July microblogging: Sam Gribley, you were my first boyfriend

Yesterday's prompt, which I forgot to address, was to write about a favorite childhood book. My all time favorite book from my pre-teen years was Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain. It's fantastically nerdy, without a shred of fantasy; the tale of a city boy who runs away to the Catskills to live off the land for a year. It sparked all sorts of personal nature study for me, and inspired my early foraging efforts, as I learned about edible wild plants in the area where I grew up. It made me excited about camping and being out in the woods, and probably spurred me on to do things like rappelling and canoeing as I got older.

Now, years later, I discover that this wasn't the only book George wrote about Sam Gribley! I am so getting my hands on these!

Here's some milkweed I came across in West VA, in my cousin's area. No, I did not eat them. Yes, the pods are edible.

July goals: a month of mini-blogs

Following Dianne Sylvan's theme of 31 days of smallish bloggery, I launch here. She has a months worth of prompts. Not saying I'm going to do them all, but there does seem to be blogfodder therein. I'm having a hard time blogging; the book of faces and the instant gratification gram are chewing up my social media time. It's a problem, though.

Here are Sylvan's prompts, should you be interested...

http://diannesylvan.com/archives/5183

July's goals are simple. Enjoy my summer. I am off work til July 30, and I need to do 2 things...clean my crazy house, and figure out some way to set some boundaries around my work life. Because last year was just 180 days of drinking from a firehose, and it wrecked me. This year, far less, and far less stress over it all.

To that end, I'll continue to work at sustaining my meditation practice, and do some enjoyable things. I'm signed up for a qigong class at my church, and am also going to the Dirty South Yoga Fest at the end of the month. So it looks to be a month of mind-body practice, which I desperately need.

Leah's coming to visit in 11 days, and I'm so excited. It'll be good to have witchy company. We are going to the pagan-flavored Mystic South conference - hey, I'm all about the con this year!

But I'm facing the stiff challenge of getting my guest room and office ready to house her. The Clamcave has become the repository of all my chaotic mess from the end of the school year, and it's first on my list to bust a move on, starting tomorrow. I should have begun today, but ended up playing D&D all day at Jessie's so no housecleaning today.

Other goals for July (though I hesitate to make any more, because the aforementioned ones are lofty as all get out) are making a good effort in my brother-in-law's Workweek Hustles on the Fitbit platform, and cooking and eating more at home. How this jives with my newfound love of festivals and cons, and my party girl Leah coming down, I'm not sure...

I'm also doing Tour de Fleece. Clearly I haven't learned anything from the year's biting off more than I can chew, though I really only have to spin 10 minutes a day...