The Green Family

Hiking

My hiking hobby has its own blog, but I will add a few photos here. The biggest thing to come from my new hobby was becoming very ill and weak and finally seeing enough doctors to learn I was super-duper anemic. Fun. I'll say my hiking partner has been very patient. And this fall (2023) I am giving all my new red blood cells a test run. Our third hike Fall 2023 was harder than anything I did last year. It wasn't fun but I did it. Blood Mountain here I come...probably...eventually.

Most hikes look more like this.

...than this

And sometimes you end up like this.

But even on the easy trails, danger lurks. Or should I say stings.

Sometimes you get rewarded with this...but usually it's just blisters.

Betsy AKA Liz is our navigator...wait is that what you call it?

Here we are at one of the larger trees in GA.

And overlooking lovely downtown Chatsworth (insert hysterical laughter if you've been to Chatsworth)

From the top of Ft Mountain-one of my favorite places to hike.

Noontoola Creek

View from Lake Blue Ridge

So we go this way...then that way..

Sometimes I even get "D" to join me.

It's all fun and games until someone (me) breaks a wrist.

I'll have you know I finished my hike with this broken wrist-then I went to urgent care.

Nashville

My least favorite place is Gatlinburg. And Nashville has to rank in my bottom 10. Ugh. But I was so happy to go here to celebrate a friend's birthday. Even though I don't like country music, or loud music, or drinking, or other people drinking. And as I would find out I also don't like redneck comedy Christmas bus tours.

If you were to zoom in, you would see that 90% of the revelers are bachelorette parties and girls' weekends-roving gangs of young women in impossibly tiny dresses and skirts wearing impossibly stiff brand-new cowboy boots.

Why I made Betsy take this bathroom pic-no idea but it seemed very important at the time.

Can we go home now that I have proof, I left the house and did a thing.

The best thing in Nashville-this skinny mirror in a small cafe we found.

How we ended up in this Cracker Barrel instead of our fancy diner reservation is the stuff of legends.

So, I was led to believe I was going on a Christmas Lights tour. That was not the case.

I went on a Redneck Comedy Bus Tour. Redneck "comedy" is low hanging fruit indeed. All you need are some silly clothes and a few zingers about women, gay folks, and the democrats.... voila, you're a comedian.

To enhance the trip an very intoxicated young man seated behind us vomited often during the two hour ride. I would have gladly uber'd home at any point. But, for fear of being rude, we all put on our best game faces and toughed it out. Later commiserating that we wish we had uber'd home.

What in the love of Father Christmas....we picked him up along the way.

Not the "redneck" but the rando Rudolph.

Smiling, is it over yet?

Working Backwards Christmas 2022

Just in time for Christmas I finished my new rug. Obviously, I love it, although I realize it may not be to everyone's taste (as I've been told). It was very special as well because I painted it while suffering from BPPV a form of vertigo and another unknown dizziness. I really struggled to finish before our new table arrived. When I work on a piece like this, I could continue to find mistakes and areas to correct and never stop. It is 100% hand drawn and painted.

Then a few days before Christmas we made a precarious journey over the mountains to Franklin, NC to pick up our new handmade Walnut Dining Table. The trestle legs were my "must have" and the "live edge" was "D's"

At least when its foggy you can't see how far you will if you go off the mountain.

All loaded up and ready to go. And the day cleared, and we had beautiful weather for the trip home.

What will follow are like 10 pics of my table from every imageable angle. As an adult I've never had a nice dining table. We've cycled though hand-me-down and thrift store finds. These days everyone things they can screw some metal legs on a slab and call it a handmade live edge table. But I wanted something a little more.