The person behind The Hermits' Rest blog and many others. I'm a certified Texas Master Naturalist and love the nature of Milam County. I manage technical writers in Austin, help with Hearts Homes and Hands, a personal assistance service, in Cameron, and serve on three nonprofit boards. You may know me from La Leche League, knitting, iNaturalist, or Facebook. I'm interested in ALL of you!
My friends, my colleagues, and I have a rousing good time whenever one of us is stumped by a spelling, grammar, or punctuation rule. (Have I mentioned before that I am an editor/tech writer by day?) The amount of gusto with which we throw ourselves into figuring out the right answer has got to look funny to passersby at work (luckily at home no one can see us).
Recently, there have been a few capitalization questions that have come up, mostly because we are revising some old content and adding new headings. Every once in a while something looks “funny” to one of us.
Even coffee doesn’t help you sometimes.
Luckily, we solved most of the first mysteries by going to our preferred style guides. Microsoft disagreed with Chicago Manual of Style on hyphenated words in sentence case, but since we are a software company, Microsoft won.
Thus, Hyphenated-Word Capitalization Looks Like This
So much has gone on this week. It’s great when there’s lots of fun things to do, because time just flies.
What I wish I looked like in 1976.
Anita and I enjoyed the movie Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice on Tuesday night. Here’s a review, if you want to know more. I pretty much breathed along with her during the whole movie, thanks to having completely memorized every album of hers up to Pirates of Penzance. And both Trio albums.
She made such a huge contribution to music, got so many songwriters famous, and has done so much good work in her life. I also feel a kinship with her, since we both no longer can sing well (I don’t have Parkinson’s, just “broke” my upper range). The film is very enjoyable, anyway.
They even had logo balloons.
Yesterday was a LOT of fun. I’ll pretend it’s a totally typical day when I’m in Austin. It started out with the company where I work launching a new brand identity. We got some merchandise, and hooray, they replaced our name plates so you can actually read them! That’s right, my cube has a picture of a Marine playing the tuba. Yours should, too.
So cheerful.
Then, the excitement continued as I finally got to take my green car in to get repaired after the thing attacked it from the sky. The repair shop is so efficient and coordinates so well with the rental place that it took less than an hour in total. And I got a nice rental, an Audi SUV or whatever it is. It was easy to figure out and has most of the things I want in a car, so I’m really pleased. Last time I got a Jeep thing that was not fun at all.
It’s cute and peppy. And black. It’s Rowdy the Rental Audi. Get it?
I worked from home for a while, then made a nice dinner using my fancy red sauce from the Italian restaurant. I got fresh linguine, shaved parmesan cheese, a nice salad, and some bread. Then I set the table in our breakfast room, which we call the sun room. It looked so cute!
Such a cheerful table with the Fiesta ware and old tablecloth.
My son and his girlfriend joined us, and we had a most pleasant, relaxed meal full of laughs and stories. That’s the way it should be.
Photos from our neighbor, Maria.
This morning, Anita and I went out to walk the dogs and ran into most of the neighbors. We had a dog party! What a great start to the day.
What a cool sport.
Plus, lunch with a coworker reminded me that we have some cool pink Turk’s caps in the courtyard. Wow!
Happy me. Happy dog.
I’m choosing to savor all the good times as hard as I possibly can.
Here’s another nature story from one of my friends. This one comes from our Austin neighbor, Ruth, also known as “the other Ruth,” because there are two women named Ruth in our book club. She lives just down the road and goes walking with Anita many mornings. Ruth always has a good story, and here’s the most recent one.
Yesterday, Ruth was in her yard checking on the plants and such, when she realized there was a nice-looking frog stuck in her swimming pool. Now, she is as much of a nature lover as any of us naturalists, and she had a good idea that the pool chemicals weren’t ideal from frogs to thrive in. Plus, there isn’t much to eat in there.
So, she decided to rescue it. She easily captured it and placed it in a plastic container. She figured that it would not be a good idea to just let it go, since it would have trouble finding a water source in our drought-stricken neighborhood (that’s why Anita’s toad friend loves the fact that she waters the plants on her balcony so well).
It’s a leopard frog, though I am not sure which one. They sure are pretty. Photo courtesy of Ruth.
The idea quickly came to Ruth that she could take it to nearby Bull Creek, which does still have some water running through it. So, she put the frog in her car and drove it down to the creek.
She carefully took it over to the creek’s edge, and happily set it free. Off it swam. For about five seconds. Frogs aren’t the only things that live in creeks. Apparently there are fish in there big enough to eat frogs.
Well, at least the frog died happy, and the fish got a meal. We give Ruth lots of props for her good intentions and kindness to the creatures of our community. And, like Ruth and Anita, I prefer to believe the frog escaped the snatches of the fish, and swam away, bruised but happy. She didn’t see the frog get swallowed. There’s always hope.
Today we have a guest photographer! My coworker, Jen Clower-Brown, has been lucky enough to spend the summer watching a family of foxes grow up in her neighborhood north of Austin.
As you can imagine, there has been much cuteness and beauty as she captured images of them playing in her back yard and climbing her fence. Jen reports that these images are the result of much time sitting quietly on her back porch, waiting for them to show up!
I’m recovering from spending so much energy the last few days, so I’ll just share two pictures and my tarot card (I have done them most days with the app but today I used my real deck).
This yucca has decided to bloom. The bud is growing many inches per day.
The yucca bud sure looks like a giant asparagus stalk! Maybe it’s tasty. I’m not going to chomp on it.
High Priestess in Robin Wood deck.
So today I drew the High Priestess. It’s a favorite of mine. I think she is acknowledging how hard I’m working to be mature and use my skills for good these days. The weekend went so well, and I’m patting myself on the back a bit.
Probably too blurry, but pretty.
And finally, I love this hummingbird I saw today. It’s a black chinned one, judging from the male that was also flitting around. I’m so glad they’re still here.
I’ve learned that cheerful posts don’t get as many hits, but, too bad. I had a really nice weekend, and I can’t change that fact. We didn’t go far, but it was quite relaxing in Lago Vista, Texas, capital of the North Shore of Lake Travis.
As I mentioned before, Lee and I spent the weekend at the condo where I showed you all the deer and flowers, along with our business partners, Carol and Russell. We hadn’t spent much time together in person lately, so this was a much-needed time to relax, reflect, have fun, and plan.
A fish powered by a lower brass instrument. Just right for a Pisces musician.
And we did! We chose going to thrift shops as out first “team building” activity, which was a lot of fun. I liked the fish sculpture.
We had to bring our own champagne, but that wasn’t a problem.
Later, we had a celebratory dinner after our “big meeting” where we decided to move forward in a new direction with our real estate redevelopment business. We went to Broc’s, an Italian restaurant in Lago Vista, where we were absolutely charmed by the crooner singing 60s standards, a family with a toddler as cute as my son Kynan was at that age, and the whole family that owned the restaurant celebrating the owner’s 70th birthday.
This guy was quite good and not too loud. I also cove the grape lights for our wine room.
This place had surprisingly good food. Lee couldn’t stop talking about the alfredo sauce he had. We all tasted it and agreed, it was both light and creamy, with a side of buttery. And their red sauce was such a wonderful combination of flavors that I bought a pint to cook a dinner for Anita, Declan, and Rylie (the younger son and his partner) on Wednesday.
Relaxing with no
Today we sat on the patio and talked and laughed and had ideas. We decided we need to do that more often, since we come up with great ideas when we are relaxed and not under pressure to accomplish this or that or meet deadlines.
This morning I took a walk while waiting for the rest of my team to arrive. This is an interesting area, because it was all laid out to be neighborhoods, then no one showed up to build houses, so the land has stayed pretty much untouched. Now, people are finally starting to move in, as the Austin suburbs move further and further out. Still, where we are staying has a lot of empty property.
Typical terrain in this area. Lots of juniper, little oak trees, and some mesquite.
This means that you can get a good idea of what the area around Lake Travis looked like, at least since the advent of all the cedar (ashe juniper) trees.
The lake is low. But it’s been MUCH lower.
I’ve been here in the spring, and know the wildflowers are spectacular. It was easy to see from all the dried seeds heads I saw.
Our real estate mini-business has to have a board meeting every year. So we decided to do a weekend retreat somewhere we could concentrate. So Lee and I used our condo points to book literally the only available 2-bedroom condo in Texas.
At least the lake is not totally dry.
It’s in Lago Vista, an oddly endearing resort village on the north shore of Lake Travis. Well, it’s a condo all right. I think it’s the least charming one I’ve ever been in. It appears to be the same age as the Bobcat house, only with very few upgrades. (Bathrooms have been done, on a budget.)
The arrow shows the nice condos and the sliver of lake we can see from our deck. Check the lower right for a photo bomber.
It appears it once had a lake view and lots of green space. But someone sold that land and put fancy condos on it. Now there is a sliver of lake and some rich people you can glimpse between units.
The other thing Anita and I squeezed into our few hours of Austin tourism was a trip to the East Austin Succulents nursery. You know it’s cool and trendy because:
It’s in east Austin
The website is mostly pictures and hard to find links on
They have a cute pug on the homepage of said website
All employees were young, and if male, had very full beards
Teeny tiny cactus flower.
I’ve lived in Austin since 1997, but had never been to the neighborhood where the nursery is located, so I was as much a tourist as Anita was on this trip. I really enjoyed seeing all the fun and funky areas, and was impressed at how many community centers there are. I probably just happened to drive by them all.
Yesterday I had to take off work to do some boring personal stuff, but in the end, there was lots of time in the day left over. Since I will be out of town for Anita’s birthday on Saturday, I decided to take her to some places in Austin she’d never been. The first was the Contemporary Austin museum at Laguna Gloria, which I just shared some photos of flowers from.
The main building, the former home.
I hadn’t been to Laguna Gloria since some art classes when my children were small. It’s changed a lot since then, and they have added some fancy new, but not quite finished, buildings there, like a cafe (we had a nice light meal from there, though we had to eat in the car due to no seating), a cute gift shop (where Vlassic got a new “dress collar”), and such.
I’m quite proud of my new beaded leather collar. Call me fashion dog.
But we were there for the sculptures (and plants), so off we went. The day got warmer and warmer, but we persevered.
All the modern sculptures were interesting, at least, and some I just loved. The settings in and among all the native and other plants was really pleasant. Plus, I’m just glad there is still a little space where people can see Lake Austin from the ground. Most of it is full of giant, fancy houses.
My favorite one didn’t photograph well, but it was party of a trio of pieces hanging from one of the many huge trees on the property. I guess you’ll just have to go to see it.
The Hermits' Rest 