+When I get out of the natural rhythm of life it always takes me several days to bounce back.

+Last weekend I drove to east Texas to visit one of my best friends Michelle. Her daughter’s 4th birthday was this weekend—I can’t believe that one! I came to Texas a few weeks after she was born 4 years ago and met Kylen as a tiny baby and now she’s this tall, long haired, spitting-image-of-her-momma kid! It was fun, there were cupcakes, balloons, meeting Michelle and J.P.’s extended family and friends…it was great! Now that I found an easier way to get there, (I took a different way to get there, driving two-lane backroads through several nasty thunderstorms in the dark…I was very nervous a few times and kept being paranoid about potential flash floods lurking at the bottom of hills) J.P. told me of a better way to go that included part of their path to get to College Station to visit Michelle’s brother and it was much faster and involved mostly four lane highways with speed limits of at least 65 m.p.h. or more.

+We pulled most of our onions on Sunday. Now our computer room, where we are drying them out for a week before storing them, smells really onion-y. We had to close the door because both cats were too enticed to be near them.

+In the creative realm I need to finish a drawing and a quilt and I have so much to write—blogs and ‘real’ writing too.

Maybe I will get caught up this weekend…

What is going on with you?

Rosemarie and me with our friends Robert and Eric. They didn’t go to TAMUG, but Eric sailed on the Texas Clipper II in 1998 with us.

Rosemarie and me.

Another Rose from TAMUG! Hi Rose!

One of my best friends, Erika, and my first college roomate Marsha.

When my 10 year high school reunion came up four years ago (!) it didn’t seem that strange, it did feel like I’d been out of high school that long. Well, it has now been 10 years since I’ve been out of college and that does seem strange. Ten years ago I walked across the stage with most of my friends at the The Grand 1984 Opera House in Galveston. I got married a month later and then moved to Florida where we stayed for 8 years.

I read a couple of blogs where the authors are just graduating college or recently out of college and they seem to be taking that next step, not sure where they are going. The only thing I can say is that, its ok. Your life in 10 years will more than likely be vastly different, as will be your goals and dreams. I am not a marine biologist but I am still vastly interested in biology, just in a different way.

Time changes, we change, but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep a little piece of the past along with it, some of the hopes and dreams of back then. Back then I was hoping for work with sea turtles, now, while that would be an awesome job, I’d rather have a giant garden, or be going somewhere with a backpack on my back instead.

Who knows what another 10 years from now will look like. Hopefully it involves being a successful author/artist/photographer (far cry from that marine biology degree, huh?). One thing I know is, to be what you want to be and make those ideas come to fruition, you have to do the work.

It’s time for me to start doing the work.

I’ve officially been calling myself vegetarian for a year! Time has flown by and while I knew I would make it this long I think I wasn’t sure how long I would keep it up beyond this. Since things have been going swimmingly I plan on keeping this as my food lifestyle until I decide otherwise. That said, I *am* looking forward to my birthday because I plan on eating a large portion of sushi.

Throughout this year I’ve read various food blogs, some meat eating, some veg, some into the primal/paelo thing, others into organic/whole living, and there are many thoughts you can glean from them all. In all most of them stress a whole food, unprocessed way of eating which I have come to think is probably the most important thing if you are looking at bettering your diet.

As for being vegetarian I am always trying to be better, to eat healthier instead of leaning on pastas and rice or other soy based ‘fake’ meats. I use them on occasion but they don’t make up the bulk of my diet. I don’t even eat that much tofu, rarely buying it, but I do love tofu in Thai and Chinese dishes—I just need to figure out how to cook it like they do.

I think the biggest struggle is being out on road trips and finding something quick to eat. It is really something I need to start preparing for at home better and taking more foods with me, I just haven’t figured that part out yet. I think it frustrates Chris because he always rags on me about going somewhere that I can eat at. Since he has been doing field work the last several months he’s not kept to eating mostly vegetarian and I think that is part of the problem, we aren’t on the same page while traveling so we’re trying to juggle finding something for both dietary needs. My biggest problem with this is that while I *can* find a place to eat with a vegetarian option is something greasy or carb loaded like fries, potatoes or fried vegetables. Not exactly healthy either.

The other frustrating thing is that yes, I can eat a salad, but then I have to pay the same price as it would be with meat, only have them take the meat off. Hardly seems fair. More vegetarian options, please restaurants! I do like Subway having avocado to add to the sandwiches now, it bulks up a veggie sub much better.

The question of protein keeps coming up from various people and my answer is that I get it from beans, eggs, nuts/nut butters and quinoa. I don’t eat all of those on a daily basis, but at least one of them, the quinoa is probably a once a week thing. I haven’t had my blood tested or anything, but I feel fine. I don’t feel like I’m struggling for lack of anything.

Recently I started trying to eliminate coffee from a daily occurrence. When we were on the A.T. and F.T. I didn’t drink coffee due to its diuretic effects and I didn’t want to be stopping to pee every mile during the morning. I felt good not drinking so much coffee and really enjoyed it even more when we were in town stops, lingering over the coffee and chatting with other hikers. It was a treat. Lately I’d been feeling foggy in the late afternoons and sort of exhausted, I started thinking of a possible culprit. So, I eliminated coffee and switched to tea. Generally I drink herbal teas but I’ve been using up some White/Green Tea fusion and some other strawberry flavored black tea and then adding in coconut milk (the kind that is refrigerated) to sweeten it up and have been enjoying that. I know it has caffeine but it hasn’t made me feel nearly as jittery or drained. While I do have that general end-of-day tiredness from staring at screen all day, I don’t feel like I want to curl up and sleep the minute I get home.

My goal for the next year is to just start being more balanced with my eating and remembering to eat well, lay off the cheese so much and ease up on sugars and deserts. I know there is much more to being vegetarian and others talk about various nutrients like Allie at Colour Me Happy recently did regarding B12.

It is definitely a learning experience!

Two previous posts regarding this journey:
+Going Veg
+Thoughts on 6 Months of Being Vegetarian

+Digging through my photo folders and found this from a few weekends ago when we harvested the last of the snap peas. We saved several pods and dried them for use next Fall.

+Still trying to catch up from being gone last weekend. It always takes me several days to get caught up.

+And getting caught up involves going through and processing all the photos I need to write the many blogs I’m working on.

+Looking forward to a very creative weekend, hopefully. I hope it involves lots of writing, some quilting, and finishing and art project. Maybe throw some reading, gardening and chick-flick/period drama movies in the mix.

How was your week?

I started going through photos I took several weekends ago in Austin and came across this photo of a prickly poppy. I loved it so much but wondered if it was good for anything other than a nice quote. I’d read and article regarding Thoreau, about the change in bloom times in many species of plants in New England. Thoreau had kept an excellent record of the flora and fauna in Concord and now scientists are comparing his data to data they are collecting now. It is very fascinating stuff, phenology.

Thoreau was on my mind and so I chose the quote above.

I’m over at Sprout Dispatch today….drop by and say hi.

+The boys really enjoy the doors being open so they can soak up the sunlight. Samson especially is missing his ability to hang out for hours on end on a porch. We had a screened in porch everywhere we lived in Florida (very typical of Florida) and thus here in Texas that isn’t available and he gets disappointed. Leo was never really allowed to wander out on the porch because he makes a ruckus of things, but he too loves the sun.

+Our Sunday was anticipated to be full of hiking but then the weather said it was supposed to be 70% chance of rain and t-storms. That never developed. So, instead we did odds and ends, running errands and the such. Oh and a two hour nap! Chris spent time making a carrot cake from carrots in our garden (more on that later) and I made homemade mac and cheese with some ginger ale glazed carrots on the side.

+I stayed up the other night, April 14th, and watched The History Channel live Tweet the sinking of the Titanic. It was very eerie. I remember when the ship was found in the 80s and Robert Ballard put out a book for kids about the Titanic. Everyone traded back and forth checking it out at the library—this was in elementary school. I tried finding the right one on Amazon to share here but I couldn’t. But, I know it was pre-1990 because I was in elementary before then.

+And then someone else tweeted that concurrently 147 years ago was the night Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s theater and how they would be carrying him across the street to the house where he later died. Weird, weird, weird!

+Figuring out which okra I’m going to order. I’m thinking Hill Country Heirloom Red and Stewarts Zeebest to go with I think Eagle Pass that we have from my mom’s garden last year.

+I’m over at Sprout Dispatch today, so check it out!

+Leo and Samson say “Meow!”

What? A post from me on the weekend???

Swamp mallow leaves….

Two banded water snakes, well, this is the same snake, but there were two hanging out where we were in the swamp the last day I was out.

+I ended up in the swamp for two days for work at the end of the week. Thought it was going to seep into the weekend but it thankfully didn’t. I was back in the Big Thicket where I was working last spring/early summer. It felt like coming home—which is funny because it is a swamp and very wet.

+It got a little boring for awhile though because we had to wait and wait and wait for the guys we were out monitoring to get their equipment up and working. And it was slow going and in the swamp there is rarely anywhere to sit. The second place we ended up yesterday I managed to find a set of cypress knees up against a cypress that allowed me to cautiously sit on them, pokey as they were. When we arrived out there the water was down and mostly muddy with some areas of water. This section is tidally influenced despite being a freshwater marsh, but also influenced by a salt water barrier (read: dam…ugh) up the way and our boat driver, who lives on the Neches, thinks they closed the dam off which further increased the amount of tide water that came up by the time we left the swamp. It was pretty deep some in some channels when we left, up to nearly our waist.

+I think I am weird. I love the smell of rotting sargassum and I love the smell of swamp mud and all it sulphur glory. I also prefer sulphur to sulfur.

+Being out of the office was definitely nice! But, I missed my garden and my cats too. I miss my old job in this sense…I was able to get out in the field or swap it with the office whenever I wanted, but then was able to go home at the end of the day. At this job if I am in the field I am definitely away from home, as most projects are not in the immediate vicinity of my house. There are always tradeoffs with any job.

+Chris is coming home from Pennsylvania today! Very happy to see him again! I think we are going to try to get a hike in tomorrow as long as these mid-western storms don’t come to SE Texas earlier than their anticipated Monday arrival.

+The garden managed to stay alive despite two days without water. Well, mostly. Two eggplant seedlings bit the dust. They were weak looking anyway. We’ll find some starts elsewhere I suppose.

+Bought myself a cheap journal to turn into an art journal after being inspired by The Art Journaler a new website started in part by Mandy Steward. I have a feeling it will be art journal/easy scrapbook. I kind of like the idea!

+Was bummed to miss the Migration Celebration dinner that was last night due to my work commitments. The opening of the photo contest and the winners were to be announced so I have no idea if one of my five photos submitted won anything. Next weekend is the main celebration events and I’m hoping to drive down to Lake Jackson and check it out.

+As we are launching pretty much straight into summer already, I love seeing the blogs of those further north, the ones that are just now awakening to spring.

+Hope to get some more posts up this week from things I’ve done over the last several weeks….”Just keep swimming”as Dory always said.

What are you up to?

March went by fast. I’m actually not sure what I did, or at least I feel like it just slipped through my fingers.

Since January I’ve slowly been feeling the accumulating ‘meh’ that has come with Chris being gone in the field. With him having just about every other weekend off, and then during the in-between weekends I will visit him at his hotel for the evening, really that is only how much I see him. Of course we tend to cram everything we can into the two or three days he is off, talking about whatever issues we need to discuss, having mini-adventures, doing errands, napping, watching movies.

At first it was nice having some time alone after we were together nearly 24/7 for 1.5 years (see photo above of us on the Appalachian Trail in Maryland, June 2010). Two thru-hikes, two field jobs and the downtime in between, we really saw each other all the time. Then, we didn’t. I really don’t like it. I know, the upside is he has a job, we are fairly happy with where we are in life but this isn’t exactly how I envisioned our life to be. It’s supposed to be temporary and I keep telling myself this but I’m worried it won’t be.

So, I’m here, we’re doing things when we can and in the meantime I am at home doing the random things I do. Which brings me to trying to figure out a wrap-up to March’s toll on my word for the year, prolific.

Running and other outdoor activities: Early in the month I went on a six mile hike with a friend from the Appalachian Trail, RedHat. She lives about an hour or so away and it was great to see her and hike in Sam Houston National Forest on the Lone Star Trail for an afternoon. Running wise I didn’t make many more miles than February but I ran more, as in instead of running two or three miles on any given day during a week I did three days of one mile each. This was because I switched over to running in my Vibram Five Fingers. Since the feeling and running is different everyone I talked to told me to ease into it. I’m finally feeling like I will be ok running more than a mile at any given time so I will be upping the mileage soon. My calves definitely feel the burn and when I’m done I feel like they look in some of my hiking pictures: lean, mean, muscle machines. Now, if I could get my abs to look and feel like that….

Creative: I only wrote 2,000 words this month. I started giving myself a writers block and because I tend to give myself too much to do during the week I opted to focus on something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, rework my section of Wildscape Photo. It is *almost* complete, I need to adjust the navigation buttons and insert a page for the image index. The image index will be a comprehensive list of the photos and where they are within the galleries. The gallery system we use (I don’t think) is searchable to search engines so I want the titles to be searchable within a page. Not only that I want a potential client/customer to be able to scan the index list if they are looking for something in particular and then be able to go directly to that gallery and check it out. I’m hoping in the next week to have that finished. Then I want to slowly go through my hard drive and get photos up there that need to be on there. I will also be adding a garden section—well, two really—one for our own garden and then another for public gardens. Lots to do!

Also in the creative section I started working on a drawing for a friend at the beginning of the month but never got around to finishing it. Another thing I did was submit five of my photos to the Friends of Brazoria Wildlife Refuges: Migration Celebration photo contest. I found out about it when I went to the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory and decided to enter with only about a 1.5 weeks left to submit. Next week is the opening of the photo contest and the kickoff dinner for the Migration Celebration which is held the following weekend. I’m hoping to go to the dinner and maybe to the celebration events too if work and other commitments don’t conflict.

Reading: Still reading the same books. Must finish them.

April is already proving itself to be very, very busy so I’m just going to attempt to bury my head into one or two projects and finish them. I also need to start a baby blanket for a coworker and the last thing I need to be doing is starting another project, but alas I am a maker and I need to make something for someone else.

I might have to have another blog-free week in a couple of weeks to dive straight into these things!

Chel was just writing about where some of her time went the last month and she realized it went to gardening. It was then that I realized that was what happened to me as well. And while all of that is good and I enjoy being out, I need to leave the weeds some days and just water and get out of there and on to other things I want to get done. I can easily spend 1-2 hours there every evening and if I was prolific at anything last month it was being prolific in the garden. Planting, weeding, watering—growing things!

I have a long weekend that I am looking forward to.

Have an enjoyable Easter weekend for those who celebrate Easter!

I had a whirlwind weekend up in DFW spent mostly with friends, dear friends, and a smidge of time spent with my family. Zoe got to spend the night at my parent’s house Saturday night which meant hanging out with Aunt T (me) a lot, only I had to leave earlier than I would have normally so I could spend some time with friends, particularly one that only comes to town every so often because she lives full time in California. It was an excellent weekend and I will share some photos soon.

(I’m pretty sure Zoe has a mouthful of Fruity Pebbles, so hopefully you can’t see the chewed up pieces!)

My week ‘off’ of blogging last week was great. I accomplished *some* of what I wanted to get done but not everything, which is normal because I always put too much on my plate. Finally I relented and decided to focus on one thing which helped because I got a lot done. I’ll let you know what that was soon because I’m not completely done with it.

This week will be similar, light on blogging but I have a few posts up my sleeve—hopefully.

I’m also at Sprout Dispatch today!

How was your weekend?

Howdy! Spring is in full swing and so this week, other than one post I have scheduled for Wednesday, I am taking time off. I need to get some work done on my book, finish a drawing and this coming weekend I’m spending time with my college friends. So, as much I have to write up and share here, I need to focus on some other things. Today I am over at Sprout Dispatch and you can subscribe and follow the garden antics of the three of us over there, but I’ll be back here next week.

Time to get some work done!

And because I’m obsessed with them right now, listen to some The Head and the Heart. If you like indie rock, folk, or singer-songwriter music, they are one to watch.