I attended my volunteer orientation for the Texas Discovery Gardens in Fair Park on Tuesday evening.  I am SO excited!  (And it's just not because I got a t-shirt and passed a background check.  But yeah, really, I did.)  I will be volunteering in the entrance area, in the butterfly house, and in the butterfly gardens once or twice a month.  During the tour of the outdoor garden, I learned that this particular butterfly garden is a way station for monarch butterflies when they migrate.  How totally cool is that?

I can't wait to soak up knowledge from the master gardeners and the master naturalists that I will meet, learn more about butterflies, and to give back to my community in a small way.  December 4th they are having a master composting class -- I am so going to go to that!  Oh, admit it -- you want to go too.  ::::grin::::  Someday I would like to become one of those masters.  Since I have done zero research on any of them -- e.g. what education is required, and what their specialities are -- I don't know which one I want to become, but one of them is definintely on my list of life goals.  Maybe more than one, who knows?

Here's the link to the gardens: http://texasdiscoverygardens.org/.  If you've never been, you should go.  It's an amazing place.

Yesterday I went back to the gardens with a friend who is visiting me from Minnesota.  I wanted to show her where I would be volunteering; plus I knew she would be just as excited about it as I am.  While we were there we zipped through the gift shop, and I finally got that book I've been wanting that has color photos of the life stages of the butterfly so that I can identify caterpillars in my garden at home, and be able to determine what butterfly they become.  Yeehaw!  Let the games begin.