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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…
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Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas, folks! I’m surrounded by gifts and wrapping paper and have turned the last episode (on Netflix) of Call the Midwife on to watch. Chris is cooking bacon and cinnamon rolls and Forest is trying his new and improved Kindle tablet out downstairs. Dusty is giving himself a Christmas morning bath on the back of the couch and Rusty, well, I’m not sure where he has disappeared to. Probably looking for bacon! Wishing everyone a wonderful Christmas and holiday season!
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Salvia madrensis Blooms + Bonus Orchid Spikes
A few years ago I bought a Salvia madrensis plant from the local nursery only to have it never make it to its late fall/winter blooming period as it ended up being nipped by a freeze. This year our very warm fall, soon-to-be winter, has allowed a new plant I bought earlier this year to actually spike and begin blooming. While a lot of the garden is attempting to rest, many plants are trucking along, though a bit weary. Salvia madrensis is not weary, as you can tell, and is rather lovely. I know eventually winter will catch up with us (I think?!) and it will move on into the…
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Thanksgiving Out West
I had better write something about Thanksgiving or else I will let the months pass by and I will never get around to writing here. And to be honest, I have never finished editing last Thanksgiving’s photos! Or writing here…or finishing up writing about Alaska. I truly have been trying to let go of my need to write chronologically and yet, here I am still fighting the desire. I believe the last time we set out for the Davis Mountains three years ago at Thanksgiving, we left on a Friday evening and stopped in Kerrville for the night. This time we left on Saturday morning, stopping in Sonora instead. Which…
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Winning at Writing
On a whim at the end of October I decided to actually participate in Nanowrimo. Back in the mid 2000s I gave it a half-hearted go and quit pretty early, enough that I didn’t even have any of it documented in my Nano account. I hadn’t logged in there in years and saw the last time I gave it a real whirl was in 2011, when I was writing my FT hiking memoir. I made it to something like 26K words, I believe, at that time. I accidentally deleted that after I logged in and tried to set up my new book. Oh well. The only way I was going…
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Friday 5 | 11/19/2021
It’s been a bit since I’ve done one of these, so let’s dive into five things I’ve been loving lately! +Lesson 6. Be wary of paramilitaries – via Timothy Snyder’s newsletter – I’ve listened to Mr. Snyder on a few podcast episodes, mostly to talk about his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which is on my ever growing stack of books to read, but I recently found out he has a newsletter so I subscribed. The first one to come through was this audio clip about paramilitaries and it is extremely prescient to today’s times. +City Cast Houston – This is a podcast and newsletter hosted…