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We opened up during a late May snow storm. First order of business was to break out the pull-behind rough cut mower and mow the overgrown edges of our road. Next job was to tow the water tank trailer to Fairview and fill it with 1,000 litres of town water.
     
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Over the winter we had decided we needed something larger than the shed for storage and a workshop. On June 1st we drove over to Northern Portable Buildings in Cleardale, an hour away. We ordered a 16' x 32 ' custom garage with floor with an anticipated delivery date sometime in August. That was fine by us as we still had to prepare a site. When we got back home we arranged for Glenn's son Brent to bring in his tracked skid steer and level a spot before August. Late in July, he pulled in and got it done.
  
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Back on March 31st we had received a phone call. Our neighbour Glenn called to tell us his wife Cindie had passed away suddenly the day before. We were devastated as Lee and Cindie had become very close over the years. Our first thoughts were that we had to get up there for the funeral and say goodbye but were told there could only be a small private service due to Covid restrictions. For the same reason, their minister wouldn't even perform the service. Glenn promised that he'd give her a proper send off later in the summer. True to his word, on July 25th the family organized a Celebration of Life for Cindie at their cabin. Over a hundred attended.
 
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On Monday August 3rd I got a call from Northern Portable Buildings telling me that the building was ready and they wanted to deliver it on the 5th. I hadn't had a chance to gravel the site yet so it was a mad scramble to get up there and haul gravel. By the end of the day Tuesday I had 13 loads dumped and levelled. The next morning at 9:00 am they pulled in with the garage in tow. It was a real pleasure to watch these guys offload the building. They put it within a couple of inches of where I wanted it. And Glenn had done a bang-up job on levelling the gravel. When the garage hit the ground no adjustments were needed. It sat absolutely level.. By 10:30 they were finished and pulled out. I was quite relieved everything went so smoothly as I had a total knee replacement surgery scheduled in Edmonton for Friday.
    
   
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I had bought a 1981 John Deere 8440 4 Wheel Drive tractor earlier in the summer with the intention of breaking more pasture. By October I had recovered nicely from my knee replacement so we drove up to the farm for a few days of work and play. Over a couple of days I managed to break the south pasture which added another 8 acres to our cultivated land.
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While we were up breaking the south pasture I zeroed in one of my rifles and we'd go for a drive every morning and evening to see what we could see. About three evenings in I tagged a nice whitetail..
  
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In 2019 the boys had taken the initiative to break up and cultivate my middle pasture, the west pasture and the finger fields. We were taking bales off the middle pasture but couldn't get the baler and bale wagon in to the west pasture and finger fields because the trail to them was too narrow and pretty rough. To remedy this, I hired a crew with a cat and trackhoe to come in and widen the cutline. Over the course of two days they widened, cleared, burned off and levelled a 600 x 20 yard swathe down to my back pastures. We now had a total of 43 cultivated acres and all easily accessible.
  
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We managed to get up to the farm for the last time in 2020 at the end of November. The highlight of that trip was we got to watch one of Glenn's grandson's shoot his first whitetail buck off the deck of Glenn's cabin.
  
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