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Wetland Conversion Down On The Pond
So, before I start this post let’s travel back in time to late June and early July 2012 when we moved into our house. We were coming off of the 2011 drought and even had some drought conditions (and flood) throughout 2012, which also meant some lower water levels in the pond our property abuts. You can see Chris here getting a hole ready to dig to plant a new tree, a water tupleo which died last year, likely from the deep freeze we had. The hailstorm a few months later didn’t help when new leaves were coming out. But, I digress. The stream that feeds our pond has brought…
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Art with Hummingbirds
While in New Mexico I had hopes to spend more time working on some sketchbook art, primarily my perpetual nature journal that I started in early September last year. I’m several months behind because I sunk into a pit of not doing anything in May so I’ve been continuously working to get back on top of things. A perpetual nature journal is one that has some flexibility but ideally you are using one page or set of pages to chronicle something in nature for a certain time period on every year until that page is full. Mine is set up weekly, though the weeks will slide a bit as they…
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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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Pool Day
Several summers ago we attempted to make it a summer routine by heading to our local city swimming pool. Forest was 3 or 4 at at the time and we had barely tested the waters with one swimming lesson in the backyard pool of someone who gave lessons. It wasn’t a match at the time because Forest hadn’t spent a ton of time in pools or waters like that, so the community pool was the easiest place to initiate more of a relationship to water and pools like this in the summer. I still kick myself for not getting around to doing swimming lessons when he was a baby and…
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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…
