• Outdoors,  Texas,  Thoughts,  Travel & Places

    Thanksgiving at Lake Brownwood State Park

    It’s a full month later and I’m finally settling down to write about our camping trip to Lake Brownwood State Park. We were supposed to go to Mission Tejas State Park but Chris received an email a couple of weeks prior to the date that the park did not have electricity—including the bathrooms. Now, you are probably thinking, didn’t you do two thru-hikes and deal without electricity??, but that was without a 3 year old and it wasn’t at Thanksgiving when we were trying to make a decent meal. We’ve done front country camping without electric before at our campsite but there was always a bathroom. Plus, we had invited…

  • Creative,  Reading

    2017 In Books

    Compared to last year I almost doubled the amount of books I read. And if I count the five or six books that I started but didn’t finish (they are good, I have just been reading them in spurts) my number would be closer to 50. The year started off good with reading and I dipped into audio books more this year, however I find that I can only really focus on those when I have a big project at work that lets me focus for hours on end. When I’m bouncing between projects or am doing other things that require more brain power like report writing, I can’t really…

  • Thoughts

    Music for Your Week

    It’s been quiet around here despite the fact I have wanted to write. Over the last week I’ve been backing up our website files and then finalizing a conversion of our hosting setup with our provider and it has been slow and time consuming. If you saw a weird post in your feed this morning it was because I was setting up WordPress again. I’ve had to do this once or twice over the years and it always throws me for a loop before I remember how to do it all. Thank goodness for the Updraft plug-in which backs up my files and saves it on DropBox or allows me…

  • Gardening,  Thoughts

    That One Time It Snowed…

    Last week was fairly dreary around here with on and off rain and chilly temperatures. We knew it was going to head towards freezing on Thursday and Friday nights so on Thursday at lunch Chris moved a lot of the sensitive plants indoors and after I worked I moved some of my stuff off the potting bench and under the porch. When Chris got home with Forest at dinnertime he said we might have some snow flurries around 9pm. That was exciting but I figured it would be just that—flurries. We had some sleet a year or two ago with a little bit that piled up in the corners of…

  • Outdoors,  Thoughts

    The Importance of Public Lands

    A post shared by Patagonia (@patagonia) on Dec 4, 2017 at 3:54pm PST I have never been to southern Utah. My only experience with Utah has been to SLC and some areas around the Wasatch but I’ve been to plenty of other public lands (local, state, and federal) and what happened yesterday is sickening. When shit hit the fan on election day 2016 I knew we were in for it with the environment and public lands, not to mention so many other things we’ve been watching go down during the last year. It’s sickening, enraging, frustrating, and all around awful. And I keep wondering when the insanity will end but…