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Our Trip to San Diego in October

Steven — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 20:33:14 +0000

In October we went home to San Diego for a visit. We stayed at the Gliebe B&B while we saw family and the ocean. We had a great time with everybody! Here are some pictures…

A White Christmas in Texas

Steven — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 16:57:46 +0000

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.

Autumn Snow in Texas

Steven — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:33:43 +0000

It snowed for a couple hours this morning. It was really pretty especially since some of the trees still have their fall colors.

I’ll probably make a little video of the snow falling later.

Veggie Garden in November

Steven — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:07:41 +0000

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.

Western Fun with Mom & Dad

Steven — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:16:26 +0000

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.

Summer Garden Update

Steven — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:15:49 +0000

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!

The Village of Benbrook

Steven — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 02:57:36 +0000

This was taken by Sergeant C. P. Devos of the Royal Flying Corps in 1917 or 1918. Benbrook was a training camp during World War I. There are more old Benbrook pictures from Deseronto Archives on flickr.

Home Storm Chasers II (Video)

Steven — Sat, 30 May 2009 15:40:58 +0000

We captured enough footage on one day last week to make a whole sequel to Home Storm Chasers. Here it is.

Home Storm Chasers II: 96 Degree Day with Golf Ball Hail and Lightning Striking a Rainbow

Also watch Lightning Storm Video. It shows more of the lightning in slow motion.

Lightning Storm Video

Steven — Sat, 30 May 2009 03:04:02 +0000

Here’s the evening lightning storm footage I mentioned earlier. The second half is in slow motion. I’ll post another video tomorrow showing a rainbow, hail and part of the neighbor’s roof flying away. It was a day of sweet footage!

Latest Thunderstorm Shots

Steven — Wed, 27 May 2009 13:48:39 +0000

Here are thunderstorm pictures from late May. The dark sky shots were from a storm that barely clipped us. Amazingly it hardly sprinkled. The later pictures are from the 96 degree day with golf ball size hail and lightning striking a rainbow that I wrote about here. I was so lucky to get that lightning shot. Thank you Sudi-Pie for finding the rainbow or I would have missed both.

Later on in the evening we saw near-continuous horizontal lightning very far away. I took a gig of video. This weekend I’ll edit that to show the lightning branching out in slow motion. I think there will be 3 or 4 really cool sequences.