+When I get out of the natural rhythm of life it always takes me several days to bounce back.

+Last weekend I drove to east Texas to visit one of my best friends Michelle. Her daughter’s 4th birthday was this weekend—I can’t believe that one! I came to Texas a few weeks after she was born 4 years ago and met Kylen as a tiny baby and now she’s this tall, long haired, spitting-image-of-her-momma kid! It was fun, there were cupcakes, balloons, meeting Michelle and J.P.’s extended family and friends…it was great! Now that I found an easier way to get there, (I took a different way to get there, driving two-lane backroads through several nasty thunderstorms in the dark…I was very nervous a few times and kept being paranoid about potential flash floods lurking at the bottom of hills) J.P. told me of a better way to go that included part of their path to get to College Station to visit Michelle’s brother and it was much faster and involved mostly four lane highways with speed limits of at least 65 m.p.h. or more.

+We pulled most of our onions on Sunday. Now our computer room, where we are drying them out for a week before storing them, smells really onion-y. We had to close the door because both cats were too enticed to be near them.

+In the creative realm I need to finish a drawing and a quilt and I have so much to write—blogs and ‘real’ writing too.

Maybe I will get caught up this weekend…

What is going on with you?

Staring at the photos on Food in Jars I was entranced and could just imagine sipping a homemade limeade from the juice I would ferment. Oh, it looked so good; I had to make it!

I sliced up the limes and instantly my mouth was watering, the tangy scent teasing my nose. But, I kept them for the jar and managed to put them into an old spaghetti jar we’ve kept around for pickles and other home preservation ideas.

Some juice managed to fill the bottom of the jar but like Marisa, the author at Food in Jars, I had to buy some lime juice to finish it off. I was able to find key lime juice at the store which made it even better—I would have settled for regular lime juice if I’d needed to.

The other thing I’ve been doing is making pickles with the insane amount of cucumbers we’re getting. Insane. I think I picked 30 within two days! We have so many claussen pickles right now and since they have to be refrigerated I am running out of room in my fridge for that type. We also have pickles still from last Fall so I wanted to make something else.

I ended up making some relish based loosely on a recipe I found online. I am not a sweet relish or pickle fan and every recipe I found had sugar in it. Even Googling ‘no sugar’ resulted in a recipe with Splenda. Dude. No. So, I just left the sugar out and adapted it for my needs. *I did have to drain the water from the veggies/fruits before putting in the vinegar concoction…because I used my food processor to chop everything up the water easily leeched out.*

The result was 5 pints of relish ready to be eaten sometime soon! These jars came from my mom without lids but I bought replacement lids at my local grocery store very easily. The jars are super cute and I’m glad to have found some way to use them. I’m probably going to make more soon and was thinking of making some kind of cucumber chow-chow too. Any other ideas for cucumbers?

Rosemarie and me.

Another Rose from TAMUG! Hi Rose!

One of my best friends, Erika, and my first college roomate Marsha.

When my 10 year high school reunion came up four years ago (!) it didn’t seem that strange, it did feel like I’d been out of high school that long. Well, it has now been 10 years since I’ve been out of college and that does seem strange. Ten years ago I walked across the stage with most of my friends at the The Grand 1984 Opera House in Galveston. I got married a month later and then moved to Florida where we stayed for 8 years.

I read a couple of blogs where the authors are just graduating college or recently out of college and they seem to be taking that next step, not sure where they are going. The only thing I can say is that, its ok. Your life in 10 years will more than likely be vastly different, as will be your goals and dreams. I am not a marine biologist but I am still vastly interested in biology, just in a different way.

Time changes, we change, but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep a little piece of the past along with it, some of the hopes and dreams of back then. Back then I was hoping for work with sea turtles, now, while that would be an awesome job, I’d rather have a giant garden, or be going somewhere with a backpack on my back instead.

Who knows what another 10 years from now will look like. Hopefully it involves being a successful author/artist/photographer (far cry from that marine biology degree, huh?). One thing I know is, to be what you want to be and make those ideas come to fruition, you have to do the work.

It’s time for me to start doing the work.

I’m starting a new series of portraits of the vegetables and fruits I harvest out of the garden. Hopefully I can make it a weekly series!

Fairly certain this is a mustang grape…

A gas pipeline provided a nice opening for the sun-loving plants to thrive like these Mexican hats Ratibida columnifera.

Finally I arrived at the oak tree, however due to the tours (they were mostly self guided, however a guide was available to lead the tours too) there was quite a crowd and it was difficult to get good photos or to hang out very long there.

Some day I would like to return when it is quiet, to sit and enjoy it without a crowd.

I was chatting with the tour guide for a few minutes when I looked up into a nearby oak and saw those honeycombs up in the tree—only my initial look suggested they were some kind of tree fungus. I squinted a little bit and realized the mass next to it was instead a giant beehive I pointed it out to the naturalist who later recalled, after thinking a bit, that the hive had been there the previous year.

I highly recommend visiting this tree and trail if you are looking for something to do in the greater Houston area. Maybe a stop on your way to the coast?

Throughout this year I’ve read various food blogs, some meat eating, some veg, some into the primal/paelo thing, others into organic/whole living, and there are many thoughts you can glean from them all. In all most of them stress a whole food, unprocessed way of eating which I have come to think is probably the most important thing if you are looking at bettering your diet.

As for being vegetarian I am always trying to be better, to eat healthier instead of leaning on pastas and rice or other soy based ‘fake’ meats. I use them on occasion but they don’t make up the bulk of my diet. I don’t even eat that much tofu, rarely buying it, but I do love tofu in Thai and Chinese dishes—I just need to figure out how to cook it like they do.

I think the biggest struggle is being out on road trips and finding something quick to eat. It is really something I need to start preparing for at home better and taking more foods with me, I just haven’t figured that part out yet. I think it frustrates Chris because he always rags on me about going somewhere that I can eat at. Since he has been doing field work the last several months he’s not kept to eating mostly vegetarian and I think that is part of the problem, we aren’t on the same page while traveling so we’re trying to juggle finding something for both dietary needs. My biggest problem with this is that while I *can* find a place to eat with a vegetarian option is something greasy or carb loaded like fries, potatoes or fried vegetables. Not exactly healthy either.

The other frustrating thing is that yes, I can eat a salad, but then I have to pay the same price as it would be with meat, only have them take the meat off. Hardly seems fair. More vegetarian options, please restaurants! I do like Subway having avocado to add to the sandwiches now, it bulks up a veggie sub much better.

The question of protein keeps coming up from various people and my answer is that I get it from beans, eggs, nuts/nut butters and quinoa. I don’t eat all of those on a daily basis, but at least one of them, the quinoa is probably a once a week thing. I haven’t had my blood tested or anything, but I feel fine. I don’t feel like I’m struggling for lack of anything.

Recently I started trying to eliminate coffee from a daily occurrence. When we were on the A.T. and F.T. I didn’t drink coffee due to its diuretic effects and I didn’t want to be stopping to pee every mile during the morning. I felt good not drinking so much coffee and really enjoyed it even more when we were in town stops, lingering over the coffee and chatting with other hikers. It was a treat. Lately I’d been feeling foggy in the late afternoons and sort of exhausted, I started thinking of a possible culprit. So, I eliminated coffee and switched to tea. Generally I drink herbal teas but I’ve been using up some White/Green Tea fusion and some other strawberry flavored black tea and then adding in coconut milk (the kind that is refrigerated) to sweeten it up and have been enjoying that. I know it has caffeine but it hasn’t made me feel nearly as jittery or drained. While I do have that general end-of-day tiredness from staring at screen all day, I don’t feel like I want to curl up and sleep the minute I get home.

My goal for the next year is to just start being more balanced with my eating and remembering to eat well, lay off the cheese so much and ease up on sugars and deserts. I know there is much more to being vegetarian and others talk about various nutrients like Allie at Colour Me Happy recently did regarding B12.

It is definitely a learning experience!

Two previous posts regarding this journey:
+Going Veg
+Thoughts on 6 Months of Being Vegetarian

We split the drive up, leaving Houston for Dallas at noon one day, then jumping in the car that my dad, brother and another hiker were in to finish the rest of the way to the forest. We were meeting everyone else at the Little Missouri/Athens-Big Fork Junction Trailhead. Unfortunately the directions we had to get there, once inside the forest, were a little jumbled—turning at forks and somehow we managed to end up taking the wrong split. At Bard Springs we found a map and managed to figure out what forest roads we needed to take to get where we were starting the hike, finally arriving at nearly midnight.

Headlamps on, we found an area with the least amount of poison ivy to set our tent up and hit the sack.

The next morning the rest of the group emerged from the woods near the parking area to eat breakfast and chat. I was happy to see two other women on the hike, the wife of one of the other hikers—also the mother of the other female on the hike. We set off by 7:30 am, crossing the Little Missouri River, which at this point is merely a small creek we could rock hop across—vastly different than what we would see later on in the hike.

We started off on the Athens-Big Fork trail, a trail with 8 ‘peaks’ to go over. If we had been on the Appalachian Trail I’d say it was a mini-rollercoaster. Since it had been awhile since any of us had been on mountains, the first mountain took some time getting up. Slowly, but surely we made it up and over the first peak. Beyond, we saw the next couple we would have to go over.

Going down the first mountain I was reminded of my knees and how badly they hurt after finishing the A.T. I never thought they would recover, but 2-3 months later I finally woke up one morning and realized I didn’t wince getting out of bed or kneeling down to grab something off the floor. Most of the downhills were mild but there was one or two that were more steep than the others and caused a bit of pain going down.

This time of year, with the number of water crossings in this section, carrying a lot of water isn’t needed. Between every mountain is a small creek, mostly rock-hopping sized, and water is easily collected from there.

Chris was excited to find a lot of big leaf magnolias around the forest. He’d just bought one for us to grow at our house, someday—it is currently in a container, so seeing an abundance of them were quite exciting for us.

Due to the varying speeds of the hikers most of the time we waited near the creeks for everyone to catch up. Since we weren’t on any sort of time crunch to get to a destination for the evening it was nice to relax and enjoy the trip instead of breezing by everything.

Chris’ big goal was to be able to fish along the creeks and streams while we hiked. It was late morning before we came across one with a deep enough pool to warrant fishing. Had it been mid-afternoon and the weather warmer, a dip in this little pool of water would have been wonderful!

At lunch we came to the first stream that required taking our shoes off to cross. My brother, Chris and another hiker had gone up ahead and were already there when we arrived. Ahh, hiking lunches—leisurely and relaxing, time to take a snooze, and eat hiker food. Chris and I opted to boil water for every meal—oatmeal for breakfast, beans and tortillas for lunch and hiker meals for dinner.

Luckily we had lunch where we did because the next mountain we climbed was long and arduous, not to mention the afternoon humidity skyrocketed. We didn’t even hit the top of that mountain, a short side-trail would take you to the top, but we rested on makeshift wood benches at the top before heading back downhill.

I’d been looking forward to this vista, Eagle Rock Vista, the whole day as it was the only one providing a real view. Most of the other mountains were shrouded with vegetation and offered no views. The side trail up to this view as short and easy from a campsite near the top.

I didn’t see the cottonmouth, Chris took that photo, but I did see some of the crawfish. Really bright, aren’t they?

Ahhh, the campsite, time to eat and relax. It all just made me want to do it for many more consecutive nights…nights that turn into months.

I’ve still got two more days to share, so stay tuned!

That morning I had gone to Home Depot and Walmart to look for already started eggplants because the some of the ones we’d started from seed had not survived. While there I noticed the clouds darken and it appeared it would rain.

Rain it did. So, we had Easter egg hunting inside!

The cake my sister in law made…it was yummy!

Grayson (<---see, I'm spelling it right! (aside: I have friend with a Greyson and lately I've been screwing the spellings up between the two) ) is still too young to have figured out what is going on so it was mostly Zoe hunting eggs.

Zoe showing PawPaw her egg!

I don’t know about this!

This is my sister in laws mom helping Zoe figure out where a hiding egg was—love Zoe’s expression!

I think I’ll eat this instead of hunting eggs.

Getting some love with Nana (SIL’s mom).

I know there is one in there!

There it is!

I loved this shot of everyone, mostly because Stephanie, my sister in law, was playing with Grayson!

Zoe with her egg haul!

Isabelle wasn’t too happy with all the commotion, but she can’t really hear or see anyway so it must’ve been a bit confusing.

And that was Easter! Seems like so long ago!

+Digging through my photo folders and found this from a few weekends ago when we harvested the last of the snap peas. We saved several pods and dried them for use next Fall.

+Still trying to catch up from being gone last weekend. It always takes me several days to get caught up.

+And getting caught up involves going through and processing all the photos I need to write the many blogs I’m working on.

+Looking forward to a very creative weekend, hopefully. I hope it involves lots of writing, some quilting, and finishing and art project. Maybe throw some reading, gardening and chick-flick/period drama movies in the mix.

How was your week?

II.
Water crossed our path
Hop, skip, jump, across the streams
Splish, splash, don’t fall in!

III.
The woods smell divine
Wafting heady aromas
Can I soak it in?

IV.
Dusk falls, night begins
The woods come alive with sound
Who cooks for you all?

V.
Hiker stench sets in
Sweat drips, bugs bite, stomach growls
One more hill to go.

VI.
Back at the trail-head
Feet ache, hiker hobble, tired
Ready for some food.

Been awhile since I’ve written a haiku—ok, probably since high school which was 14 years ago—so I hope I got the syllables right. If not…oh well!