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a classic austin view, you might say. you can see the city skyline through the branches of the mountain cedar there (juniperus ashei, in case you were wondering.)

i've actually never been up here - ridden across this bridge on a bicycle close to 100 times or more, i'd venture, but never been in a position to stop and climb up to this overlook. i got up this morning and went for a good run, then i hopped in the car and thought i'd do a little collecting up here.

there was an extreme abundance of mountain cedar (common around here,) but some other good stuff too and i got a few collections and enjoyed the morning view. my plant press is full now so i'll have to wait it out until some of them are dry enough to remove.

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when i was younger and we had to take those silly tests to determine our personalities, you know, myers-briggs, other crap like that - well, i never ever used to rate myself as introspective or a daydreamer. not even kind of, always a staunch "not at all" on the scale of "how well does this describe you?"

this weekend i sort of acknowledged what i'd known for a while, which is that i am far more introspective and thoughtful than i was before the ride. it's funny how much you can change from an experience like that. a lot more than i thought i would. even though it's been over two years now, i still see and feel the reverberations in my daily life.

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when i collected today, there were spiders everywhere! it was so weird, every plants seemed to have a few, and they weren't all the same. in fact, i was just writing this post and i guess i brought one home with me, because i found him crawling up my arm. where there's one there's probably more.

i used to be afraid of spiders, but i guess it wasn't a fear that ran very deep because even though i still don't like it when i find them physically on me, i don't mind them at all in any other situation. they're really kind of fascinating - we're engineered to fear them. what i don't like about most spiders is how they're hard to see, and sometimes you can get bit by them without knowing. but i guess that's true of any insect so i've gotten better about it than i used to be. i think it probably started on that hot day in july when sam made me catch that spider that was jumping everywhere when we were collecting insects.

yeah, then. it started then. that did, anyway. some things started a long time before that.