• Gardening

    Spring in My Brother’s Garden

    I hadn’t been up to DFW to see my family since Christmas, (keeping your head down and working in the garden every weekend for three months straight will do that to you), so a couple of weekends ago I drove up to see my grandmother whose mental condition (and physical) had deteriorated more recently. I also hadn’t been to my brother’s house recently to see the changes in his garden so I decided to stop by and check it out. The weather was beautiful, sunshine and late springtime temperatures instead of late winter temperatures. Of course my nephew Grayson came along for the garden tour. My brother lives in a…

  • Thoughts

    Sunny Sunday….errr Make that Wednesday

    +I bleached our luffa sponges a few weeks ago. They turned out really lovely and I’m going to have to get Chris to cut them for me. Maybe one day when we have beeswax I’ll make soap and the luffa will pair nicely with the soap as gifts! +I’ve been listening to a lot of food/sustainability podcasts lately and one of them discussed organic bananas and the banana industry. It was a bit of a revelation because I don’t usually pay that much attention to buying organic bananas. Bananas are generally very cheap to begin with and the podcast was discussing that even organic bananas are relatively cheap in comparison…

  • Gardening

    Jack-in-the-pulpit

    Chris ordered several interesting native plants for our garden and jack-in-the-pulpits were some of the ones that we received. They came to us as tiny corms and sprouted faster than I expected. It would be really cool to have them naturalize in our more shady and moist areas of the yard. This is a pretty interesting write up as is

  • Outdoors,  Texas

    Evening Along The Shore

    Ah, Galveston. I love this island. For those who haven’t been reading long, my history with the island is that I spent four years there while in college. The island is equal parts old money, spring break, summer vacation, and ratty hole-in-the-wall. It’s still a little bit of a place called home for me, though. Chris and I spent a little bit of time down at the beach that we got engaged at. We think.. You see, when we got engaged there were more dunes and vegetation and a sign for riding horses on the beach. That was back in 2001. Since then Hurricane Ike came through and well, the…

  • Gardening

    Macadamia Seeds

    Chris’ dad and step-mom went to Hawaii a few months ago and brought back a package with two macadamia tree seeds. Despite that we’re in zone 9A, barely, we definitely get some chill hours here that only 30 minutes down the road into the urban heart of Houston does not get. We’re at the north end of a zone that allows us to grow avocados (apparently Fantastic is the cultivar that does best here) so I thought we’d give it a try and grow the macadamias out and see what happens. We soaked them overnight as per the package directions….well, actually it was a few days because I forgot to…

  • Appalachian Trail 2010

    Beauty Beneath The Dirt

    Beauty Beneath the Dirt – Official Trailer from Jason Furrer on Vimeo. Let me introduce to you three people that Chris and I met in 2010 on the Appalachian Trail during our thru-hike. Ringleader (Kate), Monkey (Brandon), and Lightning (Emily). While for the most part we only hiked around this group not with them or necessarily hanging out with them, I knew we would still want to see this documentary they made while hiking in 2010. There was a bit of controversy surrounding them, particularly in the beginning of the trail, in regards to their filming and that is touched on a bit in the movie (I think in the…

  • Creative,  Gardening

    Creating with the Family

    Part of my family was in town over the weekend and on Saturday we went to the Calendar Garden for a class in which we would create our own garden markers out of clay. This was the real deal—real pottery clay, real glaze, and it would be fired in a kiln by the artist who hosted the class. Sweet! I haven’t used real clay since high school and as I worked with the clay it all came back to me easily. Made me wish I had my own potting wheel and kiln! My niece and nephew came along with me, my mom, and sister-in-law and they were good for the…

  • Outdoors,  Texas

    Birding at Sportsman Road | Galveston

    Last Saturday Chris and I drove down Sportsman Road on the west end of Galveston Island to scope out the birds before we went home from a couple of days on the island for a conference. We are familiar with Sportsman Road as it was a place Chris fished regularly while in college (we went to TAMUG) and a place I went to for a few field labs. It is a popular place to not only fish but to launch kayaks too. There were quite a few birds out in the marsh that morning and a few of them let me take their photos. These were all shot via our…

  • Appalachian Trail 2010

    The Appalachian Highway | AT Video of the Week

    Once the AT reaches Shenandoah National park it really becomes the ‘Appalachian Highway’. The trail smooths out and the climbs aren’t nearly as difficult. It’s pretty nice until you reach the north end of Pennsylvania and other than the rocks it is really not all that mountainous until Mt. Greylock in Massachusetts. So you set your cruise control and head on through the green tunnel, listening to the sound of the birds along the way. It really is that noisy at times with the birds. It wasn’t until we met Merf that we began figuring out what some of them were. She’d learned some of them from another hiker. “Here…