A house….is full of projects. I mean, they are good projects and I love my house, but sometimes it seems never ending. The lists had been compiling in my head for long enough that today I sat down and wrote out everything we still needed to finish, such as the laundry room which is 90% completed. I wrote the other day about Chris’ dock building adventure and he got a lot more accomplished today. Now we can walk out over the pond!! Looking north into the pond, towards the creek. And south towards the dam and the entrance to our neighborhood. It’s so cool! I went out and I told…

+I pulled out the first daikon radish yesterday. When we planted the seeds Chris kept calling them Diagon radishes, a nod to Harry Potter. And thus, forevermore they will be Diagon radishes whenever we plant them. It was milder than a typical radish, we’ll have to cook it up in a stir-fry this week. Bookmarked lately… +What Makes a Champion Tree +Eternal Flame Falls +100 Years Since the Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon +Cauliflower Mac and Cheese…looks yummy! +AT: Bulls Bridge to 10 Mile Hill +Foothills Trail: Around Whitewater Falls +Life In the Slow Lane: Profile of a Gopher Tortoise +Pumpkin Spice Chai Tea Concentrate +Invasive vs. Aggressive: They are…

+Plant sitting an old favorite, staghorn fern, for Chris’ dad. Not that we’re much warmer here in Houston, it is a bit better than Dallas over the winter. +Digging out the long, patterned socks is one thing to look forward to in winter. I found the patch of leaves that were the greatest around the yard—don’t mistake that we have a yard of leaves. +Twilight moon. Probably taken at only 5:30ish pm. +I did a doubletake at an oak leaf and found a gall. Love them. +Daikon radishes are growing in thick. +African blue basil prior to being chopped down and turned into pesto. Chilly temperatures here, by far not…

Life has been full of doing other things besides hiking or outdoor adventuring lately. Mostly we’ve been working on projects around the house. Recently we started working on renovating the laundry room. I hated the floor, the walls were crap, and there was no hot water running to the washing machine. Now there’s hot water, 3/4 of a new floor, the wall painted with touchups needed, and a few other items to do such as install cabinets. We’re waiting on the cabinets to come into the store we ordered them from so that we can finish the painting and the flooring. But, the whole room already looks much better. After…

This is Sally. (Chris actually took this photo, I forgot that when I put the watermark on here.) Sally showed up on our pond about six weeks ago or so. Muscovy ducks aren’t normally on our pond, in fact I’ve never seen one here before Sally showed up. Which makes me wonder where she even came from. Was she someone’s pet that got loose? A lone duck that lost her way? She floats around the pond all alone, sometimes perching on downed tree branches along the shoreline, or waddling along the roadway-dam at the end of the pond. I’m worried someone will hit her one day. Some jerk had the…

Over the weekend a friend of mine had a snake in her yard which she ended up killing due to its being near where her dogs were located. She didn’t know if it was venomous or not at the time and later posted a photo of it which her friend identified as potentially a rat snake, to which I conconcurred it likely was. Now, I’m not writing this to pick on my friend, but it really was a bit of a tipping point for this post to be written as I’ve read several different items from other people in the last year about snakes being killed by people who felt…

These last few weeks I’ve really been in my head and when I get in my head, as all introverts know, it can be hard to get out. And that usually translates into me not writing here. In my head, busy with life…I’m just quiet these days. Then, a week and a half ago my mom called and told me my grandmother had contracted, once again, a bacterial infection she’d had a few years ago. This time around they weren’t sure if she would be able to beat it, especially in her weakened health. I wasn’t able to get up to the nursing home to see her until last Saturday…

Last week Chris and I drove up to Hot Springs, Arkansas to spend a few days at a house on Lake Hamilton with my parents, brother, sister-in-law, and their kids. It was a relaxing trip, not filled with going hither and tither but for the most part spent lounging inside in the ‘cabiny’ living room or in the slightly more formal and spacious adjacent living area that had near floor-to-ceiling windows, or on the deck outside. More of those photos later. I sat a lot in the reclining chair looking out at the porch as you see here, flipping through magazines, watching whatever was on tv (Food Network or kid…

…don’t forget to change your blog feed reader service if you’ve been using Google Reader. It’s gone starting July 1st. I’ve switched to Feedly and based upon Elizabeth’s review to Bloglovin’ as a backup. They both have platforms to import your current feeds, but you can also type in Oceanicwilderness.com into either and add me in or use this link for Bloglovin’. You can also copy in http://feeds.feedburner.com/oceanicwilderness to either of those services, or click the link, but it seems Feedburner has narrowed down their list of potential subscription services significantly. Email subscriptions still work currently with Feedburner so that is also an option until Google does away with Feedburner…