Hill Country State Natural Area

We decided to take a break from all our chores today and visit the Hill Country State Natural Area.  It’s a little ways outside of Bandera.

Medina River

Along the way we found a couple of Geocaches. 

This is the first time we’ve had to climb a tree to get the cache!

A year ago we might not have ever found this one but we have been seeing a lot of these ‘micro’ caches and now know that we have to look very closely to find the cache.

Today was a cool, partly cloudy day with a little breeze.  Perfect for hiking!

The Hill Country State National Area is a popular park for horse riding.  All the trails are open to horses, bikes, and hikers.  Normally we would go to a place like this during the week to avoid the crowds. The park isn’t very far from our house in Medina so we decided to head on out.  There were a lot of horse trailers in the parking lot but we didn’t see anyone else on the hiking trail we took.  It’s a beautiful, hill country, park with about 50 miles of hiking trails.

 Sotol

  
Twist-Leaf Yucca

  

 Dainty Sulphur

 

Darkling Beetle Sp.

Even the Texas State Parks are getting into the Geocache fun!

HAPPY VETERANS DAY

My Dad:

US Navy, World War II

October 29, 1925 - October 21, 2012

Mark’s Dad

US Air Force, Retired, Vietnam

A Celebrity Among Us

If you are on Facebook, check out the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge page.

I thought this photo looked familiar!!

Teri

Built Ford Tough!

As long as our house hasn’t sold, and we have the time, we’re going to keep on plugging away at projects.

We have had several trees die in the last couple of years due to drought and disease.  At the end of the driveway was a large stump that I took on as my project for this week.

I would dig out around the roots then get Mark to come in with the chain saw. 

After a couple of days we thought we had enough roots cut to pull out the stump. 

So, out came the big boy toy:  Ford F350, V10, Super Duty.   

You can tell from the pictures that this was a BIG tree! 

Project finished!

Guess how many marbles in the fish bowl

Have you ever tried to guess how many marbles in a fish bowl to win a prize?  I never was any good at it. 

As I was working out in the yard today I thought of this game.  But instead of marbles, it was butterflies I was trying to count!

We’re still having warm, sunny days here in central Texas.  We haven’t sold our house and are still working on tidying things up while we have time.

Our front yard has an amazing number of butterflies.  There might not have been 100 flying around, but it sure did look like it!

Some of the varieties I saw today were:

Gulf Fritillary

Cloudless sulphur

Tiger Swallowtail

Pipevine Swallowtail

Giant Swallowtail

Some (more) Assembly Required

In the last blog I mentioned the simple request to assemble a new desk before we left.  I also mentioned that it turned out to be a large office suite that came in nine different boxes. Once we had removed the 250 gallon aquarium and relocated several file cabinets it was time to begin assembly.

1.Open a heavy box and pull out a flat stack of shrink-wrapped parts.

2. Spread everything out on the floor and find the instructions!!  Each box came with 50-100 different pieces of hardware including strange fasteners, screws, nails, hinges, drawer glides, etc.  It was really important to get those sorted out.

3. Step-by-step, piece-by-piece, put everything together.  Remember to nominate whoever invented the cordless drill for the Nobel Prize.  I don't know how we ever put anything together without one!!

It took me half a day to assemble this first module. I really thought that we'd need to extend our stay to get this thing finished.  Since Teri was still filling file cabinets I was without my helper, and that makes a huge difference.  Having someone to sort parts, find the correct piece, hold parts while I fasten, etc. is priceless!!

The next day things went more quickly.  I was more familiar with the assembly, and more importantly had Teri to help.

More parts, more instructions.

The main desktop is finished.

Third day, add the credenzas and the connecting bridge.

Done. Altogether we utilized over 1000 pieces of hardware to put this thing together!!

So the next time someone asks if we will put their desk together, we'll get a little more information.  But we'll still say yes!!

Mark

Some Assembly Required

Since it got up to 91 degrees in Elgin yesterday I am wishing we were back in Colorado!!  So I'll go back to one of the last tasks that we completed while at Alamosa/Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuges.

It started out with the simplest of requests from the Administrative Technician, LeeAnn.  "Do you think that you could put my new desk together before you leave??"  Well putting stuff together is one of my favorite things, so I told her that I was sure we could do that.

Have you ever assembled one of those cabinets or home entertainment systems from Walmart that comes in a flat box and weighs about 100 pounds?  Particle board and a big bag of screws??  Imagine my surprise when LeeAnn pointed to NINE of these boxes leaning against the walls.  Not just a desk, but a complete office suite!!

The picture below shows the contents of Box #1.  Hard to believe that stack of "wood" weighed about 50 pounds and would become a pedestal with two drawers.

But I am getting ahead of myself. LeeAnn was sitting in a raised area near the front door of the office, but planned  to locate her new desk down in a different area.  So we needed to relocate the office file cabinets from the lower level to the raised level.  The picture below is the current location of LeeAnn's office. Kind of cramped.

This office is an old house, and there was a 250 gallon, built-in aquarium occupying the space where the file cabinets needed to go. So first I had to remove this aquarium and get it outside.  I broke out the surrounding cabinetry so get the aquarium free, but couldn't budge it.  Turns out that it weighed 650 pounds, empty!!  Luckily the staff meeting was the next day, so before we adjourned I gathered up the six biggest guys at the refuge and we barely managed to wrestle that thing out of the house and onto the front porch.  It is very likely still out there on the porch!!

With the aquarium out, Teri and Suzanne (the Refuge Manager) unloaded the file cabinets. I moved them up to where the aquarium had been, and they reloaded them. We also moved a big gray flat file up to the raised area.

Check back later and I'll share pictures of the assembly of the Super-Deluxe Office Suite!!

Mark