Thoughts
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*Bling Bling* on the Blog
My cousin Elizabeth recently re-did her webpage and coincidentally I got the urge to work on mine Saturday. I sat down last night and came up with the banner. Initially there was white space where the butterflies were but I couldn’t think of an appropriate photo to stick in there and then I found the little wingdings and the butterflies just ‘became’. Voila! The biggest pain was going through every page I have to fix it all. The photography link above does not work currently because it will eventually link to our photo website. We have a potential name, to be announced later, so once we finally decide on the…
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Sunday Morning Thoughts
I was on my Flickr account the other day when I stumbled across this photo tucked into our gardening section. Ah, it makes me miss all of my plants. That is a variegated vanilla orchid and one of our favorite plants. We had several types of vanilla and because of Chris’ super awesome watering system on the porch they became very, very long vines. We cut them into sections to sell when we sold all of our plants. A few plants are still at Chris’ dad’s house but otherwise everything we had is gone. I think I miss our ylang-ylang tree the most, mostly because I grew that thing from…
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Roadtrip Roundup
What I thought was a milkweed bug, but I’m not sure so someone id it for me, on a yellow flower in Palo Duro Canyon State Park. Check out the pollen it’s kicking up at the top right! Our whirlwind road trip across Texas is now over. Somewhere in the middle to late part of the trip I got a little exhausted thinking in photos. Thinking about what to shoot, angles, techniques and trying to go above and beyond. It was just a bit too much, I think. When we got to the beach on Mustang Island I just wanted to sit and be, to relax and love the water…
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Waiting for the Stars….
For some reason the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department decided that putting Wi-Fi at their state parks would be a good idea. I’d say that mostly this is a good idea, except that it probably isn’t because then people like me end up online. But that’s ok, I’m watching a line of brown pelicans casually fly across Copano Bay while the moon is pushing half full, the first star is out (or is it a planet…?) and the yellow orange glow of sunset is still lingering. I’m really just waiting for the stars to fully come out so I can practice some night photography. Maybe I will come out with…
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The Power of Now
While out hiking there is only one thing you have to do. Walk. Ok, so you set up camp, eat and use the privy, but your only goal for the day is to walk to your intended destination. It’s easy and your mind is in general ease. There isn’t a bunch of clutter in your brain, or maybe there is, but it isn’t pressing and can’t bother you too much. And then somehow you come back into the real world and you are bombarded with so many options. You can do this or that or both and then throw in something else and it is easy to get overwhelmed. I…
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Reverse Macro Love
On Monday we went to the Dallas Arboretum with Chris’ dad. I had never been so it was a nice experience. After being so used to Fairchild Gardens in Miami, it’s hard to get used to non-tropical plants. There are some nice tropicals such as this Pride of Barbados, but a lot of them are temperates. They also have a great test garden where they do try some of those tropicals like mandavilla and tropical hibiscus. It was blazing hot and though we didn’t walk fast or far, we were sticking to our clothes pretty quickly. It was 107* for a high here on Monday. Yesterday it was about 12*…
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5 Things Sunday
Today is list day. 5 Things I Love Swimming in a pool. Breakfast with three of my favorite friends and one cool little kid. Finding nice clothes for really cheap at Goodwill. It’s becoming my favorite store. My new brown hair. Really loving it! The blonde will come back, but it’s nice to have a change. My talkative little niece. She’s a ham! 5 Annoyances 103*. Blech. Texas in the summer bites. At least the humidity isn’t nearly as bad as it was in New England a month and a half ago. Eliana pawning Millie off to someone else. Yeah, I am peeved at that. She’s Baloo’s buddy now, keep…
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Four Goals and Overwhelmed
So, it’s been two days since we went up Katahdin and ended the hike. Yesterday felt pretty ok, like a zero day, just relaxing in town. Today, well, it was back to the real world in a way. We’re still on a vacation of sorts, but we went into the biggest town we’d been in since our short trip back to DFW in May and it was a bit overwhelming. So much stuff….everywhere! Our goal of the morning was to hit up a Goodwill after going to Best Buy to get a new GPS since we think ours was stolen from my mom’s luggage in the airport. Goodwill was nice…
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Trail Thoughts
As we wind down our first week here in Texas, time is inching closer to when we leave for Georgia for the Trail. We’ve tentatively set the date for starting for the weekend of the 13th of March. With all of the snow that has fallen this month and in January, it appears the trail conditions are fairly bad, especially in the higher elevations of North Carolina and up the trail. We experienced the blow-downs here and there are a lot of them on the AT in GA and NC right now, though local trail associations are clearing them out as they can. I think we’ve convinced my uncle and…
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Trail Q&A
Alright, I’m finally getting around to the couple of questions that were asked a few posts ago. I know the videos probably cover a lot of the answers, but I will take a few minutes to answer the questions now that we are semi-settled in again. Chris Hind asked: I’d like to know what backpacks and tents you guys will be using. We are using Osprey Atmos 65 packs. Mine is the small version, Chris is using a large. I got my backpack from my dad who got it off of Steep and Cheap and it wasn’t what he was thinking it would be so he gave it to me.…