Cacti

I usually blog on the weekends but lately my weekends have been fairly busy so I figured I'd try a week day evening for a blog post.  This evening I'm going to talk about cacti and my ability to grow things.
I think I've established along the way with this blog that although I love to grow things, I'm pitifully bad at it.  A year ago (yes, last January) I put a bunch of cactus and succulent seeds into a terrarium-type arrangement, hoping I wouldn't have to do much with it since it was a terrarium, and thus I couldn't screw it up as easily as a regular plant.  That was the thought process anyway.  

Lo and behold, the little things sprouted!  They started out as tiny green nubs and began putting out a spine or two here and there.  I carefully documented their progress with pictures at intervals, which I then lost all of when my hard drive crashed last summer.   So I don't have remaining proof that I grew them from seeds, but I did.  

Anyway, the terrarium part lasted only until the succulents got well under way.  They sent out long thin shoots which began being bent and curled by the terrarium, so I gave up, took the top off the thing and have been treating it like a regular plant.  That entails things like watering it when I think it looks dry and trying not to over water it, trying to make sure it gets sunlight, etc, etc.  Luckily, cacti can stand dry spells.  So despite my tender loving care (or lack thereof), the little things continue to grow.   As you can kind of see from these pictures the plants are perfectly happy and thriving. 

I have two types of succulents and about 10 different varieties of cacti in there.  The bigger ones came up first.  The tiny little ones at the base of the big ones and among the pebbles were slow to sprout and are small and low to the ground.  They also don't have the serious spines on them that the bigger guys do.  Most of them are getting to the point where I should be able to actually identify what type of cactus it is soon, besides using descriptive names like "roundish with long spines" "roundish with purple stripes and long spines" or "short and roundish".

I had a few seeds left so I started those leftovers this year, a year behind the original ones.  The new ones are struggling more, probably because when I was starting the first batch they were in the terrarium and the watering was via condensation dripping onto the soil.  This year they're just in a pot and when I water them I disturb the soil.  I think they've had a hard time getting started.  You can see a couple of pale green stalks in this picture below. That's what all my little thriving cacti looked like last year at this time.

Anyway, it does look like I am capable of growing cactus-type plants.  Of course, except for occasionally letting them freeze, I have managed to keep aloe vera alive, so I suppose I knew that.  It's just so much fun to watch things grow.

Speaking of watching things grow, I hope we continue to get some rain so that things will actually grow come Spring.  The drought from last year is supposed to continue this year.  People are saying they may not let us water lawns at all this year if it does continue.  We had about 24 hours of pretty continuous rain starting late yesterday, and it's supposed to be scattered showers tomorrow.  There was lots of standing water in places today as I was driving home, but unless we get more than an occasional, widely spaced day of rain, the outlook is not good.  The reservoirs between here and east Texas are basically dry . . . or were when I came through during the holidays.  Those won't fill with just a few days of rain.  So me, the sunshine girl, is actively hoping for rain. 

I guess that's all for now.

New Year - a little late!

2012!?  The years just keep rolling by, don't they?  This is my much-delayed new year's eve reminiscing.  Actually I'm only half a month late so I suppose it could be a lot worse.  This will be a short post though because I'm not really in the mood to be deeply philosophical.  Still I've looked back every year, so I'll look back at least briefly today. 

Let's see.  Overall I'd have to say 2011 was pretty good to me.  I'm actively involved in work and everything is going well there. I'm actively involved in my national professional organization and everything is going well there.  I got my promotion to professor, with a raise, and in December we got a good bonus which paid for Christmas and then some.  My life and work seem to be on a pretty nice even-keel for a change. 

So personally, things are going well, but there are also a LOT of changes going on at my work.  The department has a new Chair, and with a new Chair come changes, so that's one aspect of it.  Add to that, our interim Division head has decided she doesn't want the position and is leaving, so we'll have a new Division Head in another month.  And add to that our lab administrative director left in December.  Whenever there is this much change, people are nervous and unsettled.  I've ridden so many changes at this place that I'm sure I can ride these too, but it is a pretty excessive amount of change in a fairly short period of time this time.  It'll be interesting to see how the department grows.    

Family-wise things are going well, too.  I have a new niece-in-law, with my oldest nephew getting married in November.  My nieces and nephews all make me so proud.  What a great group of kids.  Plus I have four grand-nieces now.  Maybe my newly married nephew and his wife will add a boy to that mix along the way.  So far I'd have to say that my nephews have excellent taste in women.  All my nieces-in-law are good-looking girls.  So of course my grand-nieces are perfect.  *laughing*  Which is not to say that my nieces and nephews aren't good-looking.  As I mentioned, I have nephews ands nieces to be proud of.

So what about the new year?  I think this year I may buy a new house.  I like my little house, but the commute is getting really old.  I'm seriously considering moving to somewhere close to the rail lines.  That will be my big project for the year, probably.  At work I have lots of projects to work on to keep me busy.  Maybe I'll consider losing some weight and getting back into better shape.  And of course I always have lots of around-the-house projects that I never seem to get to. The cat-kids and I are fat and happy.  It should be a good year, I think. 

New York, New Year

Wow!  Three months since I posted.  I always let the back end of the year get away from me and this year was no exception.  I didn't even do my usual end of year/new year musings.   I'll have to try to fit that in sooner or later.  Or I guess I could just skip it this year.

Let's see.  I have so much to talk about.  Guess I'll do this blog about my trip to the Big Apple and catch up on other things in another blog.

I have a good friend in medical school in New York, so I went to visit her for five days the week before Christmas and we had a blast!   I can totally see why people love New York.  Everything is there.  And I mean EVERYTHING.  Things we can only get online in Dallas, you can actually stop and pick up in a relatively accessible store.  Authentic food from probably every known culture.  Yum!   And of course, Times Square, Broadway, Rockefeller Center, etc.  It was impossible to do everything in five days, so we were selective of course, but everything we did was fun.

First of all, all transportation was public, which was really different for me with my independence defined by my car.  You can't live without a car in Dallas.  In New York it's not only possible, it's often preferable.  Traffic isn't pretty.  Also, I've never been on a subway in the US before so it was a learning experience. I've been on the London Underground, the Paris Metro and several systems in Japan, but nothing here in the US.  I'm VERY glad to have had my friend to act as guide.   She was in charge of getting us from point A to point B and did a great job at it.  

My friend lives in Jersey City, so we went into New York every day for food, shopping and entertainment.  We ate Greek food, we ate Falafels, we ate the best greasy cheeseburgers I've ever had, we ate authentic Japanese at a place where we were the only non-Asians inside.  Basically we ate our way through 5 days. 

We went to see Wicked!  AWESOME!  I had never been to a Broadway show, so likely I would have considered anything we saw awesome, but Wicked really was amazing.  I want to see it again.  And I now have the soundtrack for it.   

We went to see the big tree at Rockefeller Center at night, which is the first picture in this blog, and also wandered around looking at all the Christmas decorations, which are the other pictures.  As you can see, all the decorations were amazing, although of course the pictures never do them justice and I can't possibly post all the pictures I took. 

We went shopping pretty much every day.  On one side of Macy's the windows are all done with fancy Christmas scenes and puppets.  Those window scenes I absolutely could not do justice to with a picture, but this will maybe give you a little flavor of what they were like.  "Magical" is probably a good word.   In fact I'd have to say the New York is fairly magical at this time of year.

We got home pretty exhausted every evening after walking and wandering around Manhattan all day, but it was sooooooo worth it.  One minor downside - temperature.  One day in Manhattan the high temp was 27 degrees, which as you know is WAY too cold for this Texas girl.  Hats, gloves, thick scarves, heavy coat ... these are absolute 'musts' for December in New York.  And add an umbrella for those wet days.  Still the weather didn't slow us down much.  We still had a blast. 

Oh, one other minor downside, I picked up a Yankee virus, which I was coming down with the day I flew back home, and then I kindly took with me to east Texas for Christmas.  Hopefully my whole family didn't end up with it. 

So that was the NY trip.  More on the rest of my life in the next blog.