fall

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/ erin / Leave a comment

My nose is very very sensitive to smells. Not in a bad way, I can just smell you, or that thing, or “insert scent here”, from a mile away. If it’s a dank enough smell it might send my gag reflexes going.. Courtesy of my mom’s side of the family 🙂

My favorite smell is the wind. I loved gym class growing up in the fall and spring time when we were able to go outside, because when we would come back in… You can smell the air, earth, and wind on your skin and hair. It’s a different smell than lined dried clothes, but that one is still ranked up there.

My second favorite smell is pine, actually, probably tied for first. But that smell, the pine and the needles covering the ground and the way it silences your footsteps. It reminds me of going to the Upper Peninsula Michigan when I was a kid to visit my grandparents camp on Lake Superior, and my other grandparents home. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve gone to the UP but it is absolutely BEAUTIFUL country up there, gorgeous! They call it Gods Country up there for a reason.  Anyways, I digress, I love the smell of pine.

SO!

All of this talk about smells is leading somewhere.  I went to the car wash the other day and they gave me a free air freshener, looks homemade somehow, and I picked the pine scent, but it looked like they also had an “air” smell. Next time. But my car smells so good I could live in it.

That was all.

NEXT order of business!

–SO. I HATE waste, and I really have been trying to minimize my carbon footprint, but in our current situation we don’t have a fresh water tank / running water set up in the trailer. (It will be coming just not yet). In the mean time we have been buying water either by the gallon or just recently in cases of water… and I KNOW I KNOW that is really bad for the environment, so this is why I’ve been looking up ways that I can recycle and re-use the bottles we will end up going thru!

My favorite ideas from one of the lists I found were…

  • Little greenhouses / Planters for plants
  • A vertical plant stand which you can use your grey water for it to grow plants like lettuce etc. Something that will be good for the kitchen etc.
  • Curtain/ Door sheer by painting the bottom of the bottles that are cut off
  • Making designs from the different colored bottle caps

http://www.boredpanda.com/plastic-bottle-recycling-ideas/

http://www.onegoodthingbyjillee.com/2015/06/31-creative-ways-to-reuse-plastic-bottles.html

45 Ideas of How To Recycle Plastic Bottles

(All of these links found in a simple google search)

Maybe I’ll think up a few new ideas to use the bottles for, but I don’t want to recycle that many away, it’s more of a challenge to be creative and see what I can come up with.

Altho sometimes I tend to get obsessive and that’s all my time will end up consisting of… hope that doesn’t happen this time 🙂

Colorado the Beautiful *

/ erin / Leave a comment

I crave fall like some people crave chocolate. Cold crispy days that leave the tip of your nose red, running and just a little numb; when your cheeks are rosy and pink, a winter jacket is just too much but one layer isn’t quite enough.

I crave these days. The past few days here in CO has been what I’ve been dreaming of since last fall closed down for the winter to move in. I don’t even mind the rain… I am half convinced I could live in a place like Seattle with constant rain and I wouldn’t get depressed, but I don’t have any plans to move there anytime soon so we can’t know for sure yet. But anyways, the last two days have been steady with a light fall of rain, not to windy, not to heavy, fading in and out just enough so Ben couldn’t work and we could get out and explore CO some!

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Our mission Tuesday was to head blindly into the Rockies for the day and just figure it out, as we often do when we do some “Sunday driving”. We spent a few hours on back roads winding and twisting and since it was bad weather we couldn’t see beyond the base of the hills and mountains to about half way up… still didn’t take away any of the magic. We came across some signs for a trail head about an hour and a half into the drive so we pulled off and went for a 3.4 mile hike. It was gorgeous and I was BEYOND ecstatic to be back in the mountains again. I promise my soul belongs in the mountains, it just does. So anywho, it was an awesome chilly day with a great hike, the rain didn’t bother us at all and the hike followed a river the whole time so that was pretty cool.

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This was a pretty cool church we came across in the mountains not much else around but it…

On Wednesday we decided to head down to explore other parts of CO, so we headed southwest to the Red Rocks Amphitheater. That hike ended up being about 2 miles and was very cool! I didn’t realize (I don’t know where I’ve been) that CO has cacti and had some desert to it, the Red Rocks Amphitheater was full of red rocks obviously :p but it was really big smooth rock formations, and the amphitheater is almost built into the rocks. As you’re hiking along the trails you wouldn’t necessarily notice that there is an amphitheater there if it wasn’t for the signs, random parking lots and enormously big ramp to walk to get to the top.

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From the top of the amphitheater, awesome views!

We could’ve used those two days “off” to work some more on the trailer, but we’ve been here for a couple weeks now and I’ve been just itching to get out and go! BUT, I have made some improvements on the trailer since then! I was able to find some individual stack-able drawers for our clothes! YAY! When I went to buy them, I went right back to the clearance spot where they were, and there was only 1 left! I was so sad, buuuut then I turned around and they just re-arranged the place J SO I got all 5 and an extra collapsible box so we have some more organization in our lives!

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The white stack-able drawers are what I found to be useful to hold our clothes 🙂

My summer wardrobe (the little of it that exists) is slowly being cycled out and my fall and winter clothes are being brought into the trailer. Like I said… I crave this season so I am STOKED! We’ve had some cold nights so we’ve moved the electrical heater into the trailer. It looks like fan and it adjusts on and off with the temperature in the trailer which is very nice for those times we leave it on all night. As you can imagine it doesn’t take much to heat a small space like that, so that is an excellent feature… it does heat up like a sauna rather quickly. Of course that’s wouldn’t always be a bad thing as saunas are basically amazing, but not for sleeping.  But EVEN BETTER the heater fan we use is a Vornado VH2 and we got it at a garage sale for $5. Ben insisted that it would be useful, and it has proved to be so far! WIN!

I feel like we are gaining some more order and footing in our lives. It’s a hard thing, change. I’ve said it once and I will say it a thousand times! BUT, it feels oH! So good when things start to chill out and the new routines start to feel “normal” again. (I hate that word, normal. It’s not a real thing.)  But for lack of a better… “normal” is nice sometimes.

I picked the right Starbucks to sit at this beautiful afternoon. I’ve been writing this post for a few days, but the weather has been too awesome to stop and finish it. Now that I do, the sky is very clear, and I have a nice widow seat facing the snow peaked mountains in all of their glory, and my mint tea which is bomb.

The mountains are beautiful today, I may have to go explore some more 🙂

**fyi. I started this post on a Thursday and finished it on a Sunday. So if it was confusing that is why 😉