My Phalaenopsis is growing a flower spike again. The spikes generally start to grow this time of year. The flowers won’t come until the beginning of February. I’ll be curious to see if the fact that I put it in a larger pot will yield more flower spikes. Perhaps not this year yet… perhaps it will be later…
I’ve let a lot of my houseplants die natural deaths this year. The pineapples are gone. A ficus is no more. So also a fern, sansevieria, and syngonium. Good-bye, little plants. I enjoyed you while you lasted, but now I’m tired of taking care of you.
I went to Home Depot yesterday, and while I was there I noticed a peculiar sign. I don’t remember seeing this before, so I took a picture. Maybe it’s old news to other people, but I found it quite shocking:
Since I’m posting racy pictures already, here’s a picture of my nearly-naked head. I got a haircut yesterday.
I got lots done around the house yesterday. It was a good day. I cleaned up the kitchen a little bit in the morning. I was surprised how much of the stuff piled on counter tops was just trash and recycling.
For a while I’ve needed to replace the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom. A hinge broke on the old one and the door wouldn’t close properly. Then the latch broke so that even if I could close the door I wouldn’t be able to re-open it. After driving to Lowes and Home Depot, and seeing an interesting vanity plate along the way, I got a larger cabinet. It ended up being too large (and it was cosmetically damaged), so I took it back and got a cabinet that was nearly identical to the one I was removing. The differences were slight. I think I must’ve gotten the original one at Lowes, but this one from Home Depot. Or else they reconfigured the cabinet in the five or so years it’s been since I got the old one.
OLD
NEW
After getting the cabinet in place, I did a little more straightening up. That included watering the plants. Max decided to play in the water saucer. It made a horrible mess, but I let him play a little anyway because I couldn’t believe it.
I’m still getting used to my new schedule that includes wrestling practice. It’s a hard transition for me. The first week was a baptism by fire. Tuesday after wrestling practice I went directly to handbell practice, which wasn’t too bad because I was done by 7:45pm. Wednesday was a church council meeting. I wasn’t done until 9:30pm. Thursday was Bible study. 9:15pm. I was getting home, making sure my recorded TV shows were there, then going to bed. I didn’t even read before going to sleep.
Last night, I had no commitments. Absolutely nothing. I got home at 5:15pm, made a grilled cheese sandwich, and watched TV. At 7:30pm I almost went to bed because I was so sleepy. Thinking that probably wasn’t a good idea, I played Peggle and surfed the internet for a while, but I was still in bed early. It was glorious.
I was going to call this post “The Heat is On”, but that’s what I used last year. It is interesting to note that I’m turning the boiler on about two weeks sooner this year. Is the cold weather coming earlier this year? Perhaps. But what motivates me more is the price of a barrel of oil being $49.62. Gasoline is less than $2. Heating oil must surely be cheaper right now as well.
All this talk of economic meltdown is scary, but I haven’t felt any big difference yet, so crashing oil prices sound good to me. Am I dense, or is the “recession” not as big a deal to little folks as it is to big bankers and stock-trading millionaires? So for now, I’ll just shelve my plans to be a stock-trading millionaire. Instead, I’ll continue to burn my money by running the boiler.
