Pretty picture: Bracteantha bracteata NOID

I know. It's been two days without a post. I feel bad, I do. But I have two very good excuses.

One, the plant room is officially ready for tenants, so I had to spend a lot of Thursday putting shelves together and arranging them just how I like it, and putting the various plants in just the right spots to meet their light and temperature requirements, and all that. And I did get the shelves mostly filled, and it was very pretty. Notice I said mostly -- I didn't get them all the way filled. I still had a little bit to do that I didn't get to because of the other very good excuse. So because it wasn't actually finished at the end of the day on Thursday, I didn't bother to take pictures, on the theory that pictures would be better if taken of the whole, completed arrangement, with everything just so. And then everybody would go oooh and aaah and it would be ego-boosting for me.

However. On Friday, the husband asked me to get the remaining plants out of the living room (where most of them wound up in the move from the apartment) so that he could do stuff with a wall, or something -- I'm not really all that clear on what the plan was. Sometimes I don't listen beyond the point in the sentence where I find out what task I'm supposed to perform.

So then I spent a fair chunk of Friday moving plants from the living room into the plant room, because they had to get crammed somewhere and that was the only space that was close to being big enough. Which means that now the plant room looks like crap, because it's crammed full of plants in ways that don't perfectly cater to their aesthetic and cultural needs, and things are crammed all cheek to jowl -- which is crazy, because PLANTS DON'T EVEN HAVE JOWLS -- and if any of them need to be watered anytime soon, they're going to be out of luck, because I can't even see several of them anymore, much less reach them. So I didn't take pictures again, and probably some of them will die.


But so that was one thing I did. The other thing I did was, I got embroiled in an internet drama, both as observer and (less significantly) participant, and continually monitoring that situation (I couldn't look away! The drama was dramatic!) has also eaten up a lot of my time, time which would probably in the long run have been better spent on moving plants from room to room or doing something unknown to walls.

The internet drama in question was, just for the record, at Shakesville, a lefty-liberal blog that I've learned a lot from and enjoyed reading. Although I didn't comment there much, I still considered it more or less my home away from PATSP, and it was important to me. The specifics of what went on have nothing to do with plants and are therefore mostly beyond the scope of this blog, and anyway I don't especially want to talk about it now because I've been doing almost nothing but talk about it, and move plants around, for the last two days and I do not want to have to start dealing with it here, too, for fuck's sakes, enough is enough, but yeah, so it was very dramatic and also depressing and now it appears to be over.

I see that I have written so much, so quickly, that I've left today's picture several paragraphs behind and now have to back up to talk about it. Um. It's a strawflower, Bracteantha bracteata, of some unknown yellow variety. I'm fairly certain I have the tag still, so I could look up precisely which variety it is, but I really don't think that would be a great use of my time (and I am so clearly a good judge of what is and is not a great use of my time), so I'm not gonna. I like Bracteanthas, though I think I like the buds better than the opened flowers. The flowers sometimes have screwy color sense. Like the one in the picture.