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In the Kitchen: Making
It’s taken awhile but I am slowly feeling like I can begin doing my old kitchen experiments once again. I may not be getting wild hairs on a Friday night at 8pm to make homemade pasta (done it!) but I feel like I can tackle some small projects in the kitchen once again. Suffice to say, the last 15 months have been hard, the first 9-12 months of that the roughest. An adjustment period. Some of the more curated blogs and social media sites are very great about depicting the ability for a new mother to keep up with her old ways, or even a mother with a new baby…
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Currently | Late December
+In My Head Another year is just about over. I’m looking forward to 2016 and moving on from 2015. 2015 was a good year but the first half felt quite heavy. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in 2016 but I do know my parent’s 40th anniversary is in June and my dad turns 60 in September, so those are two milestones to be looking foward to. I had planned to try to work with Forest on potty training/elimination communication harder during this Christmas break but he came down with RSV and has been extra clingy, sleeping like crap, and lost his appetite, so working with him on that…
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Another Sunday Hike On The Chinquapin Trail At Huntsville State Park
We first hiked this loop back in late March when Forest was almost 7 months old! This time we opted for a clockwise route instead of the counterclockwise route. The trail is the orange line on this map. It was a little chillier than I expected when we set out that morning and I was thankful that I had a hoodie on my fleece jacket. The sky was overcast and while there were some storms west of us in Austin, we didn’t expect to be impacted during our hike. There were lots of prints in the first creek crossing we visited, some we could identify and others we couldn’t. Chris…
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Rainier From The Road | Wordless Wednesday
As seen from I-90, heading west
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Aasgard Pass Descent
If you’ve been reading here long enough you know that Chris and I went to Seattle and the Cascades for our 10th anniversary in 2012. I never actually finished sharing the photos from that time and since I don’t always have a lot of excursions and adventures to share these days, I thought would try to finish sharing those photos over the next few weeks. If you missed any of those posts you can flip through them here. The big chunk of time we spent in Washington State, the primary reason for going, was to hike in the Enchantment Lakes. We had a permit for the Core Enchantment Zone which…
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Compost Bin Update
When we installed the compost bin in early 2013 we knew that because we were using natural, untreated materials that we would eventually face rotting and need to come up with a different design. The compost bin is sill functioning but it is definitely in a state of slow decomposition. We’re going to have to come up with another game plan in another year or so. Here’s a chronicle of the pile over the last three years, with related posts near the bottom. Pre-compost pile, October 2012 January 2013 August 2013 November 2013 December 2015 Relevant Posts: The Future Compost Pile Compost Bin Complete Compost Bin Update
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Soul Gardening
Last Friday was our work Christmas party and we were able to go home a few hours early after the festivities. Chris was out of town in southern Louisiana for work, a four day trip that turned into 12 days. The weather was unseasonably warm, low 80s, and so I opted to take advantage of a few hours of solo time in the garden while Forest was still in daycare. It was glorious to get some uninterrupted gardening time in but I still felt pressed for time, not accomplishing the amount of tasks I would have normally been able to handle pre-kid. It was ok, though, I weeded half of…
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Wonder at Moody Gardens Pt. 1
I’ve written about Moody Gardens before. I worked there my senior year of college (2001-2002) in the education department staffing touch tanks and talking at the exhibits. The aquarium hadn’t changed in 2011 when we visited and it hadn’t changed *much* this time around but they were in the process of adding in a new exhibit in the center of the building, a tall, ciruclar aquarium that will go between the two floors of the aquarium where previously you could look down from the center on the second floor. That said, it still was a little ‘meh’ in many regards however Forest was very interested when we went over Thanksgiving…
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Beach Combing
Galveston Island State Park, Thanksgiving Weekend 2015
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Late November Gardening
The weeks just slip on by, don’t they? And the garden still needs to be cleaned up to head into winter. I have no idea when this will happen. Short of digging out Chris’ monster fishing/work light to work in the dark in the evenings, it will probably be after Christmas until we formally hit the yard for cleanup. The butterfly ginger, above, needs to be trimmed back as a few of the stalks have gotten a little unwieldy. But, they are still blooming despite mid 30’s temperatures in the mornings. The woodland painted petals, Anomatheca laxa, are coming back again for a third round in the garden. This has…