Family

Monthly Wrap-Up

Posted on June 26, 2014 by Debora

A few weeks ago I was walking through a field and saw this guy on a trash-heap:

I whipped out my camera, but I needn’t have hurried.

I think I’ve seen more random taxidermy since I moved to Texas than in all of the rest of my life put together. I don’t know why, but Texans really, really enjoy stuffing animals and pieces of animals. I mentioned this phenomenon to a coworker here, and her eyes lit up with delight and nostalgia as she told me about the first creature she ever taxidermied (a mouse) and how she still proudly displays it in her home. I am not making this up.

Summer is in full swing now, but I don’t want to forget to mention how gorgeous Texas is in the springtime.

Everything was in bloom, everywhere. I didn’t get a lot of photos, because working full time in retail kind of swallowed up my life for a while until I adjusted to it. On the plus side, this job is getting me into better shape than I’ve been in in years.

It’s like getting paid to go to the gym for eight hours a day.

The horses that run wild down by the Trinity River have added some new babies to their little herd.

They keep their distance now and scamper off if Mahogany and I get too close.

Farther up the river, there’s a nice park area where I can work on training Mahogany to cross moving water. We haven’t gone there much, because getting to it involved crossing a narrow road-bridge with no way to get out of the way of traffic. But we braved it today, and discovered that the culvert has been reconstructed to allow for crossing beside the bridge. Now I have TWO places to train Mahogany on water crossings!

And the park is great for just galloping at full speed across the open meadows.

School is out for the summer. As per our custody agreement, Luke and Elizabeth are each spending four weeks in California with their dad. Luke went first; he’ll be coming back to Texas this weekend and Elizabeth will fly out to California few days later. It’s their first experience with flying, so that’s kind of exciting. Selfie at the airport:

An out-of-state Facebook friend came out to Arlington on business this week and invited me to have breakfast with him yesterday morning. Neither of us were familiar with that area, so I got some restaurant recommendations from a local friend and we ended up at a colorful little dive straight out of a grainy ’70s movie. So much food was piled in front of me that I ended up bringing most of it home home for lunch. The company was very nice, and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. This was the first date I’ve been on since my marriage ended six years ago, so it feels like a milestone.

And that’s all the news for the month. Life is good. Oh! How To Train Your Dragon 2 is an amazing movie, go see it!

Categories: Animals, Family, food, Friends, Horses, kids, Life, trail rides, Travel | 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

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

Home For The Holidays, Part I

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Debora

Luke and Elizabeth spent Winter Break with their dad in Anza. I drove them back to California, stayed with friends over the break, and then we drove back to Texas. I came home with 400+ pics on my camera, so for the next week or so I’ll be sharing my favorite images from the trip.

The whole thing went really well. We arrived at my friends’ house on the night of the 23rd, very restless from sitting in the car for two days. First thing the next morning, I took the kids out to stretch their legs on the little mountain at the end of my friends’ road.

It’s a nice climb, with a nice view at the top.

Those tiny dots above the mountains are hot air balloons. I climbed this mountain almost every morning of my stay, and I saw the balloons almost every time.

My friends’ road, seen from the mountaintop:

At some point since our trip to the Grand Canyon a few years ago, Luke apparently lost his fear of climbing around above long drops. The boy was scrambling over the rocks like a mountain goat, he even gave me a scare or two.

Elizabeth is as fearless and surefooted as ever.

We felt a lot better after the hike. Washed off the road dust, had a really nice Christmas Eve with our friends, and then Steve picked up the kids and I didn’t see them again for more than a week. It’s the longest we’ve ever been apart.

My friends did their best to keep me too busy to miss them, though. More pics to come!

Categories: Christmas, Family, Friends, kids, Life, Travel | Leave a comment