As Yet Untitled

It's World Teacher Day! A very important day. Education is something that I feel very passionately about, and while I try  not to get too political on my blog, I do feel strongly that America does a disservice to its children by not providing them with quality education, and depriving teachers of resources and wages that they need to do their jobs. Teachers are valuable for more than simply providing kids with information. Often, teachers in low-income communities are the only stable adult that children come in contact with. They are role models and encouragers and sounding boards and confidants. I personally can remember several teachers that had a huge impact on my life and taught me things that I really do use to this day. Without them, I can truly say I would not be who I am.  So let's take this moment to celebrate the educators around the world and thank them for everything they do! Grammarly has provided this great infographic detailing some fun facts about teac...

Aren't they pretty?  I love mushrooms. I think they are cute, and pretty, and fascinating. Before all this rain, I even bought a couple ceramic mushrooms to put in the flower bed because they make me think of the forest floor in a fairytale. Now that we’ve gotten so much moisture, though, we have tons of living mushrooms all over the garden! The main garden. Carrots in front. Speaking of the garden itself, it is nice and green, but having a little trouble actually growing because all the weather has kept temperatures cooler than they normally are this time of year. We haven’t gotten nearly as many spring blooms as we normally do, and all the tropical plants, like our passion flower vine and hibiscus and bird of paradise are enjoying the rain but not the cooler temps. Yellow squash!  Nevertheless, here is what is happening in the garden this year so far: carrots, onions, garlic, tomatoes, purple bell peppers, sweet jalapenos, zuchinni, land yellow sq...

I am giving you some valuable information here. Snakes are my biggest fear. My second biggest fear is that upon discovering my biggest fear, people will pounce on it and send me snakes in the mail, or put them in my bed, or my car, or throw them in my face like David Bowie did to Jennifer Connelly in Labyrinth . So, the other day, when Norris was getting ready to go on a short trip, we were talking about all the critters in our yard. Normally I like all these critters. We have a bunch of toads (like, seriously, we have like 20 toads in our back yard—and that’s just the ones we can find. Toads freaking love us.) and a couple tree frogs, and some praying mantises, and snails, and a family of birds (dusky flycatchers—the babies all just flew away and I was very sad) that nested in our patio light fixture, and for a few days we had a raccoon living in one of our trees. We also have a couple of hawks (I mean two hawks that are in a committed relationship. We know they care about each...

*** This contains mildly graphic (but mostly just frank) descriptions of miscarriage. You have been warned. *** I am going to say something that might make a lot of you uncomfortable. I recently miscarried. My second miscarriage in the last year. And I am talking about it because it seems like people generally feel very uncomfortable discussing this topic, and women often feel kind of ashamed to mention it, probably because it so obviously makes people uncomfortable. But I am going to repeat what the doctors told me: there is nothing that can be done to prevent it. It has nothing to do with anything you did or didn’t do. These things just happen—it’s part of the biological process. You wouldn’t want to keep an unviable fetus in your belly anyway. The point being, miscarriage is something that is natural. It happens when for whatever reason, the cells that make up the beginning of what could be a baby are genetically imperfect, or mismatched, deformed, whatever. And it just...