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Reading, Writing, Creating (and Health) in 2024
Drosera capillaris, Chuluota Wilderness Area – Florida, 2020 December turned out to be busier than I expected, so my goal to write here daily went *poof*. Such is life! Forest had several school functions, I had some last minute doctors appointments, including my third MRI of the year, as I tried to milk the most of out having met my deductible earlier this year. So far in 2023 I have received pretty digital pictures of my hips, brain, and now my cervical spine! This was certainly the year to figure out so many health issues. I managed to get my hip mostly into decent condition again with four months of…
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Sugar Makes Everything Better
Our orange tree produced a pile of oranges this year but none of us were eating them. I had been thinking about doing something with them, a jelly perhaps, but Chris brought up making marmalade. I let him take over that responsibility and while I took Forest to swimming lessons on Wednesday evening Chris made marmalade in the kitchen. It’s been many years since we’ve made any kind of jelly, much less actually canned something. It’s a lot of work but certainly worth it in the end. I had Chris keep the peels for about half of the oranges he wasn’t going to use and ended up making candied orange…
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Down but Not Out
*TLDR: Short backstory for what I’m talking about. Energy company created Fairfield Lake for cooling water for its power plant back in late 1960s. Early 1970s, they asked the state to put a state park in on part of the land. State leased the land for ‘free’ (re: yes, monetarily free to landowner but also consider the millions in infrastructure and staff put in by the state, but also the repercussions for the plant to pollute, tax incentives, etc, etc…so very much tit for tat here…) for 50 years. Energy company went bankrupt in mid 2010s, closed plant in 2018, decided to sell off portion of their property, 5000 acres…
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Mountain Pinks (Zeltnera beyrichii) at Pedernales Falls State Park
Turns out when you stop blogging and trying to feed things through social media you just stop sharing all of the good stuff you have backlogged. Which means I have many things from the last three years to share, plus I know I do have the tail-end of Alaska in 2019 to share, too. We encountered these mountain pinks on the south side Pedernales Falls State Park, some along CR 201 but the white ones were encountered along the Juniper Ridge Trail in the far southeast section of the park. This was back in June 2021 when we rented a cute AirBnB in Dripping Springs for my birthday. Now revisiting…
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Arkansas Green Lint Cotton
Arkansas Green Lint Cotton I’ve not been a very diligent gardener this year. One of the ornamental crops I planted back in the summer, when I was trying to find anything that would thrive in the drought, was some green cotton I’d bought last year off of Etsy. I have grown brown cotton in the past and did try to germinate some this time around but because I didn’t label things how I should have, I wasn’t sure which plant row was what so I didn’t know if it was green or brown I would be getting because one of the rows had poor germination. The bolls have been ripening…
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A Couple of Lizards at Pedernales Falls State Park
Common Spotted Whiptail, Aspidoscelis gularis Greater Earless Lizard, Cophosaurus texanus July 2021
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Hello Out There…A Little Update
Powdered Dancer, Argia moesta It’s been a hot minute since I’ve written here. I intended to step away to try to do some writing for NaNoWriMo again but I did very little. Instead I spent October and November trying to get my head on straight and attempting to get into the holiday season a little earlier than usual. NaNo fell apart, though I still intend to do more writing soon, and the back half of the month fell into heavy Fairfield Lake State Park advocacy after about two months of quiet. I have been writing about all of that over on my On Texas Nature Substack. I guess I should…
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Roadside Rudbeckias
I have wanted to grow some of our more gregarious Rudbeckia species for several years but it wasn’t until this year, in my small native plant bed inside the deer fence, that I was able to do this. I’m always enamored with how they look when I spot them on roadsides. These were on the road near the Hickory Creek Savannah Unit of the Big Thicket, where the Sundew Trail is located. I spotted them as we were leaving that unit back in May and had Chris pull over so I could take a few photos. I believe these are Rudbeckia texana but there’s also R. maxima and R. grandiflora…
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Stale Cigarettes
In recent years there has been talk about how we’re losing certain words and even accents in our lexicon as language adapts and changes. One thing I hadn’t considered was lost smells, or at least fading smells. Over the last weekend I was in DFW to visit some friends and after we’d spent some time browsing and becoming over stimulated with the Christmas décor at Decorator’s Warehouse, we were all lamenting how we should have eaten lunch before embarking on our shopping excursion. Now, I eat on a fairly regular schedule, as Chris will attest to, so I knew better than to leave our campsite without eating lunch. But my…
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Life Lately | October 2023
The newly minted 9 year old with his leopard print Snuggie. Thinking: I started drafting this in early September, intending to do a Life Lately for that month but stopped writing. So here’s an expansion from that month: Forest turned 9 last month! 9!!!! We are fully into the tween years and I’m enjoying it so far. Next steps are to try to cultivate more independence, which he’s doing on his own in some manner, but needs a push in some areas. Plus chores. More chores need to be on the agenda! The best kiddo ever! Also, I’m very heavily into “Wow, I’m middle aged now” thoughts. They strike at…
