• Thoughts

    The Garden Before the Flood

    I thought about doing a second post titled ‘500 Year Flood Part II’ because that’s what we had Friday afternoon, but I decided I’d rather show pretty pictures of the garden a week ago and just tell a short story about the second epic flood in less than 24 hours. When we woke up Friday morning and as I had written the post about the night before, the water was still in the yard but slowly receding. The front yard always takes forever to drain and well, patches of it haven’t drained for about two months because it has been so damn wet this spring. I’m half tempted to start…

  • Thoughts

    500 Year Flood

    If you’ve been reading here for any amount of time you probably remember the first few weeks we were living here and it flooded. We’ve had a few simliar floods and smaller floods since then, including at least two or three others this spring. The most recent was the Tax Day Flood so it is very fresh in everyone’s memory. After that flood I remembered that back in 2012 someone had mentioned a massive flood in 1994 in Houston and that was recalled again so of course looked it up and was definitely worried about that ever happening again so I rechecked the floodplain maps for our county and was…

  • Memes

    Life Lately: Mid/Late May 2016

    Been several months since I’ve done one of these! Thought it was time to do a good old-fashioned brain dump! +In My Head Summer’s here! So, mostly I’m now thinking about gardening, yardening, and keeping up with everything outside. It’s going to be a chore but we’ll see how it goes. Last September I joined a gym near my work so I could work out better/differently at lunch. It hit me a week or two ago that I really needed to quit the gym for the next three to four months so that I could work outside on my lunch breaks. I can still do some weightlifting here (when I…

  • Texas,  Travel & Places

    Small Towns: Gonzales, Texas

    We popped into Gonzales, Texas the afternoon before Mother’s Day to take a break from the heat and have a little diversion. Plus, we were on the prowl for ice cream, hoping to find a local ice cream store! The city was like many small Texas towns, slowly fading with many historic buildings that were empty or decaying. Sure there were quite a few businesses in the town center and we popped into a few of them, but it was a quiet little town. The most interesting shop that we would have explored more of if a: the stroller fit through the aisles and b: a toddler wasn’t in tow,…

  • Hiking,  Outdoors

    Fauna of Palmetto State Park

    Assassin bug nymphs For the most part, wildlife at Palmetto State Park was about looking to smaller species. On one of our hikes Chris stated beforehand that he wanted to see a snake and a caterpillar. That was surprisingly achieved! The caterpillar wouldn’t have been too hard if we’d looked but we ended up having one walk (slowly!) right across the trail. The snake, I figured, would be harder, but as we rounded a corner on the trail a rat snake was trying its best to disguise itself on the edge of the vegetation while soaking in some of the sunny warmth poking through the forest canopy. We did not…

  • Hiking,  Outdoors

    Flora of Palmetto State Park

    Over Mother’s Day weekend we loaded up and went camping at Palmetto State Park. We’d had reservations here before, over the winter, but cancelled them due to weather. What’s interesting about this park, kind of in a similar botanic way to Bastrop State Park just to the north with their patch of pine trees, is that this park is the western most population of Sabal minor, or dwarf palmetto. The park is located adjacent to the San Marcos river and definitely has a unique ecosystem for this particular region of Texas. While walking along many of the trails it was easy to picture that we were over in our neck…

  • Gardening

    Monarch Babies

    I took these photos on April 19th and since then I haven’t been able to find more caterpillars or any chrysalises despite seeing quite a few monarch butterflies flitting about and landing on the milkweed as well as additional eggs throughout the month. I’m not sure if they are being predated on or if our storms shortly after taking these photos influenced their outcome. Likely a combination of both which is a little depressing. It’s been a little hectic around here and while I’ve had plenty of things to write I’ve been trying to stay on top of multiple things. We went camping over the weekend and I’ve processed all…

  • Friday Five,  Memes

    Friday Five | 7

    Some thoughts and link sharing for your Friday: a little happy, a little sad mixed in this week. Lemonade. More specifically, a certain mixture created by Beyonce. Two Saturday’s ago as I was scrolling for Outlander tweets I kept seeing social media blowing up about Beyonce’s HBO special releasing her new album. By the next Sunday night someone posted a link to a Vimeo video, now currently taken down as it was pirated, streaming the entire 1 hour movie. I had already been debating what I was going to do after Forest went to bed and I opted to watch the entire movie. Holy cow! I liked and listened to…

  • Botanic Gardens,  Gardening

    Touring Peckerwood Garden

    It’s been a few years since I first heard about Peckerwood Garden. I think I may have stumbled across it when we moved to NW Houston when I was searching out plant nurseries and gardens, and then the garden was reinforced when I saw fliers at our local plant nursery advertising their Open Days that occur a few times in spring and fall. We finally managed to make it there last weekend but it was not the glorious botanical experience I was hoping for! I’d called about four or six weeks ago to find out if we needed to pay for a ticket for Forest since he was under 2…