Do you ever wonder what would happen if you ran your dishwasher for weeks and weeks, even months, without any detergent? Well I’m here to tell you that you’ll be fine. No one gets sick, but your drinking glasses will be cloudy and unattractive.
I finally figured out the obvious, which is that our automatically-dispensing-dishwasher wasn’t actually dispensing any detergent! I was thinking it had to do with hardness/softness of water or something like that, since I had been using the auto-dispenser for quite a while with no problem. Well, turns out that when you insert a new pod the dishwasher must be ON or it won’t “recognize” it. Hahahahaha so ya, it’s nice to actually have clean dishware again :)
Let’s not forget how burning hot it was all summer. It became a daily thing where I set out ice water in the flowerbed for the chickens.
We had a fun time hosting Raine, Paige, and Paige’s boyfriend, Ananth for a weekend. As suspected, Ananth is super nice and easy to hang with. We had yummy barbeque, played games, and went to Jester King of course!
A big change for us is that we (actually Rob) setup the front yard so that Pangea can roam inside the fenced area freely! Just the fencing wasn’t enough because if she can see beyond the fence, she will try to get out (and probably succeed as they can push/dig/find a way). So anyway we have the lower part of the fence covered with landscaping cloth. For now, she comes in every night for shelter. Also, if it is too cold we keep her inside. She definitely looks like she owns the place out there!
She likes certain flowers a lot such as hibiscus, Rose of Sharon, climbing rose flowers (not regular roses), Rock Rose, Mexican Petunia.
Summer was so burning hot we almost lost all our garden plants, but the basil was great. We got the loquat and sour gherkins through the heat but then we had a nasty cold snap early fall which I think has probably killed those off which is super sad because we had lots more loofah growing and millions of gherkins!
At least we did harvest a couple of loofah earlier in the season.
We had some more classes and field trips for the Master Naturalists. At one of them, scientists trawled the bottom of a creek to find what lives there and they even used electrofishing to temporarily stun the fish so they could be caught!
Last night we both attended our graduation! Each table had a River Cooter themed centerpiece (River Cooter is our class’ mascot - each year has a different animal/plant) and I got to take one home! That was my favorite part of the evening.
I’ve been occasionally making quick videos for the social media team, including a series called Nom Nom Natives, Haiku of the Day, and possibly going to do one called Let’s Ask AI. Anyway, if you follow Hays County Master Naturalists on social media you can view them. Meanwhile, someone suggested we do a podcast where we read articles from our newsletter (Hays Humm) and I was like Oh, great idea! so naturally I’m tasked to look into how to do that. Rob has already investigated how we could do this on the logistical/technical side, so now we really just have to decide if we want to push this and take it on ourselves :)
Also the coloring book team is rolling out their book to 3rd graders, and I helped out several classes recently at the Meadows Center. At my station we made sun dials, which went pretty well considering we only had like 10 minutes per class to get it done!
I submitted a bunch of entries to this year’s Texas Master Naturalist Art, Photo, and Media Contest and I actually won 3rd place in the digitally enhanced category! If you follow that link you can see it in there, and also you can see that the coloring book team won 2nd place in Exemplary Project Awards.
I attended the Climate Scientist Conference too which was down in San Marcos as well. It was somewhat interesting. I actually kind of liked this guy the most as he seemed most controversial- I hope he’s not right!
I also finally attended a Dripping Springs Art League gathering and joined. Now I have to decide if I want to join a committee.
I took an on-line class involving using rusty objects to make stained paper and cloth. Haven’t figured out how to use the cloth yet, but generally it is nice to have another option in making cool designs.
I’m also looking at biomaterials, and I’m gonna try a couple of “recipes’ involving eggshells since we have plenty of those. Not sure what I’d use them for but maybe I’ll have an idea when I see the end result.
This fall I made a recipe for dinner which had tahini as a main ingredient. Then since we had tahini lying around, I made a salad dressing with it, and then by the end of that week I noticed a had a gigantic rash covering my entire torso! It got worse over a couple of days (but didn’t itch), so then I applied Benadryl and it got better. So anyway I concluded I must be somewhat allergic to sesame seeds!
I shopped around and finally bought new eyeglasses. It’s been something like 8 years. But I am gonna update my old frames too so I will have two pairs.
auto tinting in the sun. these cost like a million dollars
I’m just gonna plop some more pictures below. It was a lot of ground to try to cover this time.
