It’s possible I’ve mentioned that I had a busy series of weekends for about the past month at this point. It’s likely I noted around this time last week that one more of them was coming. It’s certainly the case that this past weekend, the last one before Ms. 8 started back to school, took my family and me afield, and it ought to be the case that I let you know how all it went. Hence what follows.

We left Wednesday for and returned Sunday from Foxfire Cabins, where we lodged at around the same time for the last couple of years, as noted. On Wednesday, we made the drive out, and, as in previous years, the drive was pretty. We did go by a bit of a circuitous route, admittedly, one that showed the ongoing effects of the 4 July 2025 flooding in the Hill Country (rebuilding continues, and having support continue would also be helpful); had we gone by our preferred route, I think it would have been harder to see. But we arrived in good form and good time, and we were able to settle into our cabin–which was lovely, with an expansive deck and direct access to the upper Sabinal River–easily. I even joined my wife and Ms. 8 for a brief swim in the river, something I don’t often do. (Since I sink with a life-jacket on, swimming isn’t usually my thing. But it was hot, the upper Sabinal is usually fairly shallow and cool, and it seemed the thing to do.)

On Thursday, the three of us stayed more or less at the cabin. My wife and daughter spent a lot of time at the river, wading and swimming; my daughter also tended to a loose rockwork dam that had been set up to help pool some of the river-water and which a group of hooligans had spent the morning doing their damnedest to destroy, hucking rocks at it loudly to the cheers of their father. She also conceived of a like for frogs, and I have to wonder if she will take up batrachology as a field of study later on. For my part, I joined Ms. 8 and her mother on the water for a while, enjoying short floats on borrowed inflatables–but I also made a point of getting in a long nap. I’ve been tired, and for a while; it was nice to be able to rest quietly for a time, and I did feel somewhat refreshed by the time it came to light the grill and start dinner. I appreciate it greatly.

On Friday, we went into the nearby Lost Maples State Natural Area once again, where we went on a hike on the Maple and East Trails. We made it to Monkey Rock before the heat started really getting to people; temperatures reached the century mark (37°C for the metrically inclined), which takes some getting used to. (I used to be used to it, but I’m older now than I was then, and I work an inside job with no heavy lifting.) Some time in the air conditioning later, my wife and daughter found their way back to the upper Sabinal near our cabin, and I spent some time reading. (It was, admittedly, reading for work, but it was also reading I enjoyed doing, and I might well write here about what I read there. Maybe.) Dinner was grill-work for me, which I was pleased to do; it’s a part of outdoor living that I do actually enjoy, indoorsman though I am.

On Saturday, we went to Concan again, floating on the Frio River with the help of Happy Hollow. The river was higher than when we visited last year, and so there were more people in attendance; I am given to understand that it was a much more normal year than last year was. It made for a decidedly different experience, one that I am not sure I enjoyed; the crowds were friendly enough and seemed to be having a good time, and I’m not complaining about them, but I was unable to relax. For one, I was worried about running into people; I’m not the smallest person or the lightest, after all. For another, I was worried about revisiting the approach to drowning; again, I sink with a life-jacket on, and I had flirted with it on the Frio last year. For yet another, parts of the river seemed intent on beating me up; the riverbed punched me in the butt and back several times, and one cypress tree kneed me in the shoulder rather forcefully. Still, my wife and daughter enjoyed it, just as they enjoyed going to the Frio Float for a bit of refreshments afterward. And I was glad to fire up the grill again that evening to make dinner; I usually am.

On Sunday, we made our way back home. My wife and daughter took one more chance to wade in the upper Sabinal as I got our stuff loaded back into our vehicle for the drive back; they enjoyed it, and I’m glad to have facilitated their enjoyment. We did make a stop in Kerrville on the way back, as it was my nephew’s birthday; we had presents for him from our trip, and we enjoyed a lunch and birthday cake with him before his mother came up to take him off to see her family. The drive home thence was easy enough, and after we packed in and got some briefing on Ms. 8’s coming school session, I fired up my home pit and cooked both dinner and some meat to eat across the next several days (we’re still working on it as I write this, in fact). So it was a good day, and one I’m glad to have had.

I’ve got some more fun and adventures coming up in the next weeks. School has started here, and that means football season is soon to follow; I work with the local band, and so I’ll be driving to a number of games, both home and away. Too, I have some travel for work coming up, and there are already some plans for another brief getaway, depending on how matters go for Ms. 8 as she moves through her new coursework. I’m sure I’ll have something or other to say about at least some of what’s coming after I manage to make it through–which is good, because I like to write, and I like to write here.

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I mentioned at about this time last week that I was looking at another uncommonly busy weekend. So much did, in fact, happen to be the case; I had stuff going on on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Honestly, it was all a bit much for my normally staid and stolid self; I have some hope that this weekend will serve as a bit of a counter to it, offering a time to rest and relax a bit before a bigger push begins again. Until then, though, a bit about what went on might be in order.

On Friday, I went to Kerrville, where I participated in a trash pickup with my daughter and with fellow employees of the family business. Texas runs an adopt-a-highway program in which individuals and groups can volunteer to pick up trash along a designated two-mile span of highway quarterly; in exchange, the state posts signage for the individuals or groups. It’s good advertising, and it does do some good for the area. (Picking up trash is helpful, right?) My daughter and I had a little trouble getting started, as it was the first time for both of us, but once we got moving, we did well, contributing to making what had been expected to be a two-day hitch into the work of a morning. I’m pleased with how things turned out in that regard.

After the trash pickup, my daughter and I returned home. She took time to rest and play; I got to work on a freelance project that had dropped into my lap. It took me through Saturday evening to get it done, but I got it done and submitted, so that much was good. I’m pleased to know that I can still do such work at such a pace, if I have the luxury of focusing on it. I know, however, that I do not often have that luxury; my wife and daughter did a lot to take care of other things while I was pushing through the project, and I cannot always or even often ask so much of them.

Sunday was taken up with a family reunion. Much of my wife’s extended family lives in the Texas Hill Country, although there are kin spread out a fair bit further than that, and they gather annually on the first Sunday in August. Traditionally, they have met at LBJ State Park in Stonewall, but the last couple of years have had the event in Johnson City at the city park. As such, I spent Sunday at the park, helping set things up, cook and cut meat, and tear down, all while enjoying the company of familiar people seen but once in the year and meeting new folks who hadn’t been by in a while. It was a good time, although it made for a long day, and I managed to twist my right knee uncomfortably along the way. But that will heal, I’m pretty sure.

This coming weekend, I’ll be away from home for a few days. We’re taking one last chance to get away before Ms. 8 starts back at school (on Monday, if you can believe it), one last opportunity to rest and recreate before things get back going in earnest again. I’m sure I’ll have something to say about it afterwards; I hope you’ll read it!

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It’s not often that I have the kind of weekend that bears much reporting. It’s far more rare that I have two of them in quick succession. But the weekend before last was a busy one, and the one just past had some excitement to it. (The one coming up does, too, as does the one to follow that, somehow.) And for so much to happen to and around me so quickly bears some mention.

On Saturday, my stepfather-in-law (there’s some interesting blending at work on both sides of my wife’s family) had his sixty-fourth birthday. He had let us know a while back that he wanted to go swimming at Johnson park and to eat at a Mexican restaurant in Fredericksburg, Texas, both of which seem enjoyable enough things to do on a summer day in the Texas Hill Country. Consequently, my family and I planned to join the festivities–sensibly enough, I think, if perhaps with some caveats.

One of those caveats is that I don’t really swim. Instead, I sink. Even with a life-jacket on. And I have demonstrated this on more than one occasion, including a time or two when my wife has seen it happen. Because I am not buoyant at all, I tend not to go into the water, thinking that, even if there is something of a damper on a good time by my staying out of the pool, it’s not nearly as much of one as having to have a lifeguard pull me out of said pool–which, again, has happened more than once, and across a span of several decades, now, so that it’s in no way a one-time thing.

Now, we had thought that the park in question was LBJ State Park in Stonewall, which suited us well enough. The park itself has free admission, and the pool–recently reopened after a reconstruction previously thought unaffordable–asks for $2 to $3 per user. It’s a small enough fee, and the facility’s certainly worth the price, but I still see no reason to pay for something I know damned well I’m not going to use if I can avoid doing it. And, since the family well knows that I don’t swim, I was able to avoid doing it.

No, I dropped my wife and daughter off at the pool and retreated a little bit down the road to the Gillespie County Safety Rest Area on US Highway 290. I’d stopped there many times before, as might be imagined; I used to commute to Kerrville from Johnson City, taking 290 for much of the way, and there are still times that the cups of coffee I take in each morning tell me they need to get out earlier than anticipated. I’d not had occasion to stay there for any length of time, though, and, since there was a decent breeze and the temperature decided to confine itself to the lower 90°s F, it seemed a decent enough thing to do while my wife and daughter swam and played in the pool. (There are lots of places to set up at LBJ State Park, to be sure, but many of them are at some distance from restroom facilities, and I’d been told there was an event at the park headquarters that would make my setting up there, with access to its facilities, a bit of a challenge.)

While at the rest area, I sat at one of the covered picnic tables that grace it, my back to the highway and the wind coming from the southeast, and I wrote in my journal in the shade. There is something to be said for an occasional chance of scenery for the writing I do. Most of it happens while I sit at my desk at home, and a fair bit while sitting at my desk at the office where I still work. It’s sensible enough; I have the bulk of my supplies in one or another of those places, and the former is where I have such research apparatus as I still maintain. I also have chairs in those places that are not apt to aggravate my sciatica, and I have ready access to coffee and other things to drink (I’ve found I do better when I cycle more fluids through my body more rapidly). That I can also shape my soundscape to a large degree helps; certain music conduces well to how I think, and writing is thinking.

So much noted, and true, I also know well that being at home or at the office presents distractions. In both places, I have things other than my supplies and apparatus, and they call to me. At home, I’ve not only a decent chair, but also a bed and a couch that beckon. I can call the tune, but the cats’ meows and the dog’s whine also ring out for attention, or the phone rings. And even aside from all of that, I fall easily into ruts of thinking and depressive spirals that lead me down into dark places I’ve too often visited before, and at far greater length than is good for me. There are limits to how good my setup can be, given my resources, and I am ever near them.

Consequently, popping out every now and again has a salubrious effect on my work. It keeps me from falling into unhelpful cycles or helps me get out of them, which is its chief virtue. I know those cycles present danger to me; they echo with words perilous to hear and ultimately fatal to heed, but getting out every so often quiets the bitter monologue that delivers soliloquies on nothing but my failures. Getting out helps me to remember that the world is more than me, both myself and the externalization of self that the settled-into home is.

I do not always do well with remembering as much. It is easy for me to withdraw, to retreat, from a world I find confusing and frightening. It is easy for me to see what is wrong and what might well grow worse and to take myself where I feel some sense of control. It is this all too easy for me to fail to look outside myself and to focus on what might well go well after all. So much is a problem with which I struggle, with which I have struggled and likely long will. I try to take what are ultimately small steps to get away from it…when I remember to do so, which is, again, not often.

When I do remember, though, and go somewhere else to put my thoughts down, I am the better for it. I cannot always do so, of course. I do have tasks as demand I be in one place or another. I do have to be findable for a few folks at all times and for some more folks a fair bit of the time. And I do get a lot of good work done in my accustomed places; they’d not be my accustomed places did I not. I have worked to make my places good ones from which to write, but I am still glad to get out and about every now and again, to air myself and my places out and return to them ready to address what needs doing.

So it was that my time at the Gillespie County Safety Rest Area was a pleasant enough experience, the decent weather and available shade doing much to help it be so. The facilities are constructed and maintained well, and, the noise from the highway aside, things were rather quiet. Some birdsong and what I think was the chittering of cicadas reached me, and a few people stopping to make use of the facilities happened by, but the last were content to keep their own company and leave me to mine. I appreciate the courtesy, and I appreciate having gotten to have the peaceful time to myself. I think it’s something I might do again, go there to write, as duties and weather permit.

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