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3. Best Book of 2022 – December Reflections 2022
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed by email! Thanks for visiting! It’s been a rather lackluster reading year for me, this despite reading almost 55 books. Many of the books have been fine but very few have stood out to me as being so enjoyable I’d rave about them. I have plans to fix that next year by reading A LOT more fiction and some paper books on my shelves. I use NetGalley and Edelweiss to read and review Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) digitally and have been slogging through some of those non-fiction ones. They are good, just slow reading. I need some…
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2. My Favorite Mug – December Reflections 2022
Now, this is a prompt I love! I could easily become a mug collector, though I have limited space so I try to keep it reigned in. I can’t reduce it down to one so I’m going to share three. The first two I use at work. This mug I bought back in 2015 at some coastal beach boutique in Port Aransas while on vacation that summer. I was out shopping with my mom and Forest, who was an itty baby at that point, not even a year old. Sea turtles and the thick, white heft of the mug sold me the instant I saw it. I made it my…
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1. Here I Am – December Reflections 2022
Way back in 2016 I completed a December blogging challenge called A Month of Faves. It was a great set of prompts to keep me writing here. Recently Susannah Conway posted on her Substack a December Reflections prompt for her Substack chat. I’ve decided to turn it into a blogging challenge instead. A much more approachable one than what I attempted a few months ago. So, maybe I’m not going to hibernate this month! I admit, the first thing I thought of when I saw this prompt was the Dolly Parton song “Here I Am” from the movie Dumplin’. It’s a great movie if you haven’t watched it! So, here…
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Thanksgiving on SPI
Having lived in Texas most of my life, minus the 8 years I lived in Florida, I’ve seen a good chunk of the state. There were corners I still hadn’t been to, and even places within regions I have been to that I haven’t seen. Forest asked a few weekends ago if it was possible to see every place on Earth, and he meant as if you could walk across every inch of Earth. We had to break it to him that it just wasn’t feasible to accomplish but I do admire his question and thought process! I knocked the panhandle out early when I was 3, flying for the…
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Hibernation Mode
Pasture Heliotrope, Euploca tenella I have entered hibernation mode as we switch from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. One thing I do relish about this switch, at least for the first two months or so, is that after dinner there is time to do nothing and everything. I don’t feel the need to have to go outside because it’s still sunny out. I can become a cozy hobbit and mindlessly move from one thing to the next and then ponder that it is really too late while looking at the clock and being dismayed it is only 6:30pm. *sigh* (Patrice, in Alaska, is laughing at me now!) I haven’t…
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Goodbye NanoWriMo, Hello NanoEdMo
Four days into NanoWriMo and I think I’m going to call it. Why? I realized I have a plot issue. The plot where I left off last year doesn’t work in my brain this year. And try as I may, I can’t get it to work. Typing words is difficult and I find myself stumbling. But I came up with an alternative plot this afternoon that works better. However, I’m going to have to edit the first half of the book before I get back to writing so that I can get into the groove of the book again. *phew* So, no winning for me this year. But coming to…
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NanoWriMo Round 2
Somewhere on the northern part of the Appalachian Trail, 2010. Last year I won at writing and accomplished my goal of finishing a NanoWriMo event (National Novel Writing Month) for the first time. I’d written about half of that about a decade ago but had never finished the full 50K words. This year I’m at it again but am finishing the book I started last year. I had intended to spend time editing and finish the book earlier this year but my interest waned. Instead I have spent the last few days reacquainting myself with the book and characters. I thought I had remembered enough about it but apparently not…
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How can you grow native plants if there aren’t native plants to buy?
A discussion that Chris and I get into on occasion is, how can gardeners grow native plants when there aren’t native plants to buy? Ok, sure, there are native plants to buy but the diversity of native plants is terrible, as you will see further into the discussion below. To take this idea even further, some gardeners and ecologists think gardeners should be growing by ecoregion or habitat type, not by USDA hardiness zone, which is the prominent method of identifying plants that will grow within a certain gardening region. Some recent discussions on social media prompted me to really ruminate on this issue and write about it, so let’s…
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Disappearing Act
Hello! You look down and suddenly it is over two weeks since your last post and time just keeps on ticking by. Life has been busy but I can’t really blame it all on that. Part of it is that I got a new computer for my birthday back in July and in August it started giving me blue screens of death with various warning codes to decipher and after both Chris and I tried to negotiate it ourselves, it is now on its way back to HP. I still have my old laptop but it is limping along with various issues of its own so I don’t like toting…
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Scratch and Sniff Butterfly Ginger
Ever since the gardenia died after the Snowpocalypse in 2021 (there are a couple of tiny shoots coming up, but it is basically gone) I haven’t been able to enjoy that heady aroma in the garden. The next best thing is the butterfly ginger which blooms in the autumn, though it doesn’t waft its scent from backyard to frontyard like the gardenia. It’s not a bad consolation and will lift your spirits while cleaning up the potting bench or starting new seeds, but you do have to force your face into the flower to drink in the full scent of the flowers! I keep hoping some of our other gingers…
