environment

So. Much. Rain.

Posted on June 2, 2015 by Debora

May 2015 was the wettest month in recorded history for Texas, by a wide margin. DFW got an absurd amount of rain, 16.96 inches in May alone and 25.05 inches from March through May. It just rained and rained and rained.

So you can imagine my excitement when I got clear skies and sunshine for my day off work yesterday. The school year just ended on Friday, so the kids and I headed out to get stuff done and enjoy the glorious weather.

I had to pay up Mahogany’s board for June, so that was one of our stops.

The pasture looks great, and the wildflowers are still in bloom.

We decided to hike back to the Trinity River and see how full it was. Just getting to it turned out to be an adventure. A back pasture had become a lake, and we had to wade through one edge of it since it extended past the fence on both sides.

Then we crossed a nice stretch of high ground, and then we came to the woods and those were flooded too.

We slogged through that, and finally came to the bank of the Trinity.

Okay, just for context, here is an old pic of how the Trinity usually looks…

…and a pic I took yesterday from the same spot:

Here’s another old shot, same bank but facing the other way…

…and here’s one from that angle that I took yesterday:

The river was unrecognizable. As soon as we saw it, we immediately made plans to go tubing on it this summer.

On the way back, Elizabeth dropped her phone in the flooded woods and then spent like ten panicky minutes dredging around for it in the murky water.

I was waiting for her on dry ground, but when she couldn’t find her phone and refused to leave without it, I waded back in to help her look. Eventually we found it, long after I had given up any hope of it surviving the mishap. Miraculously, it took no apparent damage at all. She turned it back on the instant she found it, still dripping wet, and it started right up.

Luke’s phone got a little damp last week from being in his pocket while he walked home from school in the rain, and it flatlined and had to be replaced. Elizabeth’s phone spent somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes submerged in two feet of muddy floodwater and just shrugged it off. Technology is weird.

The sunshine felt really good, so our next stop was a nearby park. I wanted to see what the ponds looked like after all the rain.

This pond is brand new; it wasn’t there before:

The regular ponds had overflowed their banks.

This stand of trees usually marks the border between the two ponds, where there’s a sort of concrete bridge that I like to cross on Mahogany. Yesterday I couldn’t even see the bridge.

As of this writing, there’s no more rain in the forecast. I am ridiculously happy about that. I mean, we definitely needed the rain that we got, but enough is enough. Hooray for sunshine.

Categories: Animals, environment, Family, Horses, kids, Life, trees, Weather | Tags: Texas rainfall 2015 | Leave a comment

Writing, Working, Relocating

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Debora

Funny thing about writing for a living. To make any money at it, you actually have to spent most of your time sitting in front of a keyboard, writing.

Earning a living as a writer has been my dream since I was a teenager. I don’t know why the actual logistics of it never really crossed my mind. The part where I’d be sitting at a desk all day as my body slowly turned to mush? Somehow that was never part of the fantasy.

When we got back from our holiday trip to California, the combination of my return to the sedentary writer’s life and the feast-and-famine nature of the kind of writing I was doing drove me to get a part-time job that I knew would keep me on my feet and running around for a few hours a day in exchange for a steady paycheck. The first week or two of that really made me realize how out-of-shape I had let myself become. So much pain. But then my body toughened back up, and the extra flab started to come off. Seriously, I haven’t lost this much weight this quickly since my marriage ended and I couldn’t keep food down for like two months. I think manual labor is seriously underrated.

What really surprised me, though, is how much I enjoy the job. The combination of physical exertion, mental stimulation and social interaction makes me happy in a way that I did not expect. A few weeks after I hired on, I accepted a transition to a full-time position with more responsibility. I haven’t done any paid writing in weeks, and I don’t miss it. Bonus: my novel is progressing in leaps and bounds now that my wordsmithing energy isn’t being siphoned off into the other stuff.

Another nice thing about a regular-paycheck job is that it offers a certain reassurance to prospective landlords. The kids and I have finally relocated to our own apartment!

Life tip: If you ever move from a largish house into a smallish apartment, spend a few interim months living in someone else’s home. That little apartment will look positively spacious, trust me.

The best part about being able to stay with friends while we acclimated to DFW is that when the time came to start looking for an apartment, we knew exactly which area we wanted to move to. We are right where we want to be, or as close as we can get without moving Elizabeth out of her preferred high school. Luke had to switch to a different junior high, but he’s okay with that. He likes his new school.

Fun extra: there is a church up the street from our apartment with a full carillon that chimes on the hour:

I can just hear it if the windows are open, so it’s not intrusive. I like it, it’s a pretty sound.

The Metroplex is nice and green again, finally. Winter is kind of bleak here, which is one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much. It’s not really a photogenic place in the winter.

I was really enjoying how wild and overgrown Mahogany’s stretch of river trail is getting…

…until I lost my phone out there in the middle of a ride. Oops.

When the kids got home from school we went on a search-and-rescue mission that really only succeeded because Elizabeth kept calling my phone with hers until we heard it ring.

Let’s see, what else? I have plans to create a small kitchen garden in containers on our apartment’s balcony. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can grow here.

And now I think I’m all caught up!

Categories: Animals, environment, Family, Friends, Horses, Humor, kids, Life, trail rides, trees, Weather | Leave a comment

Wordless Wednesday: Nature’s Clean-Up Crew

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Debora

[Click through to see additional photos. Warning: Animal Death]

Continue reading →

Categories: Animals, Death, environment, Life, trail rides, Wildlife, Winter, Wordless Wednesday | Leave a comment

Home for the Holidays IV: Little Mountains

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Debora

This is the little mountain at the end of my Perris friends’ road:

I resolved to climb it every day of my stay, to counteract the debilitating effects of too much holiday feasting and revelry. I ended up skipping a hike or two, but not many. After the first couple of days the little mountain didn’t feel like a workout anymore, so I widened my range until I had scaled all of the immediately local peaks, such as they were.

I found this embedded in the top of a random peak. I have no idea what it means or why it’s there.

At one point my uncle came to visit from Phelan, and requested a tour of my little mountain range.

We got a really nice view of the balloons that day.

But most of the time I hiked alone. I really wanted to climb the big (relatively speaking) mountain on the other side of the Expressway next to Lake Perris.

I hadn’t climbed that one since I was in my teens or early twenties, way back in the day. It’s not really a mountain you want to tackle by yourself though. If something went wrong, help would be a while getting to you. On the last hike of my stay, I compromised by setting my sights on a handful of geocaches around its base. I didn’t expect to have time to get to all of them, and in fact I only got to two of the caches and didn’t actually find either one of those. Without a real gps unit it’s really just a guessing game trying to figure out which pile of rocks you’re supposed to be searching under. No regrets though, it was a beautiful hike.

The second geocache that I searched for was supposedly next to this big rock face.

I tried to climb that once, without equipment, in one of my younger and more foolish years. I didn’t get very far. To give a better idea of the scale of this thing, here are some arrows pointing to people who were climbing it when I snapped the pic:

That hike brought back a lot of memories. Two decades ago I used to ride Stormy on those trails.

The next day Steve dropped off Luke and Elizabeth. And if I’m completely honest, I will admit that our reunion was a little disorienting for me.

As I said in an earlier post, this was the longest that the kids and I had ever been apart. The first couple of days, I missed them like hell. I texted them to make sure they were okay, and felt a surge of relief every time Elizabeth posted to Facebook. But they were obviously having a fine time, and so was I, so I stopped worrying and began to enjoy the break. And there I was in this place where I had spent some of my carefree single years, with nothing to do but hike and play with my old friends and act like a kid again, and it was very easy to slip into that old mindset. And then suddenly the kids were with me again, and of course it was great to see them and catch up and everything, but…there was a very small part of me that had a hard time letting go of my rediscovered freedom. It was just…disorienting.

The next morning we headed back to Texas. By the time we arrived in DFW, the weirdness had passed and I was back in parenting mode. We all agreed that, while it was wonderful to see our old friends again, SoCal no longer felt like home. We’re just not desert people; we like trees and grass and rain. We like Texas.

I do kind of miss the mountains, though.

Categories: environment, Family, Friends, Geocaching, Life, Travel | Leave a comment