• Thoughts

    The 2010s: Looking Back on a Decade

    Originally when I began thinking about writing this post I thought I’d select posts from each year but that is proving to be a task because I am not one for brevity—all of my posts bring back a lot of memories and I think back about everything that occurred this decade and I want to share it all! So, I think I’ll go for a short photo series that encompasses the highlights, some good, some bad, some sad. Here’s my 2000-2009 In Review if you’d like to peruse that old post! 2010 The decade started off with my baby niece Ashleigh being born at 26 weeks gestation at the end…

  • Family

    Merry Christmas

    It’s been a dinosaur filled day here at the Little household. We’ve played, we’ve eaten, and 2/3 of us want to just nap while the other 1/3 could play all day….it’s a good one. I hope yours was a good one, too.

  • Creative,  Reading

    Best Books of 2019

    Overall I read 139 books this year. That includes books I read with Forest—because even though they are kid books, I’m still reading! That doesn’t include books on our own shelves at home or books I’ve re-read again and again with him, mostly just library books throughout this year. I started logging his books last year so I could easily figure out what we’re reading but also books he likes and we might want to revisit later. He often finds books we’ve checked out before and grabs them again so he has a good memory for that anyway. As for “my” books, I read 45 books out of a goal…

  • Alaska,  Travel & Places

    Around Juneau, AK

    Had to stop and take a photo of the Bucc-ee’s sticker all the way in Alaska! (Bucc-ee’s is a chain gas station/store in Texas that draws crowds of people when you stop at one. And super clean restrooms.) Because we’d arrived in Juneau mid-morning we had until later in the evening before our ship left port and approximately four or five hours before we had to return to the ship to get on our tour bus for the whale watching tour. Our ship was docked at the furthest dock from town and thankfully the city/cruise ships have a deal to provide shuttles to the east side of town for tourists.…

  • Alaska,  Travel & Places

    Mendenhall Glacier View No. 2

    On our way to a whale watching tour in Juneau, we stopped for about 10 minutes at the Brotherhood Bridge near the Mendenhall River to get our first glimpse of the Mendenhall Glacier. The Mendenhall River is a relatively short river, draining Mendenhall Lake at the base of the glacier, flowing into Fritz Cove downstream. The view from the scenic overlook area was gorgeous as you can see, with swaths of fading fireweed in the foreground. In the distance we saw paddlers in the river. A trail was nearby but we had no time for sleuthing down the trail so we had to be content with our views from here.…

  • Arkansas,  Memes,  Travel & Places,  Wildflower Wednesday

    Kentucky Lady’s Slipper, Cypripedium kentuckiense | Wildflower Wednesday

    I’ll have a few posts from our hiking trip along the Eagle Rock Loop from 2012 these next few weeks for Wildflower/Wildlife Wednesdays. Wildflower/Wildlife Wednesday is a much better use of “I don’t know what to post but it is Wednesday” than Wordless Wednesday used to be. Though, Wordless Wednesday had ease going for it—just post a photo! I suppose I could turn these into that as well but let’s not, though we can just keep them short and brief. I think lady slipper orchids are one of the Holy Grail orchids to find and also to keep. We had a variety/species of one when we lived in Florida and…

  • Hiking,  Outdoors,  Texas,  Travel & Places

    The Grotto at Westcave Preserve

    I think the word has gotten out about Westcave Preserve—our tour was crowded during our visit in July. Of course it didn’t help that it was the 4th of July weekend when we visited, but still. After you’ve come here several times and basically had a tour to yourself, you get spoiled! We joined the tour and stuck towards the back of the line so Forest could walk slower and we could dawdle just a bit. And we had been here several times so we knew the main spiel already, though of course new things get sprinkled in as the years go on, particularly discussions about floods. Various flooding events…

  • Alaska,  Travel & Places

    Inside Passage Approach to Juneau, AK

    I think this is what is labeled on a topo as Suicide Falls coming out of Cross Bay Creek on the SE side of town. Our arrival into Juneau wasn’t until mid-morning so we had plenty of time to get up, eat breakfast, and then bounce from outside deck to outside deck to take in the views as we slowly sailed into Juneau. With Admiralty Island and Douglas Island to our port side and the mainland to our starboard side, we had plenty of interesting things to see on each. The island side was less populated, less homes built and much more remote appearing. Once we crossed over to Douglas…

  • Gardening

    A Visit to Fern Plantation

    Arachnoides standishii L to R: Jean, Cindy, Laurin, Andrea, Darla Fern Plantation’s owner, and me. A few weeks ago I was invited to join some other garden bloggers for a little mid-week meetup at a local nursery. No one had been to it before but I had seen it on Google Maps as it is in our neck of the woods. Fern Plantation nursery had piqued our interest but because it seemed to be by appointment only (and it is) we didn’t really know if we could go and visit. Was it wholesale only? After the invitation from Andrea to join the group I knew that I wanted to go…

  • Arkansas,  Memes,  Outdoors,  Travel & Places,  Wildlife Wednesday

    Red-Spotted Purple Butterfly, Limenitis arthemis astyanax | Wildlife Wednesday

    As seems to be the general case these days, I was digging around on my backup hard drive looking for another particular photo or set of photos and came across our photos from when Chris and I joined my brother and dad to hike the Eagle Rock Loop on the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas back in 2012. You can read day 1, day 2, and day 3 here. For those entries I had put together the photos into a sort of mosaic, mostly trying to conglomerate how many photos I had per post into something more reasonable, a feat that I’ve never really been able to replicate or reduce because…