Thoughts
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The Best of Intentions
Well, 30 days of writing just isn’t going to happen. As per usual, I start off well for these types of things and then fail rather quickly. It isn’t for a lack of interest. I go into weekends with the plan to do more creative projects than I actually get done and over the years all of those plans fall apart faster than they used to. I can’t even get all of the chores I want to get done completed in a weekend anymore. What I have been doing is spending a lot of time in my head brainstorming ideas and thinking of the projects I’ve started that I need…
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Best of Summer 2022
Oof, the last week or so has been busy and I’ve been solo parenting while Chris has been doing field work. It hasn’t left a lot of time for writing. But I thought I would do a Best of Summer wrap up while Forest is getting his bath tonight. Summer isn’t officially over until late September, but I think we all know June, July and August are the summer months in our heads that we care about—or the ones we cared about as kids. And the ones that rule the roost for anyone who has a kid in school. This summer breezed by quickly but there were some delights! I…
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Lunch with Beto
I’ve been a fan of Beto O’Rourke’s since his 2018 Senate run against Cancun Ted and have always had high hopes for him in our state. A couple of weeks ago our county Democratic party sent out an email saying he would be in the area and I thought it would be worth taking a few hours off in the middle of the day to drive over and see him at the event. It was part of his Drive for Texas event, and if there’s one thing Beto knows how to do, it is going around the state and getting to talk to folks in person. I texted a couple…
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Whatever thrives, thrives.
As it turns out, a lot of my extra energy and oomph in getting this blog going again with steady entries was that I had the free time to work on it! Forest was at various grandparent’s for the last week of July and first week of August and because Chris and I were actually home and not galivanting about for work or pleasure, there was time to just be. And now, he’s back home, swimming lessons are back on schedule, there are bedtime routines, and school started today! Needless to say, life is full once again. I’m currently trying to figure out how to navigate my never-ending creative ideas…
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Current Obsessions | August 2022
Things I have been loving and/or obsessed with lately: This cover of Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters by Phoebe Bridgers. It came on during a Spotify playlist earlier in July and I have now become obsessed with it. Subsequently I have started listening to Phoebe’s music as well, which as it turns out, is right up my alley. There’s also a Miley Cyrus cover of that same song but I don’t like it nearly as much. via GIPHY The final season of Better Call Saul—Holy Smokes, it has been a good one! Two episodes left and we will finally have some closure to the entire Breaking Bad enterprise. I had thought…
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Things I’m Loving Lately
In Austin over the weekend we popped into an HEB to get some groceries for our short stay. I wanted to check out their kombucha case because HEB usually has the Live brand that is cream soda flavored. My Kroger only carries the root beer, which is fine, but I like the cream soda better. I picked up a couple of the cream sodas but then became enamored with these Greenbelt brand kombucha so I snagged the strawberry and peach. I drank the strawberry there and it is far better than GT’s and this may be my favorite brand now! Luckily our HEB has them too so I bought a…
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Pool Day
Several summers ago we attempted to make it a summer routine by heading to our local city swimming pool. Forest was 3 or 4 at at the time and we had barely tested the waters with one swimming lesson in the backyard pool of someone who gave lessons. It wasn’t a match at the time because Forest hadn’t spent a ton of time in pools or waters like that, so the community pool was the easiest place to initiate more of a relationship to water and pools like this in the summer. I still kick myself for not getting around to doing swimming lessons when he was a baby and…
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That Gnawing Feeling
Well, what a craptastic last week, eh? Chris and I escaped to New Mexico last week to celebrate our anniversary and while we had some wifi we were mostly off in lala land and not paying much attention to the news. I had even taken Twitter off of my phone earlier in the week so I wasn’t constantly tethered to the latest breaking story. We left our cabin in Pecos Friday morning to drive to Las Vegas for lunch and do a little shopping in their town center, when a few miles outside of town on I-25 the hosts for 98.1 Radio Free Santa Fe came on to break the…
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A Writing Habit: Step One – Get Out of Inertia
I’m going to attempt a not-quite-daily writing habit here this summer. It may be a few paragraphs, maybe just a few sentences, but the goal is to write more here which will hopefully lead to more writing outside of this blog. I miss the days when I could sit down and jot down a few paragraphs no matter how messy they were, just to share whatever thoughts were coming my way or to share a few quick photos. Somehow I got bogged down into my trip reports and well, you see how well that has gone as I’ve just abandoned sharing them because it seems like such a task to…
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A Forced Slow Down
May was a very busy month for us and as I peered out into June and July, all I saw was busy, busy, busy. Don’t worry, it still looks like that, and with an ever growing pile of field work at work for a thin crew of field-bios-who-also-double-as-project-managers-and-other-indoorsy-type-biologist-job-descriptions, things are very chaotic. I was actually looking forward to last weekend with my parents and niece and nephew for the Labor Day weekend but if I had known that a late Thursday night headache would turn into a positive Covid test on Saturday morning, well, I would have done things differently. But here we are, a house full of Covid soup!…
