Thoughts
-
Retro Writings
I’ve been writing here in some variation this blog for 9 years now. I started on a blogspot account rambling some crazy stuff, doing some weird memes and well, a lot of non-sense. That I won’t show you, but I will dig up some goodies that you may have missed if you haven’t been reading since the good ol’ days! Blogging has evolved a lot and my initial readers were some internet friends and my family so my audience was different. I’m not sure what my audience is now, but I am trying to at least write better content instead of rambling. Anyway, I thought I’d dig out some posts…
-
I could be here…
May 4, 2010, Rice Field Shelter in Virginia, Appalachian Trail It doesn’t fail. There are always particular days that throw me back to last year. March 13: Started the trail, April 20: Getting close to Damascus, May 4: Dad comes to hike, Ashleigh slips away while we have a beautiful sunset. I wish I was out there again and I wish she wasn’t gone. But of course I’m done with the trail and she really has left. See, it really is about the memories you make, the little moments in time that somehow seal themselves to your soul. Eventually we may have scratchy brains that struggle to remember the exact…
-
A Good Day
Yesterday…. +Breakfast with my mom at Bacon’s with a Groupon coupon. Tried a salmon eggs benedict—delish! I love me some hollandaise! +A trip to the Parker County/Weatherford Farmers Market despite cooler weather and clouds. Bought some veggies for dinner and browsed at the plant selection. Can’t wait to go back when Parker County peaches come in season! +Dropped by Foch Street in west Ft. Worth, the ‘new’ upgraded area around W. 7th to stop by The Greener Good. Found them at Prairie Fest the other day and wanted to see their location. I had a 15% coupon from the fest and bought some bamboo ‘silver’ware to use in the hotel…
-
Being Green
I’m trying to re-think my enviro ways a bit and go at it a little harder. When you see a coworker use the same styrofoam cup over and over and over again you kind of realize that you could do that too. Or, just bring the cups you were supposed to down to where you were going to work! Duh! My goals for the next two months when we go back to work: +Take my own leftover container when going to restaurants. +Always use my own cup or mug when I can. +Take recycling to a higher level and recycle everything I can. +Rethink items I buy or am thinking…
-
Swamp Creatures
Today we had an amazing animal day despite our really crappy day of trying to get to our points to collect data. We ended up waist deep in thick floton (floating plant matter) in some areas and it was not pleasant. Sometime floton is thick enough to actually walk on, carefully, but this kind was not too thick and breaking through it was inevitable. That means you then post-hole through the floton moving at an incredibly slow pace. It was not pretty. However, we were able to get some awesome shots of animals today, including this alligator snapping turtle up on shore to lay eggs. She was ginormous!! And then…
-
“Botany is the science in which plants are known by their aliases.”
Ah, the quote above is so true. (The quote is anonymous but I found it here.) If you’d asked me 9 years ago (9!!) when I graduated college that I’d be working with plants more often than not I would have probably laughed. After all I was a marine biology major! Now, that’s another rant into itself, marine biology, but don’t think you will get a great career in it unless you go to grad school or are willing to scrape by at cheap paying jobs. But, I did focus on wetlands in college and of course, here I am in wetlands. Except that all the plants I learned in…
-
More Swamp Work
Where Chris and I are working reminds us a bit of a mix of the Everglades, which I think mentioned in the last Swamp Work post. It isn’t common to walk through thickets of cut grass, getting cut up by it as we walk through. And then there is the mud slogging. Sometimes we’re able to walk through areas with a mostly hard bottom, albeit a little muddy, but then we get in areas that are 1-2′ thick of floating plants and root matter and once you break through that it’s mud on the bottom. Then you slog through that. Previously these areas in the ‘glades would’ve been accessed by…
-
Swamp Work
Chris and I have made it to our job site down here in S.E. Texas. I spent a little bit of time in Sabine Pass back in college when I was capturing and tagging Kemp’s ridley sea turtles. Luckily I am in a bigger area and not so near all of the petroleum refineries this time around. We’re working in the Big Thicket doing a wetland inventory for a bigger project that will be handled later. Much of the project area is similar to where Chris and I hiked in south Florida, similar to regions of Big Cypress and the Everglades and Water Conservation Areas. But, there are different plants…
-
Pull up a seat—link love
These chairs used to be at my grandfather’s house and now sit at my parent’s house. Last summer they worked on getting him to a retirement complex and kept some key items from around the house and yard. They used to sit on an old concrete pad that my brother and I would play on growing up. ~*~Avgolemono Soup recipe…looks delicious! ~*~Spinach risotto recipe…made this one a week or so ago. Loved it! I’d only made risotto one other time and it took much longer than this one did. ~*~Patrice and her husband have made it official, they’ll be hiking southbound on the AT in June! It’s been awesome getting…
-
Consumption and Conservation
Chris’ mom and step-dad have Netflix via their Wii and we’ve been watching a few movies from that lately. My brother also only has Netflix for his tv now, something Chris and I will probably be doing when we settle down again. We never paid for cable other than the very basic stations in conjunction with our internet. However, I enjoy watching movies and there are some tv shows on cable stations I enjoy so it will be nice to have Netflix in this aspect. We’ve been watching a few documentaries, two of which were AT related, Southbounders, though more docu-movie since it has actors, and the Nat Geo Wildspaces…