• Family

    Thanks Mom!

    If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed by email! Thanks for visiting! This is my mom. Dad calls her Donna, I call her Mom and Moosie (a name I came up with in high school from Moo-Moo which I don’t know how that started) and Zoe, my niece, calls her Mimi. She’s cool and I love her. We like to shop together, do creative things, and somehow I eventually caught on to cooking despite resisting strongly throughout my growing up years. She adds butter to things I wouldn’t, like eggs, but you know, that’s ok. But, today, Mother’s Day, I’d like to thank her…

  • Outdoors,  Wildflowers

    Texas Wildflowers: Spigelia marilandica, pinkroot

    We’d just driven by some coral bean, Erythrina herbacea, when we spotted these flowers. Though we weren’t going terribly fast I initially thought they were the same until I realized they weren’t. Chris reversed the car and we stopped and looked at them for awhile before deciding we’d have to look them up later. This woodland plant likes loamy soils and occurs fairly widespread in the southeastern United States. There’s also another species with a white flower in Texas, Spigelia texana. It seems that it will grow in USDA zones 5 to at least 9 so there is wide variety for garden usage. The shape of this flower seems to…

  • 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…

  • Appalachian Trail 2010,  Family,  Thoughts

    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…

  • Food,  Gardening

    Edible in the garden

    Since planting a lot of the vegetables in early March (mom planted some in February, too) here’s a follow-up on how things are going. Right now the garden in the backyard is great but at the plot—not so much! We’re not sure what the culprit is, too many coffee grounds, too much water, who knows, but everything is fairly stunted. The onions are just now starting to bulb whereas my brother’s plot has well bulbing onions. The potatoes withered and are basically dead, something ate the tops of the okra, and whereas everything else is alive and doing ok, they aren’t growing and seem to be stunted. It’s very strange.…

  • Texas,  Travel & Places

    Prairie Fest 2011 Recap

    It’s been over a week since Prairie Fest happened and I’m just now getting around to blogging it, but here it is! It was a gorgeous day, albeit windy, but still beautiful. Storms plagued the evening, but we were there during the pre-lunch hours so it was great during that time. The place was crawling by the time we arrived and got even busier by the time we ran back after lunch to pick up some free plants from a scout troop that we forgot to pick up when we left the first time. Lots of dogs out and about in the park. The fest was set up primarily along…

  • Family

    The Egg Hunt

    A few of my favorites from Easter, I took tons so I picked a few to share. If you are friends with me on FB the rest of the album is over there. Zoe had a blast looking for eggs, is now smart enough to organize and separated the plastic ones from the hard boiled ones, even sometimes eschewing the hard boiled ones for the plastic because she knew candy was inside. She even said one of the hardboiled ones was ugly and didn’t pick it up! It was brown on one side and yellow on the other so I flipped it over to the yellow and managed to get…

  • Outdoors,  Wildflowers

    Texas Wildflowers: Clematis crispa, swamp leatherflower

    We first saw this flower on the side of a levee in the Beaumont Unit of the Big Thicket National Preserve. We later found another plant on another roadside in the northern section of the same unit. The initial flower we saw had more purple in it compared to this nearly all white flower above. It appears they can vary in color from pink, blue, purple and white. Blooming throughout the spring to very early fall, Clematis crispa isn’t relegated only to Texas and occurs throughout the southeast. We found this plant among purple vetch and pinkroot, two plants that will be shown on another wildflower post later. The Lady…