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Warming Up in the Garden
I’d like to throttle whomever put up the forecast on Weather Underground yesterday. Every time I looked, the temperatures were in the high 60s or low 70s for the next forseeable future. This morning I dressed Forest in shorts and a t-shirt and even felt how warm it was when I sent Chris and Forest off. Thirty minutes later I was out the door and enjoying the balmy morning and then ten minutes later I opened the car door to get out at work and wondered if I’d entered a different world. It was at least 15* cooler! That was not what Weather Underground said was going to happen today!…
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January Camping at Lake Livingston State Park
Unlike last year, this time around there was no burst of caterpillars for spring, no thunderstorm to attempt to obliterate our tent, and the freshly poured concrete for the campsite driveway showed signs of aging from the last year. More importantly, the woods were still brown and leafless for the most part—no coloring of green other than the pine trees and any other evergreen type plant. It did drizzle a little bit and there was quite a bit of fog but overall it was a cozy winter camping event instead of an energetic spring one. While we did end up snagging the same campsite we had last year, we will…
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Signs of Spring
Finally, we are edging towards warmer days. The last week or two we’ve had a series of warmer days, though yesterday we dipped back into the 30s and 40s and I was shivering once again, but we’re on the upswing. Soon I’ll be dripping in sweat when I step outside—thanks high humidity! I’m ok with that, though. Give me tank tops, shorts, and flip flops any day. The bright side is that all of the tropical plants are providing a flush of green to the garden after hibernating inside for more of the winter than usual. But the fig tree they all hang on is putting on leaf buds and…
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Sunday Reads + Listens
Some things I’ve read and listened to in the last few months that have resonated with me. How to support the artists + writers you love via Ashlee Gadd. 1. If they write something lovely that resonates with you, leave a comment. When you leave a comment on a blog post or essay or article, that is your way of saying, “I’m here! I read this!” Comments (well, nice ones) make the writer feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. You don’t need to leave a comment on every post—just once in a while when something really resonates with you. That Favorite Place via Rambling Hemlock So I lay on…
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Nopales Ridge Trail | Lake Brownwood State Park
Ah, let’s flash back to Thanksgiving of 2017 once more to wrap up our hiking adventures there, shall we? We haven’t ventured out much so far this year, though I do have some photos to process for one night of camping a couple of weekends ago. I’m hoping that in a few short weeks the weather will warm up enough that we will want to be venturing out much more often! Actually, it isn’t that the weather hasn’t warmed up (finally!), just that it seems to be that we have inclement weather on the weekends lately, which doesn’t make for a large desire to be outside. Onward to the hike!…
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January 2018 Book Report
It’s been a fairly productive month of reading around here—much to my surprise. Ok, so one of of them is actually from the tail-end of last year but I had already written my book write-up for the year. Eh, no big deal, right? Completed +Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon: I subscribe to Kleon’s weekly newsletter and occasionally read his blog, and have heard about his work for quite awhile now but never actually read a book. Annnnnnd….can’t say it was worth the experience. It feels like a repackaged set of blog posts to sell as a kitsch book item. This…
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Fun with a Slackline!
I’ve wanted a slackline for several years now and at Christmas we decided to gift my brother’s family one for when they go camping and Chris bought one for us at the same time. Last weekend we set it up at our campsite at Lake Livingston State Park and had some fun! Let’s just say I have even more respect for Philippe Petit of Man on Wire fame. Woo boy, is this hard but fun! Chris did end up stretching out another rope up top and I did get better with balancing. I tried with shoes on too but I like the feeling of going without shoes as you are…
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Life Lately | Mid-January 2018
+In My Head Well, 2018 has started with a bang! Almost two weeks ago (tomorrow) Forest came down with a fever one evening and was feeling rather awful with runny nose, coughing, etc. Considering the flu has been horrible around here this year I was worried we were heading that direction. After all was said and done I’m not sure if we had the flu or a very bad cold, but either way I came down with it the following Monday evening and subsequently took 4 days of PTO. I was going to take three but that Friday Forest was cranky again and we both stayed home because we were…
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That One Time Everything Iced
Ugh. This winter y’all. This winter is becoming unbearable. I don’t even know what zone I’m in anymore. Is this really gardening zone 9a? Sure hasn’t looked or felt like it. I’ve read a couple of articles about how the jet stream has been situated the last several winters to create harsher winters in the east and mild winters in the west and how it may be tied to global warming but no one is quite sure yet. Despite all of that, I think after the last several winters we may need to re-evaluate replanting certain plants like citrus. And only time will tell if the other tropical plants in…
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Post-Freeze Damage Assessment in the Garden
We left for DFW the day after Christmas and in advance Chris moved a lot of the tropical plants like the bromeliads and orchids into the man-cave to spend some time under the grow lights while we were gone. It wasn’t supposed to get terribly cold while we were gone but after our mishap last year of leaving town and not taking care of moving and covering some plants because we weren’t expecting that cold of weather, this time we learned our lesson and did some advanced planning. We knew that just as we were planning to return home that we were expecting a deep freeze so doing some work…