I knew it would hurt even worse this time around. But I didn’t expect the visceral gut punch, ripping out of my appendix, cutting off the blood supply to the limbs it would be. It isn’t like everyone who knew what this would be like, including myself, hadn’t warned, and warned, and warned. Somehow enough people memory-holed the first term and thought well, it won’t be so bad for me and decided to toss the rest of us to the oligarchs and fascists and well, here we are. “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…