+In My Head Another summer is over. I know there’s three weeks or so until the equinox and more weeks after that in which it will still be hot here in Texas, but the sterotypical ‘summer’ is winding down. Forest’s birthday is next weekend and the little baby will be two! TWO! He’s becoming such a little kid and all summer, with an increase the last month, his language skills have been flourishing. I am really loving this age so far because there’s just so much fun surrounding it. Chris has already reframed two to be Terrific instead of Terrible. Let’s hope! +Watching As I type this we’re watching Peppa…

Today’s photo is brought to you by the Turner River in Big Cypress National Preserve and Everglades National Park, circa 2008. +In My Head Let’s go with some random bulleted thoughts…. I think the story of my life is being emotionally connected to time passing. Speaking of time, I have a post to write that has been jingling in my head for months about synesthesia and time. Just need to sit down and parse it out. I’m trying not to get too excited about autumn and cooler weather but I am looking forward to hiking and camping again. And fall baking…*sigh* I love autumn! The last two days we have…

Happy Sunday! Reads: ‘Monarch Promise’ variegated milkweed. I need this! Baltimore Jack’s obituary from the Applachian Trail Conservancy. No more war in the garden from You Grow Girl. The Quiet Extinction: Stories of North America’s Rare and Threatened Plants a book about the loss of plant species on this continent. While some plants may have federal or state protection they don’t come with the same tight regulations that protected animals do unless they are located on a public property. Protected plants located on private lands are generally eradicated without consequence or knowledge (because most people are unable to identify plants for one), thus we have a problem with the loss…

Hello, 36. My birthday was on Monday. I turned 36. I’m officially heading straight for 40 and that seems really strange. I took the day off because I learned years ago that working on your birthday just isn’t all that fun. If I’ve got the days available, why not take the day off? Last year’s birthday was a bit of a dud. We were driving back from vacation in Port Aransas so most of the day was spent in the car. Forest had been sick that week as had several of us adults, and while the vacation itself was great and we celebrated my birthday the day prior with my…

I put together a short video of the second flood last week. For some reason I didn’t take a video of the front yard with the good camera, just my phone apparently, but I put some photos of the front yard in there at the end. Chris and I walked the neighborhood yesterday morning. Pretty much every house north of us along the creek had flood damage of some sort, mild to horrific. We are very lucky.

I thought about doing a second post titled ‘500 Year Flood Part II’ because that’s what we had Friday afternoon, but I decided I’d rather show pretty pictures of the garden a week ago and just tell a short story about the second epic flood in less than 24 hours. When we woke up Friday morning and as I had written the post about the night before, the water was still in the yard but slowly receding. The front yard always takes forever to drain and well, patches of it haven’t drained for about two months because it has been so damn wet this spring. I’m half tempted to start…

If you’ve been reading here for any amount of time you probably remember the first few weeks we were living here and it flooded. We’ve had a few simliar floods and smaller floods since then, including at least two or three others this spring. The most recent was the Tax Day Flood so it is very fresh in everyone’s memory. After that flood I remembered that back in 2012 someone had mentioned a massive flood in 1994 in Houston and that was recalled again so of course looked it up and was definitely worried about that ever happening again so I rechecked the floodplain maps for our county and was…