Musings on Life and Living

Several weeks ago, Gretch and I embarked on another step toward self-reliance, namely, gardening . We'd been talking about it for a long time, but we finally did it. For those who may have forgotten, this is what it looked like when we finally got everything planted: Shortly after planting, our area was afflicted with record high temperatures and drought-like conditions. We watered our plants every evening, but then we started watering in the morning, too, in an effort to keep them alive. We tried our best to follow the recommendations for caring for the different plants (tomatoes, cucumber, bell peppers, broccoli, cantaloupe, cayenne peppers, and crazy-hot-insanity peppers). We worried that some of the plants, especially the cantaloupe, may have been planted to late, but we decided to go with them anyway. The hot of DOOM has subsided, and we've had a little bit of rain, but still not a consistent amount. With regular watering and constant care, though, we've man...

A few months ago, Gretch and I decided to become advocates for infertility awareness, especially when it comes to PCOS . We had been open about it before when people brought it up, but we wanted to be more forthcoming. It started with a lengthy blog post that received some wonderful, caring, and honest responses. Since then, we have learned that many friends and family members around the country have had similar struggles. Gretch and I are honest with others about what we've gone through, what we are going through, and what we will be going through. We share our successes and our disappointments, and we have become people to whom friends and family turn to ask for advice. We honestly didn't expect the response that we received. We knew that some of the people we knew had had experiences with miscarriages, PCOS, and infertility, but we didn't realise the extent of it. We also didn't fully realise what we were getting ourselves into when we decided to become advocates...

I could have sworn I wrote a blog post a week ago about our fourth second anniversary. Apparently not. I was all set to write a post yesterday and then somehow I didn't. I even had my new post page open and ready to go. Whoops. Sorry about that. It has been a good two weeks. As noted, Gretch and I recently celebrated our fourth year of marriage (that is our second anniversary; our first anniversary is on August 16--the date of our first date). We seem to have established a tradition of going to State Parks for our anniversary. I have been advocating for formalising this since our first second anniversary, when we went to Starved Rock State Park, but Gretch wasn't so sure about it. The next year we went to Moraine View State Park (actually for our third first anniversary, due to the fact that Gretch's sister got married the day before our second wedding anniversary, and we were traveling with her family at the time). Last year we did not go out to celebrate either of our...