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Hiking Adventure on the Nature Trail at Fairfield Lake State Park
Everyone but my dad set out for a hike Sunday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend. Dad stayed back to hang out with their dog Daisy. We weren’t sure exactly how long this trail was because unlike many other Texas state parks there wasn’t an individual trail map for the state park. The trail was on the campground map but there weren’t really any distinguishing marks to estimate the distance of the trail. And to make matters more complicated, wires were crossed between my brother and sister-in-law in regards to what the end-goal was for the hike: my brother was going for a hike and my sister-in-law thought the trail ended…
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Flood Video
I put together a short video of the second flood last week. For some reason I didn’t take a video of the front yard with the good camera, just my phone apparently, but I put some photos of the front yard in there at the end. Chris and I walked the neighborhood yesterday morning. Pretty much every house north of us along the creek had flood damage of some sort, mild to horrific. We are very lucky.
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Campsite Scenes | Fairfield Lake State Park
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May 2016 Book Report
I only read two books this month but both were stellar! Lab Girl by Hope Jahren Up until a few months ago I had no idea who Hope Jahren was. When her book was recommended to me by Erin I followed Hope on social media and kept tabs on her book release date. It was released but the library didn’t have copies of it yet, however I put a request in on my Overdrive account for the library to get it if they could and was subsequently put on the hold list. I was thrilled when they did purchase the digital (and hard copy) book and launched right into it…
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The Garden Before the Flood
I thought about doing a second post titled ‘500 Year Flood Part II’ because that’s what we had Friday afternoon, but I decided I’d rather show pretty pictures of the garden a week ago and just tell a short story about the second epic flood in less than 24 hours. When we woke up Friday morning and as I had written the post about the night before, the water was still in the yard but slowly receding. The front yard always takes forever to drain and well, patches of it haven’t drained for about two months because it has been so damn wet this spring. I’m half tempted to start…
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500 Year Flood
If you’ve been reading here for any amount of time you probably remember the first few weeks we were living here and it flooded. We’ve had a few simliar floods and smaller floods since then, including at least two or three others this spring. The most recent was the Tax Day Flood so it is very fresh in everyone’s memory. After that flood I remembered that back in 2012 someone had mentioned a massive flood in 1994 in Houston and that was recalled again so of course looked it up and was definitely worried about that ever happening again so I rechecked the floodplain maps for our county and was…
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Life Lately: Mid/Late May 2016
Been several months since I’ve done one of these! Thought it was time to do a good old-fashioned brain dump! +In My Head Summer’s here! So, mostly I’m now thinking about gardening, yardening, and keeping up with everything outside. It’s going to be a chore but we’ll see how it goes. Last September I joined a gym near my work so I could work out better/differently at lunch. It hit me a week or two ago that I really needed to quit the gym for the next three to four months so that I could work outside on my lunch breaks. I can still do some weightlifting here (when I…
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Small Towns: Gonzales, Texas
We popped into Gonzales, Texas the afternoon before Mother’s Day to take a break from the heat and have a little diversion. Plus, we were on the prowl for ice cream, hoping to find a local ice cream store! The city was like many small Texas towns, slowly fading with many historic buildings that were empty or decaying. Sure there were quite a few businesses in the town center and we popped into a few of them, but it was a quiet little town. The most interesting shop that we would have explored more of if a: the stroller fit through the aisles and b: a toddler wasn’t in tow,…
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Fauna of Palmetto State Park
Assassin bug nymphs For the most part, wildlife at Palmetto State Park was about looking to smaller species. On one of our hikes Chris stated beforehand that he wanted to see a snake and a caterpillar. That was surprisingly achieved! The caterpillar wouldn’t have been too hard if we’d looked but we ended up having one walk (slowly!) right across the trail. The snake, I figured, would be harder, but as we rounded a corner on the trail a rat snake was trying its best to disguise itself on the edge of the vegetation while soaking in some of the sunny warmth poking through the forest canopy. We did not…
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Flora of Palmetto State Park
Over Mother’s Day weekend we loaded up and went camping at Palmetto State Park. We’d had reservations here before, over the winter, but cancelled them due to weather. What’s interesting about this park, kind of in a similar botanic way to Bastrop State Park just to the north with their patch of pine trees, is that this park is the western most population of Sabal minor, or dwarf palmetto. The park is located adjacent to the San Marcos river and definitely has a unique ecosystem for this particular region of Texas. While walking along many of the trails it was easy to picture that we were over in our neck…