past 3 1/2 years, the switch to Canadian English spellings of certain words has been bit of a mental block for me. I've easily twigged to some of it, adding the "u" for "labour," "behaviour," etc. Several years spent editing and proof reading documents in American English only contributed to the stubbornness of the mental block. You'll notice that many of the affected words on this site are still in American English. Please bear with me as I continue my uphill climb of Becoming Canadian and embracing the unfamiliar spellings of these words. Many of our readers are based in the U.S. and are probably wondering what all the oddly placed letters are about. So there's something to perplex just about everybody. Anyway, thank you for your patience as I work out my deeply ingrained cross-border issues.
