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Two-striped Mermiria, Mermiria bivittata & Orchelimum sp. | Wildlife Wednesday
Mostly sharing these two because they have been sitting in my drafts for eons! I took their photos back in July 2021 in Dripping Springs when we went there for my birthday and unfortunately I’m just now getting around to sharing their pretty portraits!
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Late Summer Evening Walk
Back in September I took an early evening walk around the neighborhood to scope out a few things I saw blooming. Seeing these photos once again has me seriously ready for spring and summer to come. I spent some time in the garden today (drafting this on Sunday evening) and it was so great to be doing gardening things, and looking at these photos just has me looking forward to warmth again. Soon…soon. Ascelpias linearis in our garden. Some oleander aphids photobombing as well. Kuschelina thoracica, a flea beetle. Zephyranthes carinata in our right-of-way, an introduced species we planted. Hyptis alata, musky mint, down by the pond shoreline. Blue-gray Gnatcatcher,…
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Early Winter at Watson | Silent Sunday
December 10, 2023 view of Geraldine Watson’s cabin at Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve I grew up in the, as I say, these beautiful woodlands and everything. And on Sunday afternoons my mother would take us walking in the woods flower-picking. And we would pick Birdfoot Violets and Winecups and all those things. And mother would point plants to us that her mother had made medicines from and dyes from. And she would tell us stories all about how they made their own cloth and all that. And, then I learned the trees from my father who worked for a lumber company. And, the mill there at Doucette was a…
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Best Books of 2023
In 2023 I set the goal to read 40 books in my Goodreads challenge. I hit 42 and spent December thinking I would read two more but just never did. And that’s fine. I lowered my goal to 30 this year because I want to read a giant stack of magazines I have piled up in addition to some thicker books I’ve been putting off for a while. Audiobooks will still fill in many gaps and I suspect I’ll surpass 30 books easily but I prefer to ease up on myself on this end a bit. I looked over the books I read in 2023 on Goodreads and realized it…
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First Day Hike at Lake Arrowhead State Park
It was January 2022 the last time we did a First Day Hike, that time we tromped around Tandy Hills and the newly opened Broadcast Hill trail system. Last year my parents were at our house for New Year’s so we didn’t get out for a hike. This year we spent the week after Christmas in DFW before Chris and I drove to Wichita Falls on New Years Eve to stay at our favorite B&B, the Harrison House in Wichita Falls. We first stayed there in late 2021 after our Charon’s Garden Wilderness Hike in the Wichita mountains and stayed there again on our drive back from New Mexico in…
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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…
