Life on the Vine

Saturday I finished the 2024 Read Harder Challenge with nearly two months to spare. It's the seventh year in a row that I've completed the challenge. Typically I try to read as many of my own books for the different challenges but this year I was only able to complete five with books I already own. I completed the rest thanks to my local libraries.  Here are the covers for all the books I read and the list of challenges is below.     2024 Read Harder Challenge Read a cozy fantasy book - A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers.     Read a YA book by a trans author - Being Jazz by Jazz Jennings.   Read a middle grade horror novel - The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf. Read a history book by a BIPOC author - Homecoming: The Story of African-American Farmers by Charlene Gilbert and Quinn Eli. .  Read a sci-fi novella - Very Far Away from Anywhere by Ursula Le Guin. While a novella and a book by Ursula Le Guin, who typically writes...

Last month I went to a daylong Introduction to Nature Journaling workshop led by Roseann Beggy Hanson of Exploring Overland and hosted at the Amerind Museum . I knew nothing about nature journaling ahead of the class. It just sounded like something that might complement my own personal journaling and the House Journal I've been keeping since we moved into the new house in February 2023.  In my House Journal I record seasonal observations from Dalrymple Ranch, as my girlfriend Sydney calls our place. Since I walk the pups 2-3 times a day, I notice when a type of wildlfower first appears or when a particular cactus blooms. I also try to note when we have snow or a big rain storm. And while I don't do it as regularly, I do record some wildlife observations too. Thanks to keeping my journal last year I learned that there is an order in which our cacti tend to bloom. Hedgehogs bloom before the prickly pear. Cholla bloom after the prickly pear have started and then barrel cactus ...

A draft of this blog post has been sitting in my unpublished queue for many years now. You'll see that the book I start the post with is one I read in 2020. This post is about the death of my mother's oldest sister, my Aunt Almeda.   I noticed that death, grief, and illness were themes in some of my reading in 2023. I read John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud, Laurel Braitman's What Looks Like Bravery , Elizabeth Alexander's The Light of the World , Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge , Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking , and Suleika Jaouad's Between Two Kingdoms .   Recently I've found a lot of creative inspiration from Suleika Jaouad. There is a documentary on Netflix right now called American Symphony and she recently did a nearly 2-hour-long interview with Rich Roll for his podcast . I would strongly recommend both, as well as her book.  I got the feeling that now might be the time to complete this post. So, here it is.   *** The last book I r...

When the new year started we still had contractors at the house, installing the tile floors and doing the stucco finish. We were emptying the rental and the connex as finished spaces in the house allowed. I'd received my tentative job offer from the U.S. Department of Agriculture just before Christmas and had a start date at the end of February. Work on the house continued throughout the year, the largest project being new porches constructed during the summer.  I went on three work trips, one to Northern California and two back to Washington D.C. We went to Colorado to see family and hosted friends from Italy for three weeks. We've had a handful of other house guests, a few gatherings with our neighbors, and my parents have moved to Arizona after more than two decades living in Nebraska. It has been a FULL year.  During all that I have been slowly checking off my Read Harder challenges for 2023 , finishing the challenge yesterday, November 17. This is my sixth year in a row c...

Today I spent part of the day emptying my walk-in closet.  Tom has bought a new closet system for me.  As I was carrying all my clothes and other items from one side of the house to the other, I thought about our move into the house.  I looked around each room.  Tom and I physically moved every piece of furniture and every household item into the house ourselves.  In some cases, we moved items twice, moving boxes into the connex last summer for temporary storage and then moving it up to the house.  I have two observations after today's exercise.  First.  Man, oh man...I have A LOT of clothes!  Second.  I'm about tired of moving stuff!  I know for sure Tom is too.  The house and the move have been consuming.  So I thought I'd mix things up and do a book blog.  I haven't done one since the new year.  I've been reading but notably at a slower pace in the first quarter of the year.  It felt like a bit of a slog ...

One of the first books I read this year was A Place in the World by Frances Mayes.  In it she writes of buying her house Bramasole in Italy that: "I thought that living in my house would be my way into a life in Italy, and that turned out to be right." (124) "My way into a life...." At the time I read it, that line struck me and I folded the corner of the page so that I could find it again.  That idea of a house helping you find your way into your life is how I feel about our new house here in southeastern Arizona. For the first time ever I have what might be considered a 'forever' home.  This home -- IS IT.  Tom jokes that the only way he's moving off the hill is in a hearse.  As a military brat and having my own civilian career with the military, I have lived in 7 states, 3 countries, and had 16 homes.  My parents have moved too so there was never a childhood home.  We've owned this property for 12 years and spent the past 10 years working toward...