Best Moments of 2024 We are one month into 2025 and I’ve just finished editing the final photos I took during last year and spent some time pulling together the best moments. Photography has always been the clearest, most visceral way that I remember my life. This has never been more true than 2024 – a complete whirlwind of… Read More
Home Sweet Rental Never in a million years. That’s what I would have said if you told me we would buy two houses in one year. But, when the stars align… why not shoot for them? Ever since buying our first house on 3 acres in Tennessee in December 2023, Russell and I have had our eye on… Read More
Home Sweet Homebase Exactly 1 year ago, we first laid eyes on the house that would become our long-awaited home base. We’d considered moving my mom from Houston, Texas to Crossville, Tennessee for the last couple years to be near family and we finally got serious in September 2023. On a whim, we decided to stop and see… Read More
10 Years, 50 States, 2 “I Do’s” Magic. That’s what our wedding was. And it was probably because of how long we waited and how absolutely sure we were that this was the right step, right place and right time. We got engaged in October of 2020 and thought we would get married in September of 2021 in Hawaii. But we were… Read More
Another Miracle I’m not sure how many miracles a person can expect to experience during their lifetime. I definitely thought I’d already used up my big one escaping completely unscathed during my potentially catastrophic car accident in 2018. But this morning, I was granted another one. At 6:55am, Russ, Otis and I were sound asleep when we… Read More
The Ballad of White Bear In May of 2007, Russell wandered into a pet store in California, never dreaming his life would forever change that day. Content with his brood of cats, he’d never owned a dog before and wasn’t even in the market for one. But then, he happened across a strange little white creature with a big, dark… Read More
#Mussell2021 On October 24th, Russell asked me to marry him. It was the 10th morning we woke up in our beautiful new home and he said that everything in our lives was finally perfect…except that I wasn’t his wife. Apparently, he decided over a year ago that he wanted to ask me and went through a… Read More
Someday I want to begin this post by affirming that the last 4.5 years on the road have provided more wonderful opportunities to see the world and I could ever have dreamed of and I wouldn’t trade the experiences we’ve had for all of the fancy apartments in sleek cities or the social and creature comforts… Read More
A new year of adventures ahead. 2019 started yesterday, and our new year of travel and adventure begins as well. We already started our year of travels: unlike previous years, we’re out of Houston and on the road, and we have stops booked months in advance! Our past years have been such rollercoasters of uncertainty that planning routes and reserving camp… Read More
Overdue thoughts I look back at this blog site and realize it’s a great name and a great idea, but it’s only going to be anything more than that if I actually write things down. In the ‘drafts’ area I have about a dozen thoughts and lists that outline future posts. Outlines I made about a year… Read More