When I initially started planning my reflections, I wanted to have a certain continuity about it so I decided to observe the changes of the community garden here on campus. However, towards the end of the semester class work and projects tend to dictate your days leaving your plans to blow away in the wind. So this month I was not able to participate in the garden work days and it’s kind of hard to write a reflection blog of the garden if I don’t actually go there… As a result I had to find a new interesting place that would make writing these five hundred words a piece of cake and was easily accessible for me. At first I thought about going to a park or even Wild Basin, but I realized that I already had a place: the courtyard outside of my residence hall. I live on campus in the Casas hall and in my opinion it’s one of the best looking halls on campus. To the side of the hall is a little area with a couple of tables and a bunch of trees and I find no greater peace here on campus than sitting under those trees. Granted the squirrels do occasionally jump from branch to branch, shaking a bunch of acorns down from above to subsequently hit my head, but usually it’s peaceful. Lately, I have noticed that there are not near as many squirrels running around the area since the weather has gotten colder. As the leaves keep falling, the squirrels are few and far in between. Speaking of the leaves, I have never experienced a more colorful fall than the one we are experiencing now or at least that I can remember. Typically, the trees in Texas take on a putrid brown color or the leaves just stay their normal green until one day you look up and the leaves have disappeared. However, on campus the leaves have captivated me and I could not stop taking pictures of them! I’m sure that these trees were specifically chosen for this campus for their colorfulness, but I can’t help but feel that I’m at a school up on the east coast rather than the southern reality of Texas. I think I got some cool pictures of the trees, but I noticed that while the courtyard has it’s pretty parts it can easily be tarnished by lazy smokers. Scattered on the ground by the chairs are the little cigarette buds that people are too lazy to take to the cigarette bud disposal bins. It’s terrible to see the blatant lack of respect to not only the earth, but the people who took the time to get those disposal bins installed. At this point I feel obligated to clean up these buds that people leave on the ground. Even though they’ll probably keep leaving them on the ground, my actions will be producing some kind of result whether it be keeping other animals from consuming the buds or even making the area look nicer. This sense of duty I have found is echoed in A Sand County Almanac when Aldo remarks that “… a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
, 
