What an utter disgrace… we haven’t blogged in 115 days! We’re still here.
Steven and I celebrated my Birthday yesterday in our California-like-spot… Rockwall Texas. The drive was amazing, we listened to all our old favorite songs. The weather was perfect! While we were eating, the near by fountain sprayed us with mist every once in a while, so we pretended it was an ocean breeze. The food was perfectly vegan and delicious. We walked for a long time taking beautiful pictures. I took a spectacular shot of Steven, it belongs on the cover of a Ralph Lauren Catalog- very regal- very handsome! We took a “silly” picture and it was my idea- very surprising. It got pretty hot at around 4pm and so we laid down under a shady tree and talked for another long while. It was a magical day (Thank you, my darling)!
I got a beautiful bouquet of tulips (my favorite), a pirate speed-boat and a super sweet card. It says:
Take joy in the music of life.
They’s playing your Song.
Happy Birthday!
Today is Christmas. It’s a White Christmas! We had snowed all day on Christmas Eve. It was 75 degrees and beautiful on the 23rd then it dropped to 30 degrees (that’s an insane drop) on the 24th, with 30 – 45 MPH wind! This “near blizzard” as they called it was unexpected and the amount of snow is very unusual for North Texas (three inches in Benbrook with some one foot drifts). How wonderful it was that it happened on Christmas Eve though, because here we are on Christmas day with snow all over the place… a real White Christmas. I even built a snowman.
I’ll put together a video later… including some home storm chaser action of me jumping directly into the “blizzard” for some sweet footage.
P.S. Our street is frozen solid with 1 cm of ice (!) but it’s blue skies and sunshine again today so everything is starting to melt.
I’m happy to see that we can grow veggies through November here. Our peppers are doing better now than they did in Spring. The tomatoes are producing well but now the plants are looking tired. I learned it’s better to cut the Spring tomato plants back in July than to replant for Fall. We make some killer salsa out of the harvest. Our experimental Mexican Piquin Pepper plants that we grew from seed are finally producing their itsy bitsy peppers too.
One of these slides shows prepared ground for Apache and Navaho blackberry plants (to be planted next Spring). We live on “Hills of Whitestone” so I dug out tons of rocks. One of them must have weighed 200 pounds or more because I could hardly even roll it. We then added a few hundred pounds of various composts (and a little cow manure) to help improve the clay soil. Next week we’ll dump a bunch of mulch on top to encourage the worms to keep working for us over the winter.
Watch the promo video I put together for Storm Spectator, via the site’s nifty embeddable video player. Obviously, I did not take these photos. I just edited it all together.
Mom and Dad visited us this Fall. We did some fun western stuff in Fort Worth plus the Benbrook Cowboy Roundup. We also spent some time by Benbrook Lake and ate good vegan food.
Here are some pics from our garden at this point. We’ve have 300+ tomatoes and we’re starting to get some good cucumbers now. The peppers are few but tasty. Our sunflowers expired. The tallest one was about 9 feet tall. Fun to grow!
We enjoyed an unforgettable 4th of July. Steven got me surprise tickets for a Concert & Fireworks Show at the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens. We arrived at 5:30 and stood in line (we actually sat in our lawn chairs under the shade of a huge Magnolia tree) for an hour. At 6:30 the doors were opened. It was a very hot day, but around 7ish, the temperature dropped to a comfortable 97 degrees so the rest of the night was very enjoyable.
Two options for seating were offered, “lawn” or “tables”. Steven “the genious” got us lawn tickets and we got to sit front and center in front of more than 10,000 people. We really had the best seats (grass) in the house. We laid out our old La Jolla beach towels and enjoyed fun snacks and drinks.
The Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra did the fabulous concert. All patriotic marches and good ol’ American classics like Yankee Doodle Dandy. The grand finale was performed by a soloist, a young soprano who sang God Bless America, a huge flag unfolded in the back as she sang and the spectacular fireworks began. We had the time of our lives.
