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Skylight Dreams
As the heat ramps up again here in Texas (we had a brief respite of lower 90s on Friday after some rain), I dream a bit about the cabin in New Mexico that Chris and I stayed at last month. Being able to open the skylight to let fresh mountain air into the cabin was delightful. You can see a bit of the bookcase over on the other wall (and I’ll share more of it soon) which made the idea of reading in bed with the skylight open and an accessible library all day a rather wonderful activity to ponder and make a little of it happen. In an alternate…
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Things I’m Loving Lately
In Austin over the weekend we popped into an HEB to get some groceries for our short stay. I wanted to check out their kombucha case because HEB usually has the Live brand that is cream soda flavored. My Kroger only carries the root beer, which is fine, but I like the cream soda better. I picked up a couple of the cream sodas but then became enamored with these Greenbelt brand kombucha so I snagged the strawberry and peach. I drank the strawberry there and it is far better than GT’s and this may be my favorite brand now! Luckily our HEB has them too so I bought a…
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Second Quarter Reading Wrap-Up 2022
As per usual, I hit a reading slump around May which lasted through most of June. I didn’t finish a book for about six weeks but I am slowly climbing out of that hole. I will likely have another slump, based on years of noticing my pattern, sometime later this summer. Which is why I do a lot of reading at the beginning to the year to counterbalance it all. I’m currently at 35/45 for my Goodreads challenge and I suspect I will end up around the 60 book mark again this year when all is said and done. Audiobooks are still carrying a heavy weight in the count but…
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That Gnawing Feeling
Well, what a craptastic last week, eh? Chris and I escaped to New Mexico last week to celebrate our anniversary and while we had some wifi we were mostly off in lala land and not paying much attention to the news. I had even taken Twitter off of my phone earlier in the week so I wasn’t constantly tethered to the latest breaking story. We left our cabin in Pecos Friday morning to drive to Las Vegas for lunch and do a little shopping in their town center, when a few miles outside of town on I-25 the hosts for 98.1 Radio Free Santa Fe came on to break the…
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Zinnia Love
When I decided to dedicate one of my edible garden beds to flowers I was originally planning to make it half native and half zinnias or other flowers. That is what it is this year but I am planning to change that next year to an entirely native bed and move the zinnias to one of the side beds once they are finally built. But, I’m liking my idea for the year because the zinnias are so delightful and I am in awe of their beauty every time I go out to water the garden. My original inspiration for doing zinnias was in the gorgeous flowers that Cassiopeia Farm in…
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A Writing Habit: Step One – Get Out of Inertia
I’m going to attempt a not-quite-daily writing habit here this summer. It may be a few paragraphs, maybe just a few sentences, but the goal is to write more here which will hopefully lead to more writing outside of this blog. I miss the days when I could sit down and jot down a few paragraphs no matter how messy they were, just to share whatever thoughts were coming my way or to share a few quick photos. Somehow I got bogged down into my trip reports and well, you see how well that has gone as I’ve just abandoned sharing them because it seems like such a task to…
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Tomato Season Begins
It was a bit of a rocky start to tomato season and unseasonably hot temperatures in May thwarted a lot of the production but we are finally starting to harvest some tomatoes. So far they are all primarily Chris’ tomatoes that he ended up buying not long in the planting season after the ones he started from seed weren’t thriving. My tomatoes are doing well, a mix of ones I started from seed and others I supplemented with nursery grown plants, but I’m still a few weeks away from any appreciable harvest. And with summer temperatures and a lack of rain in the forecast, I’m not sure how much I…
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A Forced Slow Down
May was a very busy month for us and as I peered out into June and July, all I saw was busy, busy, busy. Don’t worry, it still looks like that, and with an ever growing pile of field work at work for a thin crew of field-bios-who-also-double-as-project-managers-and-other-indoorsy-type-biologist-job-descriptions, things are very chaotic. I was actually looking forward to last weekend with my parents and niece and nephew for the Labor Day weekend but if I had known that a late Thursday night headache would turn into a positive Covid test on Saturday morning, well, I would have done things differently. But here we are, a house full of Covid soup!…
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20-20-20-10
Ah, how is that for a cryptic post title? As I was writing recently, I have a lot going on. Merge that with a lot of major anniversaries/markings of time in May and June and well, 2022 is full to the brim! 20 Years Post-College Graduation May 11, 2002 I originally wrote up a post at 10 years here but wow, did the last 10 years fly by faster than the previous 10. Thankfully, I finally own my education fully as I paid off my student loan a couple of years ago! 20 Years of Blogging I published my first blog post on a Blogger account on June 3, 2002.…
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Life Lately | Mid-May 2022
Hello friends! Let’s make this a rambling post, shall we? I feel like summer is over. And by that, I mean, June and July is practically planned out and I can already see August and the start of school. Now, I usually keep a pretty good calendar in my head because I have a visual calendar and dates and such usually stick out well for me. But I have so much going on in May-July that I’ve had to write everything down! Between end-of-school activities, camping or outdoor events, visiting relatives (here or there), trips being taken, appointments, and so forth, I’m trying to find empty weekends for the summer.…
