Rain (LOTS of rain) | Big Trees | Squirrels! | Magnolias | Mimosas | Prairie Verbena

We arrived in Georgia on Monday after a six-day trek across the country that began in San Diego, California.

I mean, it really began even longer ago with packing up and flying from Hawaii to the mainland.

But a road trip always feels like its own kind of adventure.

In fact, we decided to take some fun photos along the way of our son's two constant companions: Bobby the Bomb (from Mario) and Pikachu (a Pokémon).

He doesn't play with them any more, but he still brings them along when we travel and kicks them around his bed at night.

It was a nice little creative outlet, actually!

This was my favorite picture, from our quick stop at the Fort Bliss Museum:

And I think this is one Carson took!

We have yet to get any good pictures of them after arriving because it rained on us most of the last day and every day since.

But besides the rain, I've started keeping track of some of the things I notice as we settle into the area.

Mimosa trees with their pink fluffball flowers started popping up along the roadsides before we crossed the Georgia state line, but the magnolia trees really announced their presence once we got into Columbus! And some of the magnolia trees around here are BIG.

There are a lot of big trees. I don't know what they all are yet, but I'll be identifying more and more of them soon!

Another small delight has been seeing squirrels running around. We had some ground squirrels when we lived in the Mojave Desert at Fort Irwin, and there are mongooses in Hawaii, but it's been five years since I've lived around regular type squirrels!

I think they're mostly gray squirrels, but we'll see. I expect I'll be setting up a feeder for them, too!

The roadside wildflowers I'm seeing the most are scatterings of purple prairie verbena, which is a flower I remember seeing a lot of when we lived in Texas.

I've spotted a couple yellow lantanas planted near where we're staying and there's some sort of yellow wildflower blooming along the roadsides, but I haven't gotten a good look at that one yet.

Right now we're settled into temporary lodging on post, which is our ... 7th? hotel? That seems like too many, but I think that's right! We also stayed with family in California for a couple days so that's actually EIGHT different beds since we packed up the house. Actually, it's nine different beds because we got aloha furniture for a few days before we cleared housing in Hawaii!

Bed number ten will be an air mattress, womp womp. (I really hate sleeping on air mattresses.)

But eventually, some time in the coming weeks, our household goods will make their way across the Pacific ocean by boat and then get trucked the rest of the way to us here in Fort Benning.

I will be MOST grateful to sleep in my own bed again! With my own pillow. (I really miss my pillow!)

We're hoping to be assigned a house sooner rather than later, but there isn't much else that we can do right now besides wait.

Once we get into a house, there will be a few things to buy and many many phone calls and website visits to make to update our mailing address and zip code and insurance and all those good things. There will also be new doctors to meet and new school registration and car registrations. Lots to do.

Oh, but we've already met some lovely folks at the library on post! We chatted about crochet classes, too, so I'm looking forward to carrying that on here. (That was where I took the picture of the prairie verbena, by the way.)

You know, I first started teaching crochet classes when we lived here in 2013, at the Michaels store in Columbus. It's also where my husband and I first met, in 2004, as we prepared for a deployment to Kuwait with a maintenance company out of Puerto Rico.

So it's a weird sort of circular path I seem to be on!

Perhaps, this time, I had to come back to collect the color palettes of Georgia for painting and spinning and designing because it wasn't until we lived in Virginia after Carson was born that I started noticing the wildflowers under my feet again for the first time since I was a young girl. Which was when I started painting again, too.

And so we will see how the creative journey evolves in this new chapter. In the sticky, humid air of Georgia, lol.

Wish me luck. And fingers crossed for a house soon! (And a mailing address so I can order some YARN!!!)

Cheers!

-Connie

P.S. All my attempts at bird pictures so far have been garbage. I'm currently trying to figure out how to tell the difference between cowbirds and starlings when they're in the shade... So here's a raincloud for you instead!

P.P.S. Oh, oh! I did finish the scarf!! I won't be able to block it until we get into a house, but this picture isn't half bad? Oh, I need to add it to the pattern preview on Patreon, don't I!? Off to do that next.