Thinking: I’m cranky. People are idiots. It starts at the leadership, for one. Let’s open everything up! No, you don’t need a mask! Who needs masks? We won’t force our citizens to care for their fellow citizens. Nope, no way! And what happens? Increasing COVID-19 cases across many states, including Texas. Recording breaking numbers this month, multiple days in a row. Spikes here, spikes there, everywhere a spike! Spike for you, and you, and you! I went to the grocery store again this month for our big trip and it was nearly the opposite of how it was three weeks prior. Three weeks prior 70% were wearing masks. This time,…

Big Thicket National Preserve Pitcher Plant Bog I didn’t mean to go dormant over here this week. I had another post drafted called The Depths of Despair, where I was going to quote Anne Shirley after she found out Marilla Cuthbert didn’t want an orphan girl for Green Gables. Anne’s despondent and dramatic depths of despair is often how I’ve felt for the last few weeks and last week I was feeling it a bit harder. I scrapped that post but here I am to catch up a bit. As the title suggests, there are scattered thunderstorms around today. Thunder is rumbling in the distance and Forest is rolling around…

Thinking: Basically my thoughts run from COVID-19 to regular life in almost the same thought. “OMG, we’re all going to die!”…half a second later, “Mmm, looks nice outside, I think we’ll do pool in the afternoon and I’ll crochet while Forest plays!” As someone who has been in exactly two buildings since mid-March, my own house and my work office, I have definitely felt a little bit disoriented at times. I haven’t even been to my work office in at least three weeks, maybe four. I have to run up there tomorrow to get a GPS ready for someone but otherwise I’ve been at home. Chris has been going up…

I’m going to abandon my typical platform for writing these and just free write, ok? It’s been a fairly typical spring here in the greater Houston area, mild with bits of warmer days and tinges of humidity popping in here and there. Last night we received a cool front that dropped highs back down into the 60s once again and brought rain and thunderstorms along with it. And for someone who has pretty much been a homebody for the last two weeks, and in general, (exceptions have been two quick trips to the office to use my desktop up there) the rain is making me even more of a homebody.…

Ah, late February, how long ago you were. I casually said in that post that I was wondering how seriously we should be taking Covid-19. It was already on my mind and had been since January. When I flew to Florida there were people with masks on and it didn’t take until I had a conversation with someone at Billy Goat Day for it to register why. And then the flight back home, other people with masks on. It wasn’t a lot but it was enough to think a little bit harder about the implications. Sometime around that post I told Chris we should add a few extra items to…

Thinking: +About getting back into processing Alaska photos… +Super Tuesday–Go EW! +Trying to decide how panicky we should really be about Covid-19. I can’t help it, I keep wanting to call it Corvid-19. See corvid above. Really sounds like a Michael Crichton thriller. +Where did February go? If January was 10 months long, February was a week long. +I barely got anything done in February I wanted to do get done and I’m just now working on the major project I wanted go work on which was go through the pile of papers we had “to file” and figure out what really needed to be shredded and what needs to…

Thinking: Asleep. Then awake. A few months after Forest was born I opted to get an IUD put in as my method of birth control since I was still nursing and I couldn’t take regular birth control pills. Five years went exceedingly fast—I remember getting the card afterwards that said when to come back and thinking that it was ages into the future. Well, this fall I started trying to get this replacement on the schedule and through a series of poor communication with my midwife’s office it did not happen on the schedule I was hoping. Eventually it all got squared away and soon enough I was in the…

Originally when I began thinking about writing this post I thought I’d select posts from each year but that is proving to be a task because I am not one for brevity—all of my posts bring back a lot of memories and I think back about everything that occurred this decade and I want to share it all! So, I think I’ll go for a short photo series that encompasses the highlights, some good, some bad, some sad. Here’s my 2000-2009 In Review if you’d like to peruse that old post! 2010 The decade started off with my baby niece Ashleigh being born at 26 weeks gestation at the end…

Sometime in late 2010 I came to know of Florence + the Machine via the Lungs album. I bought the cd and ripped it to upload to my mp3 player and listened to the album on our 2011 Florida Trail thru-hike in the evenings while in the tent. Since then I’ve become a huge fan of her music and have bought her subsequent albums, mostly recently High As Hope, albeit over a year after it was released. I’m a little slow on the music front these days. It was really one of the songs from that album that I came across on Spotify that sealed the deal to get back…

Oof, we should have gone south for Thanksgiving. Instead we drove to Cooper Lake State Park for the long weekend to camp for the first time this season. We knew in advance that there was potential for rain, including thunderstorms, and for cooler to cold weather. So, we came prepared but I was heavily wishing this was one of those state parks that conveniently had covered picnic table areas at the campsites, but no such luck, our one pop-up tent had to suffice. Before we left I wanted Chris to get our bikes together so that we could ride with Forest. He’s getting to the point that I can’t keep…