A Different Kind of Nature Walk

Lately I've been taking some walks around the neighborhood where I work. It's been a little different from the walks I usually go on, which are out in the woods, where you feel like the city is far away.

This neighborhood is an industrial district with lots of old warehouses, but the university owns a lot of it, and they are filling it with upscale student apartments. Right now it's in a transitional state, with places like this storage unit, which now houses a used bookstore.

I love the colorful graffiti on the old warehouses.

I still see nature everywhere I look.

 Trees waving dramatically from behind barbed wire.

 Spring flowers blooming near the sidewalk.

 And I notice the beautiful details of the buildings, like the texture and contrast of these two kinds of wood siding.

 A tiny graffito on a concrete wall.

Amazing colors on this wall.

And the patterns of tree branches and corrugated siding.

Christmas in Bloomington 2015

 After a few days in Hillsville, we drove to Bloomington. I went on a walk in these beautiful frosty woods.

Mom and I had a great time wandering around these woods by Lake Griffy.

Even though it was 13 degrees out!

I got to see some of my Bloomington friends while I was in town (although I didn't get a lot of pictures).

 David and I spent New Year's Eve in Indianapolis with John, Jennifer, and Rowan.

We had some delicious food and wore some very tall hats. None of us could figure out why David's hat wouldn't stay on his head. Except Rowan, who immediately reached into David's hat and pulled out a second hat that had gotten stuck inside it.

The first day of 2015 began with a delicious brunch.

And time spent with my family.

Christmas in Hillsville 2014

Every year I look forward to seeing the trees at David's parents' house. I think they were especially lovely this year.

 I love how colorful they are.

We wrapped our presents and piled them around the tree.

Kitty broke into her stocking before the rest of us could get to them. She was very excited to open a package of little tennis balls, and she played with them all day without stopping.

We had a delicious Christmas dinner. I roasted a cauliflower and served it with lemon-tahini sauce.

Then we opened all the presents, and it was wonderful.

We had such a good time!

John gave me a monopod (or "selfie stick") from Korea, and David and I took selfies with it.

Then we had a visit from David's cousin and took the traditional group picture.

Merry Squidmas

This year we got an artificial tree for the first time ever. Malinda decided that it was her lair and enjoyed hanging out underneath it.

Luckily she doesn't bother the lights or ornaments. We wanted to do a sea-creature theme this year, so you can see lots of squids and jellyfish and other marine ornaments. But we didn't have quite enough for this big tree, so David added some others. According to him they are sea walnuts, sea bells, sea hedgehogs, and so forth.

But this one is an octopus.

 And so is this.

And this is a fish (but you can see "sea walnuts" in the picture too).

We had a little gold tinsel tree on the kitchen counter with suns, stars, and moons on it. That one wasn't nautical. We just like suns, stars, and moons.

We did design a sea-creature Christmas card this year, though. This was a rejected design for the card -- it was supposed to look like a Christmas tree, but it didn't look enough like one. It features creatures of the deepest parts of the sea: comb jellies, a piglet squid, the Dumbo octopus. At the top is a kind of sea slug called the sea angel.

Blue-Green Friday

The Friday after Thanksgiving, we went to Destin.

Destin is a town on the Florida panhandle, and people go there for the shopping and the beautiful beaches. It's on Florida's Emerald Coast, named for the clear green water of the Gulf, but it's really more of a blue-green than an emerald.

We thought our hotel room might have a partial view of the beach. But it turned out to be right on the beach with an amazing view of the Gulf.

 We spent a lot of time just looking out the window.

And hanging out on the balcony.

 This is what it looked like at sunrise.

I went for a long walk on the beach every morning.

The waves were translucent green in the early morning. The sea looked like it was made of glass.

I walked over to the park that was a couple of miles from our hotel. No one else was out there. It was a little chilly -- in the 50s every morning -- but the sun was warm.

Until a fog rolled in.

 But before long the sun was back out, and the sea was back to its amazing blue-green color.

We did a lot of Christmas shopping in Destin on Saturday. On Sunday, I went to this donut shop that I had visited the last time I was in Destin -- several years ago, with Jennifer.

 They still had red velvet donuts.

 Then David and I went to Henderson Beach State Park.

 We walked up and down on the white-sand beach and looked at the amazing Gulf.

 We watched birds and crabs.

It was the perfect way to spend the weekend after Thanksgiving.