• Creative

    2000-2009 In Review

    Looking back, I can’t believe we’ve breezed through another decade. It seems the older you get the faster time goes by. I know this is because we grow up, get jobs and become entrenched in our daily lives that we forget the small things. Time keeps ticking and the seasons keep changing. And here we are another 10 years gone by. I see a lot of people doing yearly reviews, but I thought I would do a decade review. 2000 -I did my sea turtle internship which made me fall in love with sea turtles. This was between my sophomore and junior years of college. -Went camping and tubing down…

  • Florida,  Outdoors,  Photography,  Travel & Places

    Heaven is a Place on Earth

    Ok, so the title is slightly kitchy, but it came to me as Belinda Carlisle was singing to me on the way home from work today. Sanibel is heaven on Earth. It is one of the places that furthered my interest in marine biology growing up. We went to Sanibel and Fort Myers beach for vacation a few years when I was growing up and we loved it. I always thought when I moved to Florida that I would be living over there, but we never have. I hardly ever get to go, maybe once a year; it’s a good two hour drive from the house and we are often…

  • Florida,  Friends,  Hiking,  Outdoors,  Photography,  Travel & Places

    Morning at Corkscrew

    When we left Marc and Eliana’s house on Friday night we decided we’d meet them at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary at 7am on Saturday morning. From our house it is about an hour and a half drive and from theirs, add at least another forty-five minutes. We weren’t exactly bright eyed and bushy-tailed when we got there. It was early. Chris and I arrived first and hit the boardwalk after I downed the majority of my coffee since disposable materials aren’t allowed on the boardwalk. He set out for the cypress dome and I wanted to see what I could come up with in the fog that had rolled in across…

  • Florida,  Friends,  Outdoors,  Travel & Places

    I wish I was…

    …still doing the Sanibel Stoop. And when you can’t stoop any longer, find a nice mound of shells, sit down and dig right in. We had an awesome weekend that continued from Marc and Eliana’s house over to the west coast at Sanibel and Cayo Costa State Park. I have so many photos to go through—I’ll have plenty to write about this week!

  • Florida,  Food,  Friends

    Christmas

    Christmas day started off a little bit on the wrong foot. A door was left open or didn’t get closed entirely when Chris left to do an early morning photographic expedition down at Everglades National Park, and three of the cats at Marc and Eliana’s escaped. We only knew about it when one of the cats, Desi, ended up in a fight with a neighborhood stray. I thought he was fighting with another cat in the living room until Eliana knocked on the bedroom door and got me out of bed to look for the third cat, Timber, that they couldn’t find. It was a long day of walking the…

  • Thoughts

    Feliz Navidad

    We’re here at Marc and Eliana’s house for Christmas Eve and what has turned out to be an extended Christmas Day because a door got left open this morning and a cat has gone missing. We had a late night playing Cranium and doing Eliana’s Colombian tradition of staying up until midnight to open presents. We also tried a butternut squash pesto pizza for our dinner and a vegan apple tart cake for desert. Merry Christmas from balmy South Florida! Snowing in Texas!…and Oklahoma.

  • Family,  Texas

    Ghosts of Christmas Past

    Growing up, I always thought Christmas would be the same. There would be lots of presents, good food, lounging around and lots of laughter. After I got married, Thanksgiving morphed into one of my favorite holidays and Christmas was pushed aside. Part of this was the whole sharing of families deal that comes with any married couple. The only good part about that was the families were separated by three counties, not three states. The bad part was that we had to fly out there and shuffle around. So, as I’ve gotten older Christmas has changed. Part of it is that instead of it being grey and the landscape mostly…

  • Family,  Florida,  Hiking,  Outdoors

    10-Miles with Dad

    Ahh, it is so nice to be writing again! My brother has me up and running enough to post, but we still have to work out the widgets (ie: the side archives and categories) and I’ve put everything up until this past week in the archives up there at the top. I’ll eventually re-work my banner, but until then this is what I’ve got. I will also try and fix the font size and color; I already tried to change the visited link color but it hasn’t worked yet. On Saturday, a day after my dad sat indoors while it poured the entire day and Chris and I had to…