Thoughts
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January 20, 2017 Redux
On this day 8 years ago I wrote It’s Time to Pay Attention. Reflecting back, and as someone said on social media elsewhere the other day, we didn’t resist enough from 2017-2021. We failed to hold Trump accountable after January 6th. Somehow South Korea managed to imprison their president after a coup attempt but ours is going unpunished. Good times! But that post from January 20, 2017, much of it still holds. There are some journalists I would not put up there any longer because they showed their true colors and are grifters. But most of them I would still recommend, especially the Cassandra of them all, Sarah Kendzior. She…
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Sometimes breaks are a good thing
I didn’t mean to take so long away from the blog but it has been great to get a bit of a break. Two people have prompted to me return to some more regular writing: my blog posts came up when they did a google search looking for a plant and they told me about it! If that isn’t a sign that things like trip and plant reports are worth the while, then I don’t know what is! The addition of the AI search results on Google has really done a number to the rest of the search results there and even I find myself sometimes stopping short of scrolling…
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The End of an Era | Over the Rainbow Bridge for Little Callie
If you’ve been around reading this blog for any length of time, you may have read at some point that we had a massive amount of feral cats at our house. When we moved here in late June 2012 we knew there were a couple of feral cats because we would see them when we came for closing walk throughs or for the first initial move-in. But it was when we came in late one night and the headlights turned to the carport that we saw just the number of cats we were dealing with. I spent several months trapping and then getting them fixed and releasing them, which I…
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Life Lately | September 2024
Liatris acidota in the Hickory Creek Savannah Unit of the Big Thicket NP Hello friends! As you can tell, I have not written here much in the last few months. To be honest, I’m struggling with where to go with this blog. I’m not ready to close up shop or stop writing but I feel the need to be quiet. I’m also overwhelmed with writing trip reports and keeping on top of that because I just simply can’t keep up anymore. I’m finding more joy in editing the photos, uploading to Flickr, and just revisiting them as a digital photo album than I am in writing here. I am spending…
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Life Lately | August 2024
Hello out there! It’s been A Month! Both in terms of time but also with how busy the month was. Shortly after I wrote the last post we took a 5 hour flight south, crossed the equator, and landed in Quito, Ecuador to kick off a 2.5 week adventure around Ecuador! I’m still reeling from how awesome our trip was and just how much we saw and will eventually write more here. We spent 3 days in/around Quito before taking a short flight east to Coca where we then boarded motorized canoes and took a boat ride up the Rio Napo where we got on our floating accommodation for the…
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Life Lately | Early July 2024
Hello friends out there! Long time, no write! I didn’t meant to let June get away from me but this has been a busy summer. Most of it was planned out months ago as we had to figure out when Forest would spend his few weeks with grandparents. Due to various scheduling conflicts between two sets of grandparents + a summer vacation in July, it ended up being instead of two weeks back to back, once in June and once in July, single weeks spread out through June and July/August. Which has meant more driving back and forth for us to and from DFW. Such is life but I’m glad…
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Life Lately | Early June 2024
Hello readers out there! The soggy Big Thicket Life has been very busy lately. I didn’t realize most moms/parents felt like May was a chaotic nightmare until I started seeing other mom’s posting memes about “Maycember” (all the business of the holidays but no presents) and the end of school and I feel very much seen. May zoomed by quickly and now it’s June 3rd and I can already see the end of summer because we have basically every single week planned out until the first day of school in early August. I know…it’s a lot. Forest has two summer camp weeks this year, compared to the three previous summers…
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Totality 2024
A year ago we made reservations for a hotel in Copperas Cove to see the total solar eclipse as it made its way through Texas. When the 10 day forecast started looking pretty dismal for most of Texas, we scurried to make alternate plans, just in case. In the end we ended up driving to the Lindale area in NE Texas to stay with Chris’ mom and step-dad for two nights after we made a detour to Sabine National Forest for some botanizing. But the hourly forecasts for Lindale were still iffy and so on Sunday night we started looking at possibly driving to the Tx/OK border, or even into…
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Thoughts on Time
People on the internet like to joke that 2016 was actually 2016-2020 and that 2020 was actually 2020-2023 (and maybe even 2024) and I would agree with that sentiment. There’s also those jokes about how 1998 is the same distance away from now as it was from 1988 to 1968, the time period the Wonder Years took place and aired. Nah, can’t be….and yet it is. I’m increasingly feeling like time is an amorphous thing, something ill-defined and increasingly circular. I remember on our Appalachian Trail hike that days would feel like months and months would feel like days. We might have been in the White Mountains but surely it…
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Trespassers: James Prosek and the Texas Prairie at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art
I came across James Prosek’s work last fall when someone I was following on Instagram posted that he had an exhibit, Trespassers: James Prosek and the Texas Prairie at the Amon Carter in Fort Worth. I hadn’t been to the Amon Carter in probably two decades but put it on my list to wrangle some people to go with me during the Christmas holidays when we were in Fort Worth visiting family. My mom had taken Forest and his cousins there last summer, an activity to beat the searing Texas heat, and they had all loved it. So, we wrangled up the kids again and my mom, Chris, and I…