• Thoughts

    Life Lately | May 2018

    +In My Head We just had a great long weekend with all of my family down to visit. It’s been a long time since we’ve had both my parents and then Curtis, Stephanie, Zoe, and Grayson all over at the same time. Having a three day weekend made it worthwhile to have everyone down. Often if we try to cram everything into a typical weekend it feels too rushed and there’s not enough time to enjoy everyone. This weekend we had plenty of time to go to the splash pad, the plant nursery, plenty of time playing in the kid pool, running around the yard, and loads of other things!…

  • Gardening

    Flood Number One Billion and Five

    (Ahh, sweet rain! What a relief—right???) One would think that after a month or so of no rain that a few hours of rain would be a needed respite. And it was when it all started. At this point in the nearly six years (at the end of June) that we’ve been here the number of times we’ve had flooding issues has continued to grow. Frankly, sometimes I dream of a drought—yes, tempting to wish for a drought but that also has its own terrible consequences. How about some balance, Mother Nature? Or maybe we’re just screwed because we’ve effed the climate so much this is our new weather pattern?…

  • Bees,  Gardening

    Feral Bees Found Our Hive

    A little over a week ago Forest and I were out on the front porch to send off Chris as he left for field work. It was right after dinner, nearing 6pm and the sun comes over the driveway rather harshly at that time during this season. In the glow of that hour, we noticed a huge ball of insects flying, backlit by the sun. We paused to look at them for a second and Chris started to say something about them, literally made it three or four words in an attempt to say one thing before switching, and then getting really excited to say that they were bees! We…

  • Gardening

    Spring Monarch Season

    When we finally got the flower garden beds designed and planted five years ago we added in a plant or two of tropical milkweed in hopes of attracting monarch butterflies and caterpillars. For some reason those plants would last the year and then fade out—I’m not really sure what happened because our weather and situation is no different now than it was then, and we’ve even had colder winters since then and the tropical milkweed had returned. In Florida, we had a a couple of plants in containers and some in our front flower bed at the rental house where we would see monarch caterpillars every now and then. South…

  • Gardening

    April Days in the Edible Garden

    Nearly mid-May and I’m finally here to write-up what happened around the garden and yard in April. Oh boy. I think it’s time to return to taking photos in small batches and processing them accordingly. There was a time when I was really good at that but these days I take photos and the camera languishes on my desk until I find time to process photos and then I end up with a back log of things to write about. Right now I’m only finding time to process photos on weekends or during Forest’s bath time and other than that I’m mostly finding time to do and be rather than…

  • Baby Teddy,  Family

    Forest Friday | “I’m a Lady Bug” Edition

    For Christmas this year Forest received a Koala Crate box subscription from Chris’ mom and so every month we’ve received a really fun box of crafty things that we make (read: I make) together. Forest loves getting mail so he definitely looks forward to this craft box! What I love about this box is that it isn’t junky for the most part, though there have been a couple of crafts that don’t quite get played with while others are used over and over again. A few day ago we received May’s box and in it were crafts to make a felt butterfly (and turn it inside out to make it…

  • Thoughts

    Life Lately | April 2018

    +In My Head Stopping to just look at the garden, to see where the light falls. Enjoying the funny and interesting things that Forest says. The ERA is Back: That would be really damn awesome! There have been other people writing about this thought I’m about to say—-as much as I’m still bitter we didn’t end up with a female president in 2016 I think some of the fall out from that (as sucky as it has been) has triggered some things into our general conscience and awakened a new revolution of pushing forward some issues with equality I think we all got complacent with. And if we can *crossing…