Thoughts
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Snakes: Friends Not Foes
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…
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Quiet
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…
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Relaxing
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…
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Leo Says…
…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…
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Summer
New Jersey, Appalachian Trail Some songs that are reminding me of summer, particularly of walking along the mid-Atlantic and New England states three summers ago. This feels like it will be a very enjoyable, full summer. I feel like I didn’t get a summer last year with the move to the house—the unpacking, the flooding, the constant barrage of things to do. Now I’m just trying to keep up with the garden and yard every evening, sweating through my shirt before I work fifteen minutes. The frogs on the pond get so loud sometimes I can hear them inside the house. It’s almost like camping.
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Beaver On The Pond
I went to a community meeting for our little town a couple of weekends ago and the council mentioned that they’d had problems with beavers in the past and that we should mention if we saw any on the pond. My hand shot up so I could mention that we’d scared something off the banks of our property on our pond the night before. Chris has long thought we had nutria or maybe otters on the pond but we’d never really had a good look. Then a couple of nights ago Chris saw one up close and called it a nutria and then he went off to Lowe’s to get…
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Then & Now | Changes At The House
May 14, 2012 May 31, 2013 I was going back through the photos we took on one of the visits we had to our house when we were contemplating making an offer on it to look at a tree Chris thought was leaning a lot more than when we moved in (it’s not, it was leaning just about the same then) and found the photo of the driveway and front of the house and knew I had to take a photo of how it looks now to compare. It is hard to see all of the changes but the most evident is that the grass is so much greener this…
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Thoughts on Two Years of Being Vegetarian
Two years ago I embarked on this experiment of going full on vegetarian. Initially I thought I’d just try it for a few months but then I chose a weird time to do it, jumping in when Chris and I went and did field work for three months. Not exactly an ideal time I came to find out once I started eating at restaurants. My delusional idea was that it would be easier to try this without cooking….boy was I wrong! Restaurants are the most difficult place to be vegetarian. Well, here it is two years later and I’m pretty much a committed vegetarian. I’ve dabbled in the not-so-healthy vegetarianism…
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Pine Tree Problem Solved!
1 part steady downpour for several hours + 1 part super saturated ground = Sweetgum tree falling into pond with aid of pine tree. So this flood event wasn’t nearly as bad as great flood of July 2012 and I honestly wasn’t expecting it to get like this. Thunderstorms moved through the area yesterday afternoon, we had some pea sized hail and steady downpours and then went to dinner with my parents and uncle who were in town for the weekend. When we came back we noticed the creek near our house was just below the bridge. Then we noted that the second pond in our little ‘town’ was up…
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Goofing Around
I’ve got the goofiest, laziest, and silliest feral cats!