• Thoughts

    2020 In Review

    Well, let’s recap this wild, strange, and insane year! January Somehow I went to Florida! How was this in 2020? I left Billy Goat Day thinking that in 2021 I would possibly come back and go to the FT Kick Off and then maybe hike through Big Cypress with the thru-hikers, and possibly convince Chris to come along. Ahh, dreams! Travel! Those were the days! I still laugh when I remember seeing folks wearing masks in the airport (more so on the way to Florida) and they weren’t necessarily folks from Asian countries (to be clear, this was still very few people, but more than the usual International Traveler sort…

  • Outdoors,  Texas,  Travel & Places

    Galveston in Winter

    I had hoped that we would have made a trip back to the beach, from our last trip in the summer, before now, but here we were, late December and just now getting back to the beach. Back then I think we thought online school was going to be different and we could just skip Zoom lessons and do work later. Which, we *could* do, but it turned out to be more complicated than just being flexible and up and going to the beach in the middle of the week. So, we never made it there. Since we found ourselves with some time over this holiday break we made the…

  • Family

    Christmas 2020

    Our Christmas was quiet this year. Christmas Day is always quiet and then the day after we typically pack up and head to DFW and spent the next 5-6 days visiting 3 different groups of families. This year none of that was happening. We did a modified Christmas with one group via Zoom and I called my parents on Christmas Day and had Forest open his presents from them while they could watch. It was a bit somber and sad to think about missing out on holiday goodies and hugs and time with the family but I know it was for the best. Since seeing reports of record travel at…

  • Hiking,  Outdoors,  Texas,  Travel & Places

    Escaping the House to Lake Creek Nature Preserve

    On Saturday Forest and I escaped the house for a short hike. We had actually first escaped mid-afternoon on Thursday for a wonderful, warm and sunny hike to another nature preserve after a very frustrating online school morning. But otherwise we’d mostly been clinging to the house from online school to work, and if the weather was nice we would go out and wander the yard a bit. Chris had gone to Mississippi the Sunday before and I was single parenting it for the next week+. And by the end of the week my mental reserves were gone and getting outside was needed. We hadn’t been to Lake Creek Preserve…

  • Hiking,  Outdoors,  Texas,  Travel & Places

    Finding Bartonia texana aka: Texas screwstem

    The last two Octobers we’ve tried to find the Texas screwstem, Bartonia texana. And we had no luck finding them. But this time we were successful! Actually, Chris was successful because he went out a day before and spent more time looking and expanded his search zone and came home to tell us he had found them! So we made a backpacking trip out of it and stayed out there for a night so we’d have time to take photos and relax a bit for all of the effort bushwhacking to this location involves. A faded luna moth returning to the soil of the forest. A three-toed box turtle, Terrapene…

  • Thoughts

    Life Lately | December 2020

    Thinking: Wow, I haven’t written one of these up since August! It has crossed my mind a couple of times to sit down and write one but I never made the space to do so. So, here I am, sitting down in the last month of this very insane year of 2020! If you’d asked me in January or February this year what December would look like I would not have said, “Sparingly going places, thrilled to go to the grocery store as an outing, wearing masks like nobody’s business, and pondering a very different Christmas season than is typical.” And here we are. We’re on the home stretch but…