Thoughts
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Sunday Reads + Listens
Some things I’ve read and listened to in the last few months that have resonated with me. How to support the artists + writers you love via Ashlee Gadd. 1. If they write something lovely that resonates with you, leave a comment. When you leave a comment on a blog post or essay or article, that is your way of saying, “I’m here! I read this!” Comments (well, nice ones) make the writer feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. You don’t need to leave a comment on every post—just once in a while when something really resonates with you. That Favorite Place via Rambling Hemlock So I lay on…
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Life Lately | Mid-January 2018
+In My Head Well, 2018 has started with a bang! Almost two weeks ago (tomorrow) Forest came down with a fever one evening and was feeling rather awful with runny nose, coughing, etc. Considering the flu has been horrible around here this year I was worried we were heading that direction. After all was said and done I’m not sure if we had the flu or a very bad cold, but either way I came down with it the following Monday evening and subsequently took 4 days of PTO. I was going to take three but that Friday Forest was cranky again and we both stayed home because we were…
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One Little Word | 2017 Recap and Plans for 2018
*cue record scratching sound* I had about a paragraph typed up in here from a draft over the New Year’s weekend but never got around to finishing the post up. Back to the drawing writing board I go! Honestly, it wasn’t until about a week ago that I really focused on what 2018’s word would be. And I hadn’t given a ton of reflection onto what 2017’s word was until I went back through my archives and remembered what it was. To really get my feet firmly planted in the direction I want to go for 2018, I downloaded the Year Compass to close out 2017 and start brainstorming on…
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Thanksgiving at Lake Brownwood State Park
It’s a full month later and I’m finally settling down to write about our camping trip to Lake Brownwood State Park. We were supposed to go to Mission Tejas State Park but Chris received an email a couple of weeks prior to the date that the park did not have electricity—including the bathrooms. Now, you are probably thinking, didn’t you do two thru-hikes and deal without electricity??, but that was without a 3 year old and it wasn’t at Thanksgiving when we were trying to make a decent meal. We’ve done front country camping without electric before at our campsite but there was always a bathroom. Plus, we had invited…
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Music for Your Week
It’s been quiet around here despite the fact I have wanted to write. Over the last week I’ve been backing up our website files and then finalizing a conversion of our hosting setup with our provider and it has been slow and time consuming. If you saw a weird post in your feed this morning it was because I was setting up WordPress again. I’ve had to do this once or twice over the years and it always throws me for a loop before I remember how to do it all. Thank goodness for the Updraft plug-in which backs up my files and saves it on DropBox or allows me…
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That One Time It Snowed…
Last week was fairly dreary around here with on and off rain and chilly temperatures. We knew it was going to head towards freezing on Thursday and Friday nights so on Thursday at lunch Chris moved a lot of the sensitive plants indoors and after I worked I moved some of my stuff off the potting bench and under the porch. When Chris got home with Forest at dinnertime he said we might have some snow flurries around 9pm. That was exciting but I figured it would be just that—flurries. We had some sleet a year or two ago with a little bit that piled up in the corners of…
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The Importance of Public Lands
A post shared by Patagonia (@patagonia) on Dec 4, 2017 at 3:54pm PST I have never been to southern Utah. My only experience with Utah has been to SLC and some areas around the Wasatch but I’ve been to plenty of other public lands (local, state, and federal) and what happened yesterday is sickening. When shit hit the fan on election day 2016 I knew we were in for it with the environment and public lands, not to mention so many other things we’ve been watching go down during the last year. It’s sickening, enraging, frustrating, and all around awful. And I keep wondering when the insanity will end but…
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Life Lately | November 2017
+In My Head I’m a little messed up with the timing of Thanksgiving this year. I’m used to the month ending pretty quickly after and this month we got almost an entire extra week so in my head I’m feeling like I’m behind on getting things done for Christmas. I noticed a lot more people decorating before Thanksgiving this year to prevent this sort of frenzied feeling and I think I may incorporate some of that next year, such as getting the lights on the stair-well hung and a few other small decorations. I also feel out of sorts because the house has been a disaster for so long with…
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Friday Read | Disconnecting & Social Media
Why is the US So Susceptible to Social Media Distortion? via the New Yorker. Sarah from the Pantsuit Politics podcast mentioned this article in their episode today–and it is a good episode to listen to because they talk about this issue as well as a variety of other pertinent topics from this week. As I read this article it reminded me of the pre-social media email forwarding/chain emails that used to be so prevalent—this was how memes and ‘fake news’ was shared back in the day. It just morphed into a larger platform with social media. I have thought time and time again how glad I was to have been…
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Life Lately | October 2017
+In My Head I was folding laundry last night and had queued up my Jefferson Airplane station on Pandora and Buffalo Springfield came on with For What It’s Worth and as I was listening to the lyrics I thought, man, you could easily just transport that to the last couple of years and it would easily apply to current times. I guess Beyoncé is our protest music these days? +Watching I may have binged season 2 of Stranger Things last weekend. And it was still just as good as season 1 and incredibly high on the 80s nostalgia. I recommend a good binge—it’s only 9 episodes so it doesn’t feel…