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Best Books & Music of 2024
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed by email! Thanks for visiting!Reading This year I lowered my reading expectations, intending to tackle a pile of magazines and longer books I needed to read this year. I typically read between 40-60 books a year and thought 30 would be a good number to aim for instead of going above and beyond. Well, I hit 40 books a few days ago, picking up some steam in the last couple of months when I thought had burned out. I also read some of the magazines but definitely didn’t tackle the longer books I wanted to read. Looking…
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Scenes from the Field – July/August 2024
Long-tailed skipper caterpillar (Urbanus proteus) Viceroy caterpillar (Limenitis archippus) Banded sphinx (Eumorpha fasciatus) – 3rd instar Banded sphinx (Eumorpha fasciatus) – 5th instar Red-headed Willow Leaf Beetle (Chrysomela texana) larvae Red-headed Willow Leaf Beetle (Chrysomela texana) larvae Invasive apple snail eggs (Pomacea maculata) – becoming more prevalent around here. Little yellows puddling on the soil (Pyrisitia lisa) Trying to keep the sun off me! I came back from Ecuador this summer with Covid. I pretty much took a test a few minutes after arriving home from the airport, having felt poorly for the several days prior. We’d had field work lined up for the following week after our return for…
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Sunday Reads (on Tuesday) | 1
Instead of sharing links elsewhere on the interwebs I thought I’d revive something I used to do on here and that is to share weekly (or monthly) various things I found interesting and read on the internet. And of course this was supposed to be a Sunday thing, for when people were having morning coffee and could take time to read, but this is the second weekend in a row that I’ve not been able to get the thing published so it’s going out on a Tuesday instead! Please feel free to share links you’ve enjoyed, too! Tulsi Gabbard Holds the Knife by Timothy Snyder – on one of the…
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Green-flowered Yeatesia (Yeatesia viridiflora) | Wildflower Wednesday
In mid-November we hiked all of the trails at the Roy E. Larsen Sandyland Sanctuary, something we hadn’t done in several years. It’s on the list of hikes for my book and we’d been at the Watson Preserve the day before for a volunteer work day so we paired the trip with a visit to the REL preserve, too. I love this preserve because it resembles the Florida sandhills quite a bit in the uplands and it is such a unique habitat here in SE Texas. But there’s also a really great bottomland trail adjacent to Village Creek and I also love rambling through that trail. The preserve deserves a…
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Comet C/2023 A3 aka Tsuchinshan-ATLAS
In mid-October we did what many folks around the world were doing, looking up into the night sky to search for Comet C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. I saw a few people in the Houston area say they were able to find it and so we trekked out to a more open area of the county one mid-week evening to search for it but never found it. I looked around for more information on how to spot it in the sky and approximately what time around sunset, and so we trekked out another evening to try once more. It was visible much later after sunset than what some people…
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Thanksgiving at Guadalupe River State Park
Gladicosa pulchra It’s been a hot minute since we went to the Hill Country. Well, it’s been a hot minute since Forest and I have been to the Hill Country. Chris goes almost quarterly either to Austin, or more recently, to San Antonio, for work projects. But it has been since late winter or maybe spring of 2023 since I’ve ventured to the Hill Country for recreational purposes. We made plans for Thanksgiving camping at Guadalupe River State Park, which the last time we’d been there was four years ago in 2020 for Thanksgiving. We also paired that trip with South Llano River State Park. I don’t think I ever…
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Hickory Horned Devil | Wildlife Wednesday
Back in late October we went camping at Huntsville State Park. It had been several years since we’d been and I needed to tackle some trails there for the hiking guidebook I’m writing. Which, now that I look at my archives, I can’t find that I wrote about that here….??? Oh, wait, I found it, hiding in a life update post from June. Yes, still plugging away on hikes for that and I probably should post an update soon of how that is going! It was rather warm for October at the state park but we carried on and sweated it out. On Saturday of that trip, we had one…
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Sometimes breaks are a good thing
I didn’t mean to take so long away from the blog but it has been great to get a bit of a break. Two people have prompted to me return to some more regular writing: my blog posts came up when they did a google search looking for a plant and they told me about it! If that isn’t a sign that things like trip and plant reports are worth the while, then I don’t know what is! The addition of the AI search results on Google has really done a number to the rest of the search results there and even I find myself sometimes stopping short of scrolling…
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The End of an Era | Over the Rainbow Bridge for Little Callie
If you’ve been around reading this blog for any length of time, you may have read at some point that we had a massive amount of feral cats at our house. When we moved here in late June 2012 we knew there were a couple of feral cats because we would see them when we came for closing walk throughs or for the first initial move-in. But it was when we came in late one night and the headlights turned to the carport that we saw just the number of cats we were dealing with. I spent several months trapping and then getting them fixed and releasing them, which I…
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Life Lately | September 2024
Liatris acidota in the Hickory Creek Savannah Unit of the Big Thicket NP Hello friends! As you can tell, I have not written here much in the last few months. To be honest, I’m struggling with where to go with this blog. I’m not ready to close up shop or stop writing but I feel the need to be quiet. I’m also overwhelmed with writing trip reports and keeping on top of that because I just simply can’t keep up anymore. I’m finding more joy in editing the photos, uploading to Flickr, and just revisiting them as a digital photo album than I am in writing here. I am spending…
