Rivers

I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water…has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river.

– Roderick Haig-Brown

In my normal, day-to-day engineering life, I design really exciting things like shopping centers, apartment complexes, and acre upon acre of parking lots.  But, somewhere buried under all the sewer lines and concrete lives a river engineer.  The river engineer in me gets really excited about things like flooding, erosion, and happy little streams.  The river engineering in me had a great week this week!

I spent last Friday morning on a field trip with one of the senior engineers in our office.  He is a San Antonio native who is passionate about natural channel design and stream restoration.  He took me to sites all over San Antonio to show me how the river system interacts with the city.  It was a fascinating field trip from start to finish.  Through pure luck, it rained over 10 inches in the 24 hours that followed our field trip.  A storm of this magnitude is what is known as the 1% flood event (or the 100-year storm - a total misnomer for reasons I won't go into because they involve statistics and most of you have probably already tuned out).  So, like any good river engineer, I spent Saturday morning running around town taking pictures of all the places I'd seen the day before.  Enjoy a few before and after shots.

This next one is my favorite.  The blue line of the right shows how high the water rose.  The little stick person is about where I was standing when I took the before picture.  At the peak of the flood, I would have been completely under water!  This is also my favorite picture because all sorts of interesting things are going on with the flooded river - things that only happen when lots and lots of water moves really quickly.

In The Garden - Week 15

Drum roll please...

Look at all the garden goodness!!  Even Sam thinks it looks tasty.  I'm in need of good ideas for basil.  I made a huge batch of pesto last week when I picked an arm-load.  This week, I think I'll bring a bunch in to work and hope people want it.

The rest of the garden is growing like crazy too.  You like how the cucumber decided to make it's own trellis out of the fence?  It must have been feeling a little crowded.

Notes for next year - more garden space!  I don't have nearly enough room for everything I planted.  Oops! I'm making improvements here and there trying to get things to fit a little better.  I added a little trellis for my newest vines.  Hopefully, they stay small enough that this is all the help they'll need, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'm also rotating out the things that are done producing.  My cilantro went to seed and my potatoes are nearing the end of their life.  I'm thinking of moving my pepper plants into the empty space as soon as the potatoes are done for good.

The next few weeks should be interesting.  We got about 13 inches of rain Friday and Saturday (yes, you read that correctly), so everything has more than enough water to last it for a while.  All that rain made this plant happy for the first time since we planted it in December.  Guess I need to water it a little more often.

The rain, coupled with the heat forecast for next week, should make everything grow even more... just what I needed.

We discovered some fun visitors in our yard last week.

Momma bird thought the trailing petunias hanging over our back porch were the perfect place for her nest.  Dad comes to visit frequently.  From what I can tell, they are a pair House Finches.  This week, the little babies hatched.  Super-ugly.

That's all from the garden this week.  If you want to see what the garden looked like two weeks ago, read In The Garden - Week 13.

Counting

November 14, 2012 was a big day for us, but it passed by quietly, unnoticed.  Just another Wednesday in a long line of Wednesdays.  Chris went to work and I unpacked boxes and washed clothes.  But, it was day 309;  a big day.  309 days of being together in the same place, in the same state, in the same country.  309 days of no 6-week training courses in Ohio, no weeks spent in a tent in Florida, no deployments to far away places.  309 days together.  The most we had managed to string together in our five and a half year marriage.

March 19th, 2013 was another big day for us, and it too slipped by without notice or fanfare.  But it was day 457; a big day.  457 days since Chris returned to our little island from his deployment to Afghanistan.  457 days of being in the same country, on the same continent.  457 nights of not worrying or wondering about all the what-ifs that creep in while laying in bed alone.  457 days since I started breathing again after seven long months.  457 days together.  The longest we had ever made it between deployments in our nearly six year marriage.  

Today, May 19, 2013, we are celebrating day 518!  We are also celebrating day 2,192.  2,192 days of friends and family, of friends-turned-family.  2,192 days of moves, new houses, and new jobs.  2,192 days of exploring a new cites, new countries together.  2,192 days since we stood in the front of a church and promised to love each other forever.  To stand by each other through everything life was about to throw our way.

"Here's to all the places we went.  And here's to all the places we'll go.  And here's to me, whispering again and again and again and again: I love you." - John Green