Christmas in Florida

so...many...presents...
Apparently Grandma is quite a card shark.

Babies at Meadows Cabin

Last winter we went to a cabin with two pregnant women. This winter it was two babies!

Pumpkin Party Costumes

your rock n roll hosts

Autumn and a pot-head, with munchies

Baby bear? mouse? whatever she is, she's a cutie.

a toxic lawn

Pumpkin Party Pumpkins

Thanks to Mark and Elaine for these great pictures!

Dad Meets Amy Goodman at the Washington, DC Green Festival

Lancaster County

Elizabeth's mom and dad were in town and we headed up to Lancaster County, PA to see the countryside and the Amish quilts and the horses and buggies. We stayed on an Amish-owned horse farm which was quite lovely. They sent us to a local smorgasbord for dinner, then stuffed us again in the morning with homemade breakfast.






We drove around a lot looking at covered bridges and such.

We stopped in Lititz to get pretzels from the oldest pretzel factory in the U.S., and ate at a great little restaurant called Cafe Chocolate.
We also stopped at a farm stand to stock up on pumpkins!

Sugar Knob

We had a total wash-out for our two night trip to Sugar Knob cabin. Checked the weather forecast before we left and it said 30-40% chance of rain. It started raining when we got to the cabin and didn't really stop until we were back home in Silver Spring two days later.




We spent most of out time feeding the fire and playing cards.

When we couldn't take it any longer we got suited up and ventured out in the rain. The blackgums and sugar maples were bright red, really lovely.

Another highlight of the trip was seeing SIX American Chestnut trees that were dropping nuts -- neither of us had ever seen evidence of trees that had survived the blight long enough to fruit. This is a picture of a husk and some of the old catkins from one of them. Seeing trees that are fighting the blight was inspiring, and we came home to read that there has been great progress in breeding even more disease-resistant trees.

Another mountain wedding, another friend moves to Urbana

Trying to save our friend Katy from a lifetime of cornfields and Fighting Illini
You'd think the mountains would make her want to stay. She must really love that guy Dan.

Cool bugs

At Sugarloaf. we haven't figured out what these are yet.

Jug Bay

We tried to go to Jug Bay and see all the butterflies we saw last year but it seems we were a little early -- the Joe Pye Weed hadn't quite opened up yet. However we saw a clearwing hummingbird moth:



And this nice buckeye:



And went we went for a swim there was a newly emerged dragonfly on the underside of the dock.

And there were lots of tasty blackberries.

Summer bounty

They're coming in faster than we know what to do with them now.

Our 11 babies

The two pet brown snakes were indeed mating and not fighting three months ago. Elizabeth was skeptical, but Matt kept the faith that babies were gonna arrive. And indeed, we became the godparents to 11 bouncing, slithering snakelets. They have now been released to eat slugs and worms in the garden.

Caesar, Chantarelles, and Oysters

After 13 inches of rain, Caesar's mushroom, oysters, and chantarelles were a couple of the edibles that popped up. Yum!

Rapidan and Rappahannock

We had a great trip on the Rapidan and Rappahannock Rivers on Sunday and Monday. After we let everyone get ahead of us at the put-in, the only other person we saw was a biologist taking water samples. Fredericksburg owns all of the land along the river, it was very scenic and unbuilt -- just a few houses up on hills poking through the trees.

Covering only 14 miles in 1 1/2 days left plenty of time for swimming, watching wildlife, picking blackberries, and taking naps.


We saw muskrats

and a baby beaver


lots of herons


lots of dragonflies


and lots of bald eagles, though it's possible (likely?) that we actually saw just a couple of bald eagles over and over again.


After numerous fights about whether we were, in fact, about to die in the class 2 rapids, it was easy to agree on this campsite...that's our tent on the left.