sudste.com » Outdoors

Lucy’s Birthday 2011

Sudi — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 16:23:24 +0000

We had a lovely time with Lucy celebrating her B-day at the Highlands in Arlington (Jan 10th). It was a beautiful sunny day. We ate at PFC. That’s always a treat! And yes I cut my hair. I donated 12 inches to The Angel Hair Foundation for Christmas.

Vegetable Garden Wrapup

Steven — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 20:30:19 +0000

These are shots of the vegetable garden from last year. You’ll see our first ripe blackberry, a bazillion little green grasshoppers and a couple new garden boxes.

Spring Wildflowers (2010)

Steven — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 20:28:25 +0000

Here are more photos from last year that I didn’t upload until now. I rode my bike out toward the edge of civilization in May to snap the wildflowers. This is southwest Benbrook which is southwest of Fort Worth in southwest Tarrant County. The southwestern edge of civilization!

Some Old Record Snowfall Shots

Steven — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 20:26:15 +0000

Here are some photos from January one year ago that I didn’t uplod until now. During Winter of 2009-2010 North Texas / Dallas-Fort Worth had record 24 hour snowfall. In Benbrook we had 8.5″ in 24 hours while Haslet had the most at 14″. The airport received somewhere in between. This is substantial because the area usually only gets 1 – 2″ per year. For the season, the total was 10X greater. This all followed a White Christmas in 2009.

Happy Birthday

Sudi — Mon, 10 May 2010 00:20:42 +0000

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!

White Christmas Video

Steven — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 22:20:45 +0000

Here’s a video to go with the pictures of our White Christmas.

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.

Promo Video for Storm Spectator

Steven — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:36:46 +0000

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.