Texas Lou

Archive for the ‘Pictures’ Category

Living in Charlottesville provides quite a few lovely sites to help one become in tune with nature.  When I first moved to the Commonwealth, I was quite intimidated by the endless landscape of mountains and trees accompanying all roads and stretches of highway.  Born and raised a city gal, I was used to having numerous gas stations, restaurants, and shopping centers accompany me along my rides.  Being in Charlottesville and driving through the countryside for hours without seeing a single sign that the human race existed made me feel pretty lonely.  However, now I really do enjoy making my way from Charlottesville to Richmond with a only nature as my passenger. 

Besides the Blue Ridge Mountains, the occasional roadside grazing deer, and the trees often coated in white snow in the winter, Charlottesville is home to many hot air balloons and their pilots.  On most clear and sunny days in the Fall or Spring, you can catch a glimpse of a beautifully and brightly colored hot air balloon sailing through the sky on your way to and from work.  People often take them up to watch the sunrise or sunset so the timing is perfect to watch them on my drive to work or home from work. 

Even though my drive to and from work is only 30 minutes, I still get bored (probably because my commute at my former job was only about 5 minutes).  So the hot air balloons provide a nice background as I impatiently make my way through what small-town Charlottesville residents call traffic.  Getting to see these balloons sure beats the hell out of talk-radio!  I was lucky enough to have my camera to snap some great shots of the hot air balloons this fall.

Every now and then something brings up a random and long-forgotten childhood memory.  Since these seem to become fewer and farther between as I get older, I thought this blog might be a good place to document them so I can come back and relive them whenever I want.

When I was in preschool, we made green eggs and ham.  Me being a picky eater, although you’d never know it by looking at me now, didn’t like eggs or ham, and especially not when they were dyed green.  So instead, I got to draw my own green eggs and ham on a paper plate with crayons!  What a brilliant idea!  Gotta give props to those preschool teachers!

I’d like to thank my cousin Janette for the childhood memories idea.  A few years ago when I was in college, she and I were sitting outside enjoying a few beers when she brought up some funny stories from our childhood that I had completely forgotten.  She suggested that we write them all down in a book so we wouldn’t forget them.  Thanks Tweety…this isn’t quite a book, but I figure it’ll do!

And just for shits and giggles, here’s a childhood picture of me to go along with the childhood memory!  Thanks for the big green foo foo dress mom!

Ben took this awesome picture of the cats with his phone.

Revolver Ocelot was in mid-yawn, but he looks like he’s doing the “Wuzzzzzzzzzz Up” from Scary Movie.

This is Eva as a kitten discovering the other species that shares our home. It wasn’t long before she figured out how to find her way to the top. Now the goal is to find her way in. Hopefully that won’t happen for Shadow’s sake.

Saturday afternoon, I spent the day with a couple of friends at Hill Top Berry Farm and Winery in Nelson County, Virginia.  We did a tasting of the winery’s fruit wines and honey meads.  If you’re ever in the area, I highly recommend stopping by as the vineyard was definitely one of the more unique Virginia wineries that I have been to. 

They were sold out of many of the wines that I wanted to buy, but I did find 3 that I settled on:  the Raspberry Melomel, Strawberry Melomel, and the Pyment (made of grapes and honey mead).

After our wine tasting, we had a picnic lunch on the porch and then picked blackberries.  Hill Top offers a better deal on blackberries in both quality and quantity than the farmer’s market or the grocery store.  Plus you get to choose each and every blackberry that you want to buy.

I was hoping to make blackberry wine, but since I just started a batch of concord grap wine, I’ll probably just stick to blackberry preserves.