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Knocked Down by a Rando Virus
I am signing out of January by reemerging from some rando upper respiratory virus that Forest brought home last week. Last Monday we were all almost ready to leave the house to go to work and school when Forest decided to cough and sound like a barking seal. We stopped in our tracks, looked at Forest and made a beeline for the bathroom and some cough medicine chased by an at-home covid test. The test was negative but knowing how those tests can be negative despite actually carrying the virus, I rearranged my day to grab my laptop from work and work from home. Covid or not, he was sick.…
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Goatweed Leafwing Caterpillars & Chrysalis
One of my more spectacular finds this last summer was finding a goatweed leafwing (Anaea andria) chrysalis tucked up under some croton (Croton lindheimeri) that had come up in our front right-of-way over the summer. I had noticed some leaves curled up on the croton but could barely make out the caterpillars, only knowing by feel that they were inside. And then I found the chrysalis! I looked for more and found an empty one and never did find any other chrysalides later on in the summer so either the caterpillars I later found never pupated or they crawled off elsewhere to pupate. And then a few days later I…
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Nature Tidbits from 2021
With my blogging taking a significant hit over the last year mostly due to a lack of desire to write, I now realize I have a lot of things I can post about now that the desire to write here is back. With that, today I’m going to share some random nature bits from the last year, mostly from my yard or neighborhood but also some other areas around the state! Let’s dive in! First up is a spring ephemeral that comes up in and around our yard (and the state), scrambled eggs, Corydalis sp.. There are a couple of species and this one is likely to be aurea or…
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Extreme Low Tide at Pine Gully Park
On Sunday we made a trek to southeast Houston to Maas Plant Nursery in Seabrook. Unfortunately the trip was a bust, a lot of plants weren’t out quite yet for spring and their native plant selection was lower than it has been in years past. We’d promised Forest a trip to a playground and just down the street is Pine Gully Park, a park I’ve seen for years during our trips to this plant nursery. We opted to poke into the park and see what it looked like and luckily enough there was a playground to go with the hiking trail that I had seen. But before either of those,…
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Top 5 Books I Read in 2021
Last year I read 60+ books (not counting the ones I read with Forest) and I keep tabs of it over on Goodreads. Feel free to friend me over there if you’d like! By far the heavy lifting of my reading last year was audiobooks and I have significantly replaced podcast listening with audiobooks over the last two years. If you keep your audiobooks to 10 hours and under and listen at 1.5-2x speeds then you can easily read an audiobook every few days or so. I listen while I work most often but I have tasks that don’t allow me to focus on two things at once so I…
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Charon’s Garden Wilderness | Wichita Mountains NWR
Getting up to DFW for Christmas break was one of those is it going to happen? ordeals since Omicron broke out. Skipping out on a trip up there last December meant that I really wanted to get up there this year. Plus, my nephew was going to be my parent’s house for a week while his sister and parents went to New Mexico for a scouting ski trip. Which meant a lot of uninterrupted cousin play time for Forest and Grayson and in turn meant that Chris and I could likely slip away for a couple of days and let the grandparents wrangle the two boys for a few days.…
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First Day Hike – 2022
Chris and I got out on Saturday morning to get a First Day hike in at Tandy Hills. Every year the Friends of Tandy Hills hosts a First Day hike over the perimeter trail, which is usually done in a group. This year they continued last year’s option of going solo and emailing them and getting a certificate for completing it solo. I haven’t gotten around to submitting for a certificate but I will say it was a lovely 2.5 mile hike. Plus, we got to see sections of the new Broadcast Hill purchase that has expanded this little prairie remnant just east of downtown Fort Worth. As it was…