Huernia (not to be confused with hernia)

I bought a little huernia cutting on Etsy a couple of months ago. I'd never heard of huernias before then, but I'm #1, a sucker for succulents, and #2, the listing said that the care was the same as for phalaenopsis orchids (which IMO are the easiest house plants in the world to grow), so I bought it.

When it arrived, it had a flower bud already starting to develop. But it dried up and fell off about a week later. But I'd have been more surprised if it hadn't fallen off. I mean, shipping from several hundred miles away is traumatic. At any rate, not long after that, a new bud started forming. I didn't take any pictures while the buds were small, but soon it became apparent that this baby was fixin' to bloom.


Look out! She's gonna blow!


And then, a couple days later, it started to open...


And now... TA DA!!!


Extreme closeup:


Pretty cool, eh?

Tiebreaker (or something)

The cup plant is all growed up now.

Milestone Moment

This is my 7th post this year. I made 5 posts in 2007, and 5 in 2008. Amazing stuff, eh? ;)

Zombies. They're EVERYWHERE!

I found this book in my grocery store and immediately snatched it up. The fact that it's being sold that mainstreamly just shows how incredibly popular anything zombie themed is. I can't help but think that Jane Austen would get a kick out of this book.


My Ash action figure is standing by just in case...

Retro LOLs

The Sinister 60's - It's Thanksgiving in July!

It's like Christmas in July, only scarier. It's the 60's... a simpler time. No cell phones, no internets, and your TV only gets 3 channels. So that leaves lots more time for good ol' wholesome family goodness. Right? But yet, I feel a strange disturbance in The Force. There's something lurking just below the surface here that's not quite right.

Something slightly sinister.

This poor kid looks like she hasn't seen food in years. She's like, "OMG FOOD!!!" Maybe she's been held prisoner in some "Silence of the Lambs" dungeon, and just let out to celebrate Thanksgiving with her captors. They even dressed her up real nice in a bonnet and put ribbons on her pigtails. But look how she's holding on to that glass of milk, as if for dear life. She's starving, I tell you, and she'll have no mercy on that ham. Or the yams. I'm betting she'll even eat the peas. And the garnish. And that hand shoving the plate in her direction?
I predict bite marks.

Soup's on!


Nothing screams "desperation" like dinner from a 60's era aluminum pan. And nothing screams "restraining order" like the stove shoved in front of the door.


What's with that look? Seriously. Is the turkey laced with cyanide?
I think the guy in the upper left is in on it.

The bees have been exterminated

The carpenter bee colony in my shed has been exterminated. But I didn't have to call an exterminator. (Not that I would, I like bees. Even bees that make colonies in my shed.) But gone they are.


A downy woodpecker had quite the feast eliminating the little critters as they laid unsuspecting in their tunnels.


A couple of opportunistic ants stopped by to pick up some carry out.

Family portrait

The Spock family recently moseyed down to their local Olan Mills Studio for a family portrait. Seriously.

If my photoshop skills weren't absolute zero, I'd have worked in one of those fake wagon wheels into the foreground.

Word for the day

The word for the day is: Perfoliate

From the Garden Web Glossary of Botanical Terms -

"Describes a leaf having the stem apparently passing through it."

And I just happen to have a few perfoliate plants out in my yard. The first one is Cup Plant - Silphium perfoliatum.


I LOVE this plant! First of all, it's HUGE! It's already over six feet tall, and my soil here is crummy. In good soil, it would probably get much larger. It's a native prairie plant, and I was told that it's the ultimate plant to attract birds to your yard. Of course two or three of these beauties would probably take up your entire yard, so you probably wouldn't need more than one. The birds eat the seeds, and can get a drink of water from its cupped, er, perfoliate leaves that capture rainwater.


Birds (and possibly other critters) could probably take cover in it too, because it's HUGE. But for all its hugeness, the flowers are proportionately very small. I love the flower buds. They remind me of teeny-tiny cabbages.


Another perfoliate plant is Boneset - Eupatorium perfoliatum. Mine hasn't quite bloomed yet, but has lots of buds.


Apparently it was called "boneset" because the joined leaves suggested that it would be good for mending broken bones. So the leaves were put in bandages around broken bones.


Hey, way back when, when access to X-rays and a competent ER hadn't even been dreamed of, I guess anything that sounded even remotely reassuring was helpful.

My last offering is Trumpet Honeysuckle - Lonicera sempervirens. Don't get this confused with Japanese honeysuckle - Lonicera japonica, which is an introduced species that is terribly invasive and chokes out native species.


This red variety is a native species that plays nice and doesn't get all invasive. Not all the leaves on this one are perfoliate though. Some of them are opposite. Mine starts blooming pretty early in the season, right around the time the hummingbirds are returning, so that makes it doubly nice.

More Pinbacky goodness in "Lost"

Turns out there's another Pinback related character, the mysterious Mr. Abaddon.



The Pinback connection?



Now that makes four characters with Pinback connections. I'm thinking that at least one of the writers is a big Pinback fan. And if you ask me, I think it would be uber-cool to reveal in the last episode that Rob Crow is the Smoke Monster... Hey - it could happen!