Thinking of the Beach

As I was out back the sky caught my eye and I thought ... BEACH SKY! Almost there...

Makin' a list, checkin' it twice

The presents are wrapped, the tortillas, Salt Lick sauce, and Alfie are ready to go, and the laundry is (almost) done.

Come tomorrow morning, we'll be Tulsa-bound. By Monday afternoon we'll be in Wentzville, the good lord willin' and the creek don't rise.

Hayes Carll is on the TV, in search of a standard pentatonic scale and singing what I'm thinking:

"I'm grateful for Christmas this year!"

Have yourself a merry music Christmas

What with the trip to St. Louis this year, we decided to downsize our Christmas tree ... significantly! 

But YD still decorated the hearth (note the classy Shiner poinsettia holder) ...

and our traditional bell display is as it always was.

Now we're hunkered down at Susannah's Kitchen concert in the Wimberley Methodist church for our annual Christmas music tradition: The Welch Family Sing Along (two years makes a tradition in my book).

Dustin Welch

Kevin Welch (Dustin's dad) and sister Savannah

No time like the present

Last January I wanted to keep things simple, so my New Year's resolution was a single word: Create.

That worked out pretty well, so I decided to come up with a new single-word resolution for 2014: Blog.

And since there's no time like the present, I'm starting today. Which leads me to the tale of the traveling palm tree.

As I went out to buy a Mega Millions ticket, the palm tree that your dad put out in the sun followed me down the driveway. Seems he had leaned it against the front bumper of the van ... which I guess I should have noticed before I backed out and set it free to roam. 

Oh well, I guess we can hire someone to repot it after we win the lottery tonight.

A day well spent

The alarm went off at 6:30 ... the time we have decided is best to get the day started. Which is not to say that we don't sometimes roll over and grab another hour or two. We do.

But not today. After a leisurely breakfast accompanied by the latest news in the Statesman, we headed out before the heat of the day set in. Don walked ahead, while I "beachcombed" the side of the road ... finding three turkey feathers, a deer shinbone, and a snake skeleton not quite ready for picking. 

Whenever I walk down Cascade it reminds me of the road down to Ram Island ... the storied property available for $9000 in 1963 that recently sold for $15 mil.  It may not overlook the Peconic Bay, but our piece of God's (sometimes) green earth suits me just fine.

The rest of the day was spent housecleaning, sitting in the sun, doing laundry, Skyping with Meliss and Jackson (who is now walking in earnest), starting a batch of bread, reading the NYT Book Review and taking a nap ... not necessarily in that order.

Eating, always a pleasure, has become blissful beyond belief now that time no longer presses. Leftover grilled pork morphed into an Asian-inspired lunch salad and the afore-mentioned bread accompanied tricked-out spaghetti and meat sauce for dinner (Don doesn't share my enthusiasm, opting for plain pasta, parm, and sauce, but I love to embellish pasta with Kalamata olives, fresh tomatoes, avocado, pine nuts, and basil cream).

And the bread --crusty and warm from the  oven, then liberally dosed with Unio olive oil and blessed with Kosher salt-- could only be surpassed by the promise of tomorrow's leftovers: toast for breakfast and torn garlic croutons on salad for lunch.

All this and grandkids, too? How did I ever get this lucky?

P.S. I got an email from a former coworker today.  It concluded with, "I'm glad you were able to get out." Me, too.

A good end to a productive day ...

We've been going through boxes from the move four (!) years ago: recycling paper,  creating give-away boxes, and getting ready to send stuff to St. Louis and Austin. Feeling full of ourselves, we decided to indulge in dinner out.

Good timing, because the second Tuesday of every month is "Fat Tuesday" at Linda's in Wimberley. A cup of gumbo (described by one server as "mud topped with motor oil"), Shiner Bock beers and the piece de resistance: crawfish nachos.

I know what you're thinking ... "Nachos, meh." But not these ... warm morsels of crisp corn tortilla cradling rich green cilantro pesto, a modest sprinkling of Monterrey Jack, savory rosy colored bits of crawfish and a slice of jalapeño.  Yum!

Don lovin' on some nachos

And for dessert? Mexican wedding cookies accompanied by an Acoustic Jungle serenade. Ah yes.

Selective vision

My easy days as a working woman are over ... now I have to help clean the house. I'm not complaining though ... we've always had a very companionable division of labor where I do all the "wet" cleaning (kitchens and bathrooms) and your dad does all the dusting/vacuuming and floors. Neither of us would want to trade places and YD remarked how happy he was to be off KP.

Not that I haven't done occasional turns at cleaning Cascade Trail before now.  In the nearly three years that we've been here I've given your dad a hand from time to time. Which is why what happened today was so funny.

It's not like I don't use my oven ... in fact I use it constantly. And not just for baking  bread, roasting meat, and toasting granola ... I also fire it up on a regular basis to warm up bread for Friday night suppers and to keep pancakes and waffles warm while I make multiple batches.

So how did I miss this?

Me: "We have a warmer drawer?"

YD:  "I thought you knew that."

Me: "If I knew that, why would I have asked Meliss for a plate warmer last Christmas?"

Thankfully, YD didn't comment any further ... and I can only imagine what he was thinking.

A day to celebrate

35 years after I graduated from William and Mary and joined the working world, Don and I celebrated my first day of full retirement at Trattoria Lisina. A bottle of top shelf Chianti arrived at our table ... a gift from Meliss, Jake, and Jackson in St Louis.  It was followed in short order by the arrival of Meg, Paul, and Griffin ... another wonderful gift.

Earlier in the day, my current and former bosses took me to lunch at the local Chinese Bistro. The meal ended with fortune cookies, but mine was empty ... surely because I now have everything I could possibly wish for.

I hope you dance

Kokopelli hanging out in the front yard.

Not quite blowin' in the wind

Chief Thunder Eagle reminds everyone to have their name ready for the beach campfire...

Tom time

I was working in the back yard and saw this turkey heading towards our front porch. So I went in the house and found him pecking at the glass on our front door. It is an amazing sound when a turkey fans its tail feathers...and an equally amazing sound I made to shoo him away from the house.

Expectations

We celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary in grand style over the past four days. For me, it started with the following horoscope:  

You'll realize that you do have time to do what you really want to do if you change your expectations.

So that's what I did ... I deleted the solitaire game from my iPhone, pulled up my tube socks and tied on my work boots. Then Don and I headed out to cut brush and frost weed from the back of the property.  We also did a lot of planning for the great room/studio/bunkhouse project.  And dined happily on spaghetti and meatballs. Not the romantic anniversary dinner that I would have imagined oh so many years ago, but truly what we really wanted to do.

Sunday we got the house organized a bit before we headed back outside and took the chain saw to some of the dead trees and limbs on the property (after taking some ibuprofen to counteract our back aches from the previous day). It was a good day's work.

Monday dawned rainy and we made the unhappy discovery of a dead deer in our front yard. Since we had plans to head to Austin, we deferred any action. After all, it was raining, and it was New Year's Eve, and we had an Uncle Lucius/Ray Wylie Hubbard concert to go to. Besides, we really had no clue what to do with a dead deer.

Tuesday morning the deer was still in our front yard ... in spite of my somewhat unrealistic hope that it would magically disappear. It was time to change my expectations, so I pulled on my tube socks and tied on my work boots. 

Plan A was to roll the deer onto a tarp, pull it into the lawnmower cart, and take it to the back of the property for the buzzards. Except the lawnmower wouldn't start. Plan B was to lay the side of the wheelbarrow down next to the deer, roll the deer into the wheelbarrow, then push it to the back of the property. Which actually worked, amazingly enough. Rigor mortis is a wonderful thing and it was also very convenient that the deer ended its days next to a large, wedge-shaped rock ... both of which made things much easier.

Job done, we headed off to Gruene Hall, where we reacquainted ourselves with Walt Wilkins and the Mystiqueros (who we hadn't seen in ages). That makes three acts that we've listened to in 2013 (Uncle Lucius and Ray Wylie kept singing after midnight on New Year's Eve) ... not a bad start.  As Ray Wylie says,

"And the days that I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations ... well, I have really good days"

Here's to lots more really good days in 2013.

  

San Marcos wildflowers

I just got back from a walk (the first I've taken in quite a while), and couldn't get over how many flowers I saw ... not to mention how many I recognized.  So herewith is a list of those I can remember:

Texas dandelion

Texas storksbill

Two-leaf senna

Nerve ray

• Antelope horn milkweed
• Prairie Bishop's weed
• Prairie verbena
• Blanket flower, aka firewheel, aka Indian blanket
• Mexican hat, aka thimble flower
• Skeleton plant
• Nerve ray, aka square bud daisy
• Rock lettuce
• Texas dandelion
• Texas thistle
• Alamo vine
• Herbertia, aka Prairie nymph
• Spider flower, aka Blue curls
• Horse nettle
• Bitterweed
• Yellow stonecrop
• Texas star
• Lantana
• Vervain
• Prairie phlox
• Malta star thistle (not a good one)
• Texas storksbill
• Scarlet guara
• Prickly pear
• Two-leaf senna
• Winecup
• Prairie larkspur
• Prairie brazoria

Along with a whole slew of daisy-like flowers that I can't even begin to identify.  

I'm Going to Texas ...

 ... again. 

I don't really want to let the old blog die, so I've decided to put up the occasional recipe and/or completed craft idea.  I'll let you know when I do ... like now.

Note from 2018: the original rain chain post blew up the user stats on I'm Going to Texas ... to the point where I ended up moving it. There are now several posts, which can be seen at this link.

For the someday grandkids

On our most recent trip to By the Bridge Antiques in Wimberley we found these bi-planes which are now flying around in the front yard.  The question  remains, "Was this purchased for the grandkids or for the "big" kids?"  Both I suspect...

Rain chain

Come rain ...

or shine ...

Flora and fauna

Two shots ... which do you like better?  
  

KNBT Roots and Branches

We scored a spot on the guest list for Tuesday’s Roots and Branches of Americana live on KNBT radio at Tavern in the Gruene. YM asked her audiologist to help us out since her office is one of the sponsors of the show.  We saw Stewart Mann of the Statesboro Review and Jason Eady.  Jason had just released his new CD “AM Country Heaven” which was already number 8 on the country charts...according to him.  Ray Wylie Hubbard was not there so Mattson Rainer ran the show. It was fun to see the behind the scene work of a radio broadcast.

Roots and Branches of Americana is on every Tuesday at 7 PM on KNBT radio 92.1 on your radio dial.  It has become our favorite station for several reasons.  One, they play really good music. The other is that they have live shows every Tuesday and recorded archives of live shows every Wednesday.

Last night was made even better when we learned that a representative of Leinenkugel beer was there, so beers were on him.  We had not tried Leinenkugel  before but the Fireside Nutty Brown was nice.  Leinenkuglel is brewed in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin and is available locally.

Memoir

The other day I had reason to recall when I started pruning, many years ago. You've heard the story before ... it was the December of 1984 and I had just miscarried. Told to rest by the doctor, I was quietly going crazy in our bedroom ... thinking of drinking and realizing that wasn't an any kind of good answer. So I slipped out the back door, grabbed some clippers, and began to prune a monster bush in the front yard. It was easily eight feet high and at least that wide. By the time I finished, it was about two feet tall, barely that wide ... and I no longer felt like tying one on.  
  

  
     Fast forward to this past Friday when I finally convinced YD to let me cut back the monster prickly pear looming over the fire pit. Easily seven feet high and half again that wide, it sported a formidable array of spines. The small tunas were the first to go, whacked off with a bent-tip Henckel knife (it didn't originally have a bent tip, but got relegated to garden duty when a butchering faux pas rendered it less-than-helpful in the kitchen). I made the mistake of picking up the first of the cactus pads, but quickly realized the spines would work their way through the gloves, so the infamous Valentine's Day pitchfork was fetched from the shed. 
     The cactus fell to the knife within an hour and I re-filled the wheelbarrow as fast as YD could empty it ... three, then four times over with heavy loads of water-laden pads. But then I reached the heavy brown base of the cactus, tree-like in thickness and absolutely resistant to the knife blade. We retreated to the back porch to survey our handiwork, but that didn't last long. Grabbing a pruning saw, I went back to work, taking down the remaining branches, until the cactus was but two feet tall and barely that wide. 

     The red oak stumps from the fire pit are now arrayed in a circle around the base of the former monster cactus. YD plans to fill the center with soil and plant lantana, which will drape over the sides as time goes by. No doubt the cactus will make a reappearance, which is fine by me since it will create a fine back drop for the new planter. For now, I've served notice that I'm a force to be reckoned with ... me, my bent-tip Henckel, and the pruning saw.

Don working the land

Spring

My riding lawn mower was returned today and I put it to good use cutting the grass on the east side of the driveway.  We have decided it is the one area, along with the strip by the road,we will keep mowed and let the rest of the property return to meadow.  Actually, it is the one area that does not have large rocks and therefore can be safely mowed.

After I finished I took a walk around and snapped some pictures of the many flowers in bloom.  It is quite spectacular.  We certainly did not see this kind of display last year.  Don't mess with Mother Nature!

East side mowed...and not mowed

Aloe plant getting ready to flower

Twisted leaf yucca flowering

Mealy blue sage is abundant in yard (twice as high as last year)