Continuing... like I never left off.

I have houseplants, but I hardly consider them pets. For some reason they always seem to multiply. Every time I see one I adore at the home improvement store, regardless of time of year, I have to purchase another one. Now I've got them littered about the house in various pots, and I'm constantly forgetting to water them.

I have two cats too. I do consider these pets, though they spent the vast majority of their time lounging around in a few spots - a little like the house plants, if you ask me, only with the added chore of the litter box.

It's summer now, but I can think back to the winter, to the several feet of snow we had this year and remember how I relished these houseplants, the two cats, for offering me my only taste of nature indoors.

I've decided to continue this blog though the summer semester of Nature Writing is over. I managed an A, but I still don't think I've said enough. In the next year I'm going to continue to chronicle my run-ins with nature. This could involve my houseplants and cats in the winter - fair warning - but it will also involve my garden through the seasons (including the strangely shaped cucumbers we just picked) and it may include a few observations made on my family trip to Alabama in a few weeks. You might want to expect descriptions of mosquitoes as big as birds.

Either way, this little blog isn't quite over yet. I cannot say the blogging will be as frequent, but it will continue. Let's just say I'll make the effort of one post a week.

Why a blog?

Why can't I just submit my journals on paper like everyone else?

Part of doing nature writing should involve some sort of respect of nature. In an effort to do this properly, I will be posting my journal online and doing all the writing digitally. This doesn't mean the entire project cannot be printed later, but it does mean that I'm not using paper to bring my ideas together, and I am therefore conserving resources which is directly affecting the natural world I'm going to write about.

Also, as I plan to be spending a lot of my time in the summer outside doing the reading and the writing, I'm hoping to include some digital photos of the very experiences I'm writing about. My boyfriend is training to backpack Glacier National Park in Montana in the fall, so I will be spending some weekends hiking. I'm hoping the battery on my little netbook can make an entry or two from the Appalachian Trail (to be posted after I return to the grid, so to speak).

Oh... and the third reason is the fact that my handwriting is horrid.