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Finding All the Plants
It’s spring and so I am in my happy space–there are PLANTS BLOOMING AND MORE TO COME! I’ve been out hiking a lot recently, trying to wrap up what remains of trails for my Big Thicket region hiking guidebook, and so I have been seeing a lot of interesting plants and sights recently. I’ve essentially given up on trying to keep this blog to the detail I used to be able to and so this is what you are going to get from me now (this is a note for future me when I get mad at past me for not writing about such and such thing.). My favorite place…
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It all sucks.
I knew it would hurt even worse this time around. But I didn’t expect the visceral gut punch, ripping out of my appendix, cutting off the blood supply to the limbs it would be. It isn’t like everyone who knew what this would be like, including myself, hadn’t warned, and warned, and warned. Somehow enough people memory-holed the first term and thought well, it won’t be so bad for me and decided to toss the rest of us to the oligarchs and fascists and well, here we are. “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then…
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January 2024 Reads
January started off as a really good month for reading. I set my goal for 40 books again this year, back up from 30 last year. I’m intending to go into this year reading good books and by that I mean by reading books I want to read and especially more fiction. I think I’ve read a bunch of filler books in recent years which have been less appetizing to the reading palate than I thought they would be. I’m going to get back into monthly or quarterly summaries here so I hope those who enjoy reading will also like this! And as always, please share what you are reading.…
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Snow Day
After a week of forecasts for snow, late Monday evening finally arrived and the first inklings of the proposed 2-5″ of snow in our region arrived. The forecast went up and down for days, but mostly stayed in the 2-4″ range for us, though some areas closer to the coast said they would have 6″+. That never really materialized in Texas but it sure did in parts of Louisiana! There were some veritable snow drifts from an internet acquaintance in New Orleans and her kids even managed to have a decent sledding experience on the side of an overpass hill near their house! For us, Forest finally got to use…
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Spiranthes vernalis | Wildflower Wednesday
Years ago, when our front yard was frequently flooding after heavy rain events we had a random Spiranthes orchid show up in the lawn. We hadn’t mown in that area in weeks, maybe months, due to the persistent wet weather that had left ponding in the front yard. Chris managed to clear some of the drains that go under our driveway and our neighbor’s driveway one year and the yard now dries out much better after these events. However, about two years ago we started converting this low lying area in the yard into a more natural swale area, planting bottomland species to diversify and attract wildlife. I hadn’t seen…
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January 20, 2017 Redux
On this day 8 years ago I wrote It’s Time to Pay Attention. Reflecting back, and as someone said on social media elsewhere the other day, we didn’t resist enough from 2017-2021. We failed to hold Trump accountable after January 6th. Somehow South Korea managed to imprison their president after a coup attempt but ours is going unpunished. Good times! But that post from January 20, 2017, much of it still holds. There are some journalists I would not put up there any longer because they showed their true colors and are grifters. But most of them I would still recommend, especially the Cassandra of them all, Sarah Kendzior. She…
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Gus Engeling WMA in August
Another old draft here, this one from August 2023 and a trip to Gus Engeling WMA. It was one of our trips up towards Dallas when we were picking up or dropping Forest of with grandparents before school started. I can feel the heat from this post just reading through and looking at the photos. We didn’t get a really good trip into GEWMA this last summer due to the spring floods, which damaged access to the sandhill section on the north end of the WMA. We didn’t know it was closed when we were going to drop by and visit and so we ended up exploring the southern section…
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Bogging in Angelina National Forest
These photos are from October 2022, though they feel like they are from much more recently — no, now they feel ancient. I started drafting this a year or so ago and never published it, so I’m making an effort to launch some of my older drafts on here. So much has changed since 2022! This is from a bog near Boykin Springs in Angelina National Forest, a really cool area that I’d like to get back out to this spring, between Big Thicket hiking trips. Ribbed Mock Bishopweed (Ptilimnium costatum) with a green lynx spider and her egg case. Black swallowtail caterpillar on the ribbed mock bishopweed Pitcher plant…
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Hoya multiflora blooms
A couple of months ago I adjusted the lighting on my grow lights in my office at work to be on for 12 hrs instead of 8 hrs. The plants have all responded rather happily and my Hoya multiflora suddenly put on bloom spikes! I bought this plant off Etsy back in the summer and it came with flowers so I wasn’t expecting it to bloom again so soon, but here we are. Because the plants were doing so well, I ordered a second grow light for the other side of the shelf these are on and so I could also adjust one of the lights to filter light down…
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Best Books & Music of 2024
Reading This year I lowered my reading expectations, intending to tackle a pile of magazines and longer books I needed to read this year. I typically read between 40-60 books a year and thought 30 would be a good number to aim for instead of going above and beyond. Well, I hit 40 books a few days ago, picking up some steam in the last couple of months when I thought had burned out. I also read some of the magazines but definitely didn’t tackle the longer books I wanted to read. Looking at you 2025. I still listened to quite a few audiobooks but am trying to shift away…
