Filed under: food, friends, Garden, go green, lifestyle, personal, travel | Tags: 1015 onions, creeping jenny, gardening in central texas, herb gardening, onions, roman chamomile, square foot gardening, texas vegetable garden, winter vegetable garden
Twenty-ten didn’t waste any time throwing a few speed bumps my direction.
The troubles began the day before I left for Colorado when I woke with a sore, swollen eye – another eye infection. And so I flew to Denver last Thursday wearing my glasses. On Friday a second medical complication required me to spend most of the morning talking with my Doctors in Austin and the pharmacy in Colorado Springs. Cover your ears boys: my Nuvaring had mysteriously gone missing. I finally got everything sorted out and a new prescription filled (only to discover two days later that the original hadn’t actually gone missing – oh, the glories of being a woman), and the trip turned out to be a fantastic one in spite of a challenging start.
ummm... not such a great idea afterall.
Promptly upon my return to Austin, my refrigerator broke down. This resulted in a frantic mid-week evening of picking up a mini-fridge found on Craigslist, ruining the interior of my S2000 with said refrigerator, and relocating all items from broken fridge & freezer to one of two locations: new evil car-destroying mini-fridge or friend Melissa’s freezer. It was an unexpectedly exhausting evening. The following morning I broke a glass in the bathroom as I was getting ready for work. Fifteen minutes later my worst nightmare came true: I set off the recently installed house alarm. In my week away from home I’d forgotten how to enter the disarm code. That afternoon I came home from work sick, sick, sick. Since then I have spent the majority of my weekend in bed, trying to dislodge the styrofoam residing between my ears with sleep, sleep and more sleep.
The worst of all of these events is that I am completely out of sync with my world right now. I can’t decide if it’s because of the aforementioned events, or if those events were a result of me being out of sync. The feeling spans back to my house break-in before Christmas, and then spending the holiday alone in Austin. While my friends were home with their families, I was here. As soon as they got back, I left town. Shortly thereafter I busted my eye, had a fridge bust, and got sick (resulting in more hermit at home time void of contact with the outside world). I’d like to think that I will be back in sync quickly, but I’m staring into another weekend of traveling that is going to keep me from getting settled anytime soon.
My brief glimpse at normalcy came this afternoon when I planted onions. Onions & lettuce & spinach, oh my! I made a quick trip to the Natural Gardener to celebrate my getting out of bed and pajamas today. While I was there I came across Roman Chamomile, which smells wonderful (like apples!). I have no idea what I’ll use it for, but it’s so lovely that I added it to the herb garden. The work was gentle and easy since the beds were already prepared. Being outdoors was absolutely refreshing after being bed-ridden for the last 48 hours. And raking through the herb garden with my hands to free dead leaves was really wonderful – the release of those scents into the air helped clear my head for a brief and wonderful moment. I planted two pockets of creeping Jenny where my herb garden meets the original raised bed in the hopes that the creeping Jenny will fill those areas and keep grass & weeds down throughout the new year.
The herb garden - new chamomile is bottom right.
1015 onions - much bigger than last year's sprigs, can't wait to see how they do!
Speaking of onions... while I was outside planting them, Mallary was inside cooking them. The ski goggles make it the perfect photo for this post. 
It feels great to have started the garden, and I’m looking forward to planting carrots & broccoli in the coming weeks. It still seems bizarre to be planting at this time of year, especially after having spent a week in a snow-covered place. Since my trip to Colorado I expect to see pockets of melting snow here in Austin as I drive around town, and am still feeling shocked that there isn’t any here at all. My Yankee blood must be calling to me – I’m even anxious to get to Chicago and experience the cold again. Plans for a second skiing trip this season are sloshing around in my head as well. Which leads to the final piece of my “feeling-out-of-sync” puzzle: since when have I missed cold weather and snow?!
Filed under: food, friends, Garden, go green, travel | Tags: colorado vacation, hummingbird cabin, linkedin, new years resolutions, square foot gardening, vegetable garden, vrbo.com
Garden Update #12 will conclude my series of first-year garden stories. At this point it seems fitting to ceremoniously say goodbye to my freshman experience with the garden and graduate into a new series of second-year adventures.
As I recollect over a year of growth, harvest, dormancy, death and reemergence, I realize that the garden has very suspiciously reflected my own life patterns this year. The spring was full of innocent hope. The days and weeks were balanced with equal parts work and play, and then spiced with dashes of charitable volunteering and lots of reading and learning. Health was abundant, life was full. The summer brought drought and challenge. The garden fell fallow under the grips of 100+ temps, and my life grew a bit unbalanced as well. Fall brought sweet, refreshing rains and the garden flourished once again. As the rains nourished, I turned 30 and renewed my goal of finding inner balance. At long last, winter’s first frost killed the last of the seeds I’d sprouted in January and also encouraged the growth of new plants – a fresh start for a new year.
one swift kick.
In less metaphorical terms, the last few months have brought a lot of change around here. A week before Christmas Eve, someone kicked in our front door and made off with a lot of small electronics. No doubt they will be back in a few months to collect those things that they weren’t able to hoist on the first visit. Next time we hope to greet them with a siren so loud that their eardrums will explode (but hopefully not all over my beige carpet).
Cory & I check out the ice fishing scene in the greater Estes Park area.
The other change is that I’ve been traveling, a lot. And I will probably continue to travel, a lot. My new beau is a captain in the Air Force and lives in Colorado Springs. As you can imagine, this makes scheduling regular date nights a bit complicated. In fact, our “first date” was a weekend trip to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Forest. We stayed in an adorable cabin we found on www.vrbo.com, somewhere between Lyons and Estes Park. It was a splendid weekend. Cory was down in December to accompany me to our work Christmas party, and I will head to Colorado Springs in less than a week for a skiing adventure. Two weeks later, we’ll meet in Chicago for a wedding. Twenty-ten promises to bring many frequent flier miles.
Though I don’t necessarily believe in New Years Resolutions, I do believe that the end of a year is a great time review the year past with an objective lens and learn from all the experiences contained therein. The lessons are allowed to come into the new year with me, but nothing else can carry over. With those lessons in mind, it’s a good time to formulate a plan and some goals for the year ahead. So with that, I leave you with my garden plan for 2010, and hope you’ll join me in saying, “Sayonara, 2009!!!!”
garden plan, 2010
Filed under: Austin, design, go green, politics, travel | Tags: Austin commuter trains, Austin light rail, Austin MetroRail, Austin Red Line, Austin transit, CapMetro, CapMetro Red Line, MetroRail, Plaza Saltillo
People usually have lots of nice things to say about Austin. It seems that townies and tourists alike have similar good feelings about the city. They say the people are friendly, the arts & music scene is thriving, and life in general seems to be pretty darn good around here. But there’s one compliment you’ll never hear from either group: that our public transit system is anything worth writing home about.
If CapMetro and the City of Austin has it’s way, that’s all about to change. On March 30th, 2009, Austin’s first light rail train will make it’s way from Leander to the Convention Center on CapMetro’s new Red Line. During the month of February CapMetro is testing it’s 6 MetroRail trains on segments of the track, and today kicked off the first of several open house events scheduled for the public prior to the official start of service. For those of us who have been around since the trains were purchased in the fall of 2005, today’s open house at Plaza Saltillo was a long-anticipated unveiling.
For more pictures of the new MetroRail trains & Plaza Saltillo, click the photo.
There were plenty of people milling around the Red Line’s last stop before downtown this morning. After years of much discussion about the project, the public’s curiosity had clearly peaked. Till today the plaza was a creepy ghost town. No people, no train. Just an empty depot. Today the last piece of the train station puzzle had been placed: one $6 million dollar diesel-electric train. For the first time in years, Plaza Saltillo didn’t seem so creepy anymore.
There are 8 other similar ghost town depots along the red line, and many of them plan to hold their own open house events in the coming weekends. Check out CapMetro’s website for a full list of stations and open house details. While you’re there, check out the proposals for future commuter rail lines. It’s an exciting time for Austin transit – if you’re in favor of the movement, go out and show your support at an open house or by trying out the new MetroRail!
Filed under: personal, travel | Tags: casa anita #20, casa anita y corona del mar, mexican vacation, Mexico, mexico beach, pacific coast beach, Puerto Vallarta, puerto vallarta hotels, viva aerobus
Casa Anita y Corona del Mar (center)
The Mexico trip went off without a hitch. With only an hour till go-time, we were able to get Hollie’s name added to the ticket at the airport and off we went to Puerto Vallarta. It blows my mind that it takes only 4 hours & $150 from the time I step out my front door in Austin to be checked into a sweet hotel in Puerto Vallarta’s old town district. Gotta luv that Viva Aerobus.
I HIGHLY recommend Casa Anita y Corona del Mar (beer of the beach?) to anyone visiting Puerto Vallarta. Situated on a hillside overlooking the town and the beach, the place is a maze of stairs/balconies and units of all sizes and types. There are nooks and crannies everywhere - there was so much character, nothing was the same from one floor to the next. The staff was incredibly friendly and helpful. Our room, #20, was at the very top and had a balcony that overlooked the ocean and town, a simply gorgeous view. I probably could have sat on that balcony all weekend long and left Puerto Vallarta as a happy camper. There were over 100 stairs from the parking lot to our room, so do your stair master workouts before you rent this room. On top of that, the walk from the town to the hotel was probably another 200 stairs. With all that climbing, you’d think I would have dropped a few lb’s on the trip but alas… the fresh guacamole got the best of me.
Click any of the pictures to get to my collections of photos on Flickr. Enjoy!
View from the hotel reception patio
View from Casa Anita #20
I’m going to Mexico with Hollie!
Tyler is sick, sick, sick. Triple sick. Quite literally, in fact. He has 1) influenza A, b) pneumonia, and 3/c) a severe sinus infection. Until 5:00 today we thought he had an extraordinarily nasty cold. Not so! He has the “you’re not going to Mexico, Mister” cornucopia of sickness. Which, of course, makes me dreadfully sad. But thankfully (?), Hollie got laid off last week and is free to roam about the country (or continent, as it were).
There is some drama to clear up with Viva Aerobus first (like, why was I charged $100 to change the ticket when the ticket was never actually changed?). And we’ll have to mess around with getting Hollie’s name on Tyler’s ticket at the ghetto South Terminal tomorrow. Beyond the logistical changes, I’ve got to turn the mental switch in my head that Puerto Vallarta is about to become a relaxing girl’s weekend and not a romantic weekend for two. I’m not good with sudden change, as evidenced by my frantic nature this evening. But in the end, all will be well. The trip that is already paid for will get used. Tyler will rest, take LOTS of meds and get better. Hollie will get a late birthday present at a much-needed time. All will be well with the world.
Everyone please send your love and good wishes Tyler’s direction! He could use any ounce of positive energy that you have to send forth. And if you remember to, at lunchtime tomorrow please redirect the positive energy to the South Terminal for about an hour or so. If Hollie can’t get her name on the other ticket, I may be journeying to Puerto Vallarta para mi solo! And as you can see by my obvious lack of Spanish skills, that could be muy malo!! Muchos malos! Aiye!!!
