Two Hearts Ranch

2011 Solvang Greyhound Festival

Dave — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 06:26:09 +0000

Despite the cold, wet weather, this years Solvang Greyhound Festival celebrants brought their own warmth and sunshine to Solvang. More than 230 hounds and their humans attended this years festivities, participating in games, shopping, auctions, socializing, and listening to a variety of speakers. The predicted rain materialized Thursday night and continued throughout the day Friday, but most hounds and humans just put on their rain gear and went on having fun.

On Thursday night, humans and hounds were treated to an evening of wine tasting at the Caravintas Winery. Catering to dog lovers, the tasting room allows dogs to accompany their people into the shop. Organized by Linda Weller, a standing room only crowd enjoyed glasses of three different wines, each with a unique label featuring a dog picture. Bottled specially for the occasion was a Russian River Syrah with a picture of Tenille, the first recipient of a grant from Greyt Legs to help mend a leg broken while racing.

Officially beginning on Friday morning, festival vendors opened shop with all things greyhound available, speaker Jodi Brown made a marvelous presentation about the Second Chance at Life Program, the hounds were blessed Friday afternoon at the mission, the silent auction opened, Telma Shaw gave a wonderful talk about her trip to Spain visiting over 9 different associations involved in Galgo Rescue, and the Friday Night Pizza Party brought everyone together under one roof for fellowship, food, drink and an auction – it should be mentioned that all proceeds from the festival, including the auctions, go to benefit the Greyt Legs organization.

The festivities continued on Saturday with more speakers, shopping, greyhound games, and a dinner at Pea Soup Anderson’s with featured speaker Cindy Hansen, editor-in-chief of Celebrating Greyhounds Magazine. The weekend wrapped up on Sunday morning with a walk through town with all the hounds, senior hound recognition (10 years and older), and the famous final roo at the downtown park. It was a weekend to remember, both for the weather and the program, but most of all for the hounds who are the whole reason for this great festival. This article would not be complete without mention of the people who make the Solvang Greyhound Festival possible – Teri Rogo, Jodi Brown, Tiffany Brown,Therese Skinner, Dana Provost, Will and Linda Weller and many more I simply cannot remember. Their dedication to the event and the countless hours spent in putting it together deserve an immense thank you from all of us who eagerly look forward to going. Lastly, a huge thank you to the officials, shop owners, and townfolk in the City of Solvang for having us and making us feel so welcome. See you all next year!

(click the thumbnails to enlarge)

Solvang Greyhound Festival Primer

Dave — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:29:55 +0000

It’s time once again for humans and hounds to gather for the 7th Annual Solvang Greyhound Festival, Feb. 25-27, 2011. This will be our 3rd year attending the event, and the festival is so much fun we start planning for the next one as soon as the last one is over. Our first Greyhound festival was in February 2009, just a few months after we adopted our first hound, Sammy. We fell absolutely in love with the people, the town, and of course all the hounds. Wouldn’t miss this fabulous event for the world! It will be a special one this year as we are taking our second hound, a Guam rescue, Fernie back to the exact location where we adopted him.

We don’t have the exact number of greyhounds that will be in town with their families, but a guess of 250 -300 wouldn’t be too far from the truth. The town gets involved in the festivity too, the mayor welcomes us with a speech at dinner, shop and innkeepers make us welcome with hound-friendly rooms, water bowls on the sidewalks everywhere, and houndie cookies are handed out frequently. Most shops display some sort of poster welcoming the hounds to town and into their shops. Our Greyhounds page has a few photos from last years event. If you are free that weekend, head on up to Solvang – you’ll be glad you did!

From the festival website:
“Greyhound owners are always ready to gather in large numbers to show their love and support for Greyhounds, to enjoy the company of others who share the same compassion and to show others how wonderful Greyhounds as pets can be. After all, it is the Greyhounds that bring us together and naturally this event is all about the Greyhounds!

There are many Greyhound gatherings located on the east coast and in the Midwest of the United States. However, Greyhound lovers on the west coast of the United States often found it difficult to travel such a long distance to enjoy the company and gatherings with other Greyhound lovers. They wanted a place closer to home to celebrate Greyhounds. That’s when the West Coast Greyhound Gathering now known as the Solvang Greyhound Fest was born!

The West Coast Greyhound Gathering site needed to be very Greyhound friendly with a small town atmosphere but with plenty of other activities for visitors to partake in other than Greyhound related activities. Solvang, California fit the bill with comfortable weather, friendly small town atmosphere and plenty of activities to enjoy – not to mention that the whole town is excited (right down to the Mayor, shop keepers and inn keepers) about the Greyhounds coming, too!

We are excited to hold the gathering in Solvang and we hope everyone enjoys their time as well! Proceeds raised from the Solvang Greyhound Fest will go to benefit GREYT LEGS – a 501c3 non profit support group to aid various groups with broken leg veterinarian bills through grants.”

Flowering Beauty

Dave — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 06:30:47 +0000

During the month of January we received an above average amount of rainfall, nearly 20 inches fell – the normal amount is about 5 inches. While we got a lot more than normal, it fell over a long enough period of time that serious flooding did not occur. One of the benefits of so much rain is the show of flowers that thrive on soil which stays moist for a longer time. Cool temperatures and plenty of water are just perfect for our camellia japonica to put on an spectacular display. This year there are so many flowers that the branches are bent over from the weight, like an orange tree with too much fruit. Here are a couple more photos for you to enjoy. Click on the any of the images to see a larger version.

Visiting Arizona

Dave — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 07:05:58 +0000

We recently went on a mini-vacation in Arizona to visit family and some friends we met at the John Bridge Tile Forums. We almost never go anywhere without our two beloved greyhounds, Sammy and Fernie, and this trip was no exception. Greyhounds are good travelers, but for 9 hours on the road each way we needed room for them and our luggage. Polly found us a 2010 Chrysler Town & Country with plenty of room, and stow and go seats so the boys could be right next to us during the drive. Very comfy little van, and it got pretty decent mileage averaging 25 mpg for the trip of about 1100 miles. After an overnight stop in Surprise, AZ to see Polly’s nephew and his family, we headed east to Gold Canyon, near Apache Junction, for a two day stay with our tile forum friends. The area we stayed in was right on an 18 hole golf course, a stone’s throw away from the Superstition Mountains. The view from our friends back yard was stunning as you can see in some of the photos below. And right over the back fence is a dry wash with lots of wildlife, including birds, rabbits, coyote and javelina. Each night we’d set out a Trail Camera (Bushnell) to try and capture photos of the nightlife. Got a coyote, among other critters, visible in the photo at right. The highlight of the stay was a trip by Polaris Ranger into the foothills of the Superstitions. The scenery was simply awesome, and we were blessed to spot a herd of bighorn sheep. I’d like to make a return trip sometime to explore deeper into the Superstitions and learn more about the history, wildlife and geology of the area. There’s just something about all the saguaro cacti that compels a person to stand in admiration. A huge thanks to our hosts for making the stay a memorable one.

The trip home also included a stop at Hadley’s Fruit Orchards in Banning for some fresh dates – medjool, black, and barhi varieties. If you haven’t been there, it’s well worth the stop. Everything imaginable in that store, including many different types of dates.

Two Hearts Gets A New Look

Dave — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 07:29:10 +0000

Just in time for Christmas, and after weeks of wrestling with code and design ideas, we’ve rolled out the new layout for Two Hearts. Based on the Thematic framework and WordPress, the new theme uses child theme functionality that’s built in to WordPress. It’s still Thematic, just a heavily modified version. Casual site visitors may not be interested in the details of what is incorporated in the new theme, but we should at least mention that the entire site was built on a Linux workstation using all open source software. With Ubuntu Linux as the operating system, we used jEdit and Geany (both great programmer’s editors) for the necessary coding chores. All graphics editing and creation were handled by GIMP, an open source Photo$hop equivalent. If you are interested in details beyond what we’ve mentioned here, drop us a line, we’d be happy to share. There might be a few little things to tidy up here and there, but for all intents and purposes we’re done redesigning the site. Now we can return to adding new content on a regular basis.

Have a look around, hope you enjoy what you see! – The Two Hearts