Fish, Email, and Community
Jul. 11th, 2003 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI'm gonna start off by saying that I'm very, very tempted to grab a happylarch69 email address (or some variation thereof) somewhere. Y'all suck.
I'm also paying a lot of attention to TOH's saltwater tank recently. It has one fish in it and a bunch of neat stuff, most of which you see best if you look really closely after a feeding. They've got hermit crabs and growy-planty things, but also tons of little snails and worms and wrigglies and things like that. Those you totally don't see unless you're looking for them, but the more you look the more you find. It reminds me a lot of gardening except the soil's clear so you can actually see, and a lot more is under your control because it's a closed system.
The fish, Pablo, is a lovely vicious thing that would bite me if I tried to pet him and does quick runs at the food when I feed him. He's very, very pretty and he's getting fat. :)
The garden itself is flourishing for the most part. The Juggler's sunflowers are growing a couple of inches a day, the tomatoes are growing pretty quickly, the passiflora is just beginning to take off, the peppers have started flowering, the eggplant is sad (I think from being too hot, too wilted too often when it was growing up, etc) but hanging in there, the marigolds are beginning to develop buds, there are beans all over the volunteer scarlet runners...
The big roses are all blooming except for the unknown purple -- moonshadow, Gold Medal (which fades from brilliant yellow-apricot to pale soft fluttery pastel), Tropical Sunset (which is insanely covered in blooms and all fruity-coloured), and the poor Tigress which is pretty powdery-mildewish. We've got an Amber Sunrise which is realy pretty, it fades from a sort of bright yellow to a fuschia and looks happy, and Lavender Crystals (or is it Mystery Mauve? One of the purple minis) is just churning them out, the others are in between flushes.
Perle d'Azure clematis is growing like crazy to make up for that massive 'pruning' ir recieved when it was planted, and may even flower. Multi-blue has three flowers and one messed up one, and more buds coming up. Its colour is unbelievable. I need more of that one. The Asao got wilt, but we'll catch it next year. Warm Wishes looks like it might flower soon off along the fence where it got tucked, but we'll see.
My salad/stir fry stuff's coming along okay, the red mustard and mizuna really well and the rosette pak choi pretty well. The standard pak choi's just not happy. Radishes in the center bed had such poor germination but are doing fine, the second bed of salad stuff's germinated, though the seeds were unevenly scattered.
Under the roses the herliotrope's needing a vegitative phase, its flowers are looking a little ragged and it needs to put on some size. The coreopsis looks happy enough, those flowers fade just gorgrously. I can't wait to see it next year. The daylilies look pretty neutral, not flowering or growing a ton but probably establishing roots. The peonies are surviving, the dianthus is done flowering for now despite the deadheading, and the rosemary's gone slightly yellow but looks okay otherwise. Not unhealthy yellow, but glossy-but-yellowish yellow. Hm.
Oh! And the mystery plant that I rescued from the other bed is beautiful! It looks vaguely gerbera-daisy-like, with bright orange flowers with a black ring around the center. They close at night, and they have vaguely downy deep green leaves that are kind of dandelion-shaped. Very good save on my part. The poppy from over there has grown a (very few) non-yellow leaves and is producng a mind-boggling array of longlasting, delicate-looking pink flowers. I don't know how it feeds them all.
The mint's exploded, I need to make mint tea soonish. Wintergreen looks good but isn't doing much; I do want it to spread.
It's neat to do housework with a sense of community involvement; I do some dishes, other people do more. I do some laundry, other people do laundry. It's a shared work that gets talked about sometimes and it's just neat - it's never felt that way before.
The hydrangeas on the side of the house are this brilliant jewel-blue, btw, and there are snapdragons and some yellow papery flower in the front that sprung out of dead stalks. Neat, neat.
I think I might have been out too long watering and sunburnt, so I'm in the rest of the day. Finished estrellada's book, so I'm starting on a pop-buddhism book, the Ethical Slut again, some science/sociology book, and a historical non-fiction called The Princes In the Tower that TOW has recommended. A good mix to flit betweem, that is.
I'm hoping my garden at home's okay and not water-deprived beyond hope.
Saw The Pirates of the Carribean last night with the two of them. I got one of the Juggler's arms to snuggle and TOH got the other and we held hands across him, which was The ideal way to see a movie. I was surprised by how much I liked the ending, through the whole thing seemed long to sit through. I loveloveloved the Jack Sparrow character. He had this hip-swinging swagger that was just rivetting... TOW says the actor was Johnny Depp.
Well, on to dishes. Care. :)
I'm also paying a lot of attention to TOH's saltwater tank recently. It has one fish in it and a bunch of neat stuff, most of which you see best if you look really closely after a feeding. They've got hermit crabs and growy-planty things, but also tons of little snails and worms and wrigglies and things like that. Those you totally don't see unless you're looking for them, but the more you look the more you find. It reminds me a lot of gardening except the soil's clear so you can actually see, and a lot more is under your control because it's a closed system.
The fish, Pablo, is a lovely vicious thing that would bite me if I tried to pet him and does quick runs at the food when I feed him. He's very, very pretty and he's getting fat. :)
The garden itself is flourishing for the most part. The Juggler's sunflowers are growing a couple of inches a day, the tomatoes are growing pretty quickly, the passiflora is just beginning to take off, the peppers have started flowering, the eggplant is sad (I think from being too hot, too wilted too often when it was growing up, etc) but hanging in there, the marigolds are beginning to develop buds, there are beans all over the volunteer scarlet runners...
The big roses are all blooming except for the unknown purple -- moonshadow, Gold Medal (which fades from brilliant yellow-apricot to pale soft fluttery pastel), Tropical Sunset (which is insanely covered in blooms and all fruity-coloured), and the poor Tigress which is pretty powdery-mildewish. We've got an Amber Sunrise which is realy pretty, it fades from a sort of bright yellow to a fuschia and looks happy, and Lavender Crystals (or is it Mystery Mauve? One of the purple minis) is just churning them out, the others are in between flushes.
Perle d'Azure clematis is growing like crazy to make up for that massive 'pruning' ir recieved when it was planted, and may even flower. Multi-blue has three flowers and one messed up one, and more buds coming up. Its colour is unbelievable. I need more of that one. The Asao got wilt, but we'll catch it next year. Warm Wishes looks like it might flower soon off along the fence where it got tucked, but we'll see.
My salad/stir fry stuff's coming along okay, the red mustard and mizuna really well and the rosette pak choi pretty well. The standard pak choi's just not happy. Radishes in the center bed had such poor germination but are doing fine, the second bed of salad stuff's germinated, though the seeds were unevenly scattered.
Under the roses the herliotrope's needing a vegitative phase, its flowers are looking a little ragged and it needs to put on some size. The coreopsis looks happy enough, those flowers fade just gorgrously. I can't wait to see it next year. The daylilies look pretty neutral, not flowering or growing a ton but probably establishing roots. The peonies are surviving, the dianthus is done flowering for now despite the deadheading, and the rosemary's gone slightly yellow but looks okay otherwise. Not unhealthy yellow, but glossy-but-yellowish yellow. Hm.
Oh! And the mystery plant that I rescued from the other bed is beautiful! It looks vaguely gerbera-daisy-like, with bright orange flowers with a black ring around the center. They close at night, and they have vaguely downy deep green leaves that are kind of dandelion-shaped. Very good save on my part. The poppy from over there has grown a (very few) non-yellow leaves and is producng a mind-boggling array of longlasting, delicate-looking pink flowers. I don't know how it feeds them all.
The mint's exploded, I need to make mint tea soonish. Wintergreen looks good but isn't doing much; I do want it to spread.
It's neat to do housework with a sense of community involvement; I do some dishes, other people do more. I do some laundry, other people do laundry. It's a shared work that gets talked about sometimes and it's just neat - it's never felt that way before.
The hydrangeas on the side of the house are this brilliant jewel-blue, btw, and there are snapdragons and some yellow papery flower in the front that sprung out of dead stalks. Neat, neat.
I think I might have been out too long watering and sunburnt, so I'm in the rest of the day. Finished estrellada's book, so I'm starting on a pop-buddhism book, the Ethical Slut again, some science/sociology book, and a historical non-fiction called The Princes In the Tower that TOW has recommended. A good mix to flit betweem, that is.
I'm hoping my garden at home's okay and not water-deprived beyond hope.
Saw The Pirates of the Carribean last night with the two of them. I got one of the Juggler's arms to snuggle and TOH got the other and we held hands across him, which was The ideal way to see a movie. I was surprised by how much I liked the ending, through the whole thing seemed long to sit through. I loveloveloved the Jack Sparrow character. He had this hip-swinging swagger that was just rivetting... TOW says the actor was Johnny Depp.
Well, on to dishes. Care. :)
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-12 01:57 am (UTC)