Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

It is with a little sadness that I announce the passing of Nina, everybody's favorite brown anole.

Nina. 2009? - 2013. (Photo from 8 Dec 2010.)
I say "a little" sadness, as opposed to great sadness, or unbearable sadness, because it's not like I have a ton of happy memories of running through flower-filled meadows with her or anything. (Though we did have that one moment in the bathtub.) You only get so much affection from an anole, and I don't think she ever got comfortable with seeing me, so our emotional connection was always a little fraught.

Also it wasn't like I didn't see this coming, a long time ago. In the wild, allegedly, Anolis sagrei has a lifespan of about 1.5 years, and Nina was at least 4.3 years old when she died. I mean, her death is still a change and everything, but it's hard to see it as being particularly tragic if she was like 200 years old in anole years. Hopefully the time she spent here was better (if, perhaps, a bit less free) than she would have gotten had she stayed in Florida with Felipe. It was certainly better than it would have been had she stayed in the ex-job's greenhouse and been poisoned to death by pesticides, or if she'd escaped the greenhouse and then froze to death seven months later.

Probably not going to get a replacement. (See above re: you only get so much affection.) I mean, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with keeping another anole, but it wasn't like I had a burning desire to have one when I got Nina; she just kind of happened. So if the ex-job calls me up and asks me if I want another one, sure, but that's not something that's likely to happen.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Old picture (from last June), but I figure it will probably serve your Nina-photo needs. (If not, submit a refund request by e-mail. Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery. Refund is not transferable. Restrictions may apply.)

I'm less than thrilled with the color and overall photo quality, which is probably why I didn't post it last June, but it's my understanding that all I have to do is tell you that I used an Instagram filter on it, and then you have to like it regardless.

Not really any Sheba news. There's been a lot of traveling in the last couple weeks, which is rough on her (she sometimes gets carsick), but she didn't actually get sick, so that was nice.

I've gotten a couple new plants in the process, neither of which is particularly interesting (Sansevieria trifasciata 'Jade Dwarf' and Ficus benjamina 'Starlite' are my guesses, though neither one was tagged with a cultivar name), but at least they were cheap ($5 and $3-something, respectively).

Sansevieria trifasciata NOID, possibly 'Jade Dwarf.'
A lot more money went toward large (12-14" / 30-36 cm) clay pots: many up-pottings have been on hold for several months because I needed a couple really big pots, so I could free up a few sorta big pots, which would free up some medium-sized pots, and so on.

Ficus benjamina NOID, probably 'Starlite.'
Also questionable judgment but at least not terribly expensive: I've been working on a couple new plant profiles at once, for the "book" or whatever it's going to turn out to be, and I had forgotten about the problem where when I'm writing a profile, I tend to convince myself to get more of whatever it is I'm writing about. Worse, the search results for certain plants will bring up seed-selling sites, and you know how I am about seeds. So on Thursday, I discovered that I'd ordered 100 mail-order Leuchtenbergia principis seeds in some kind of seed-purchasing blackout.

(I already have two Leuchtenbergia principis plants. I mean, I like them very much, but that was unnecessary. Fortunately, it should only set me back by $8.50, so I imagine I'll survive.)

I am now soliciting suggestions for what a person could do with 80 or 90 seedling Leuchtenbergia principis seedlings. (The prize for the best answer: an undetermined number of Leuchtenbergia principis seedlings.)

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina pictures

I know, I know, it's been so long. But I've been busy.

Nina on a bed of lettuce. This is from last summer sometime; I can tell because that's some of the lettuce we grew in the back yard. I'm not sure it was worth the effort. There was too much of it, and the more time we spend trying to grow plants outdoors, the more I think maybe it's just not for me. I mean, it always seems like a good idea, in the winter. Why would we not want to be able to go to the back yard and pick our own produce? And it'd be so economical!

The reality of it is that we have yet to come out ahead, financially, any year we've tried. The corn verged on inedible (either because it got pollinated with the field corn just behind the back yard or because we waited too long to pick it). The raspberry cane died before we got it planted. The husband wouldn't eat the tomatoes because of concerns about them being in a spot where treated lumber had previously sat (and I don't like raw tomatoes, so they were always going to be useless to me personally). I don't especially like lettuce or spinach, and we overplanted it besides. The peppers were swallowed up by weeds and never seen again. The strawberries were too young to produce the first year, claimed by the birds and squirrels the second year, and had just been set back by moving the third year. So far, outdoor food gardening looks like a ton of work for basically nothing. (If only we could eat Cannas. We'd never need to buy groceries again.¹)

Nina more recently. I think she was trying to be flirty, by sticking the Episcia flower behind her ear, but then realized at the last minute that she doesn't have external ears to tuck flowers behind.

Sheba and I don't agree on much. After straining to think of as many things as possible, I came up with these: we both think that her dog food (Pedigree, canned, "with chopped beef" variety) smells delicious,² we're not crazy about fireworks or small children, and we both enjoy popcorn, bread, the husband, and snow.

Sheba got a bath last week, in preparation for a visit to the vet.³ When we first got her, she'd spend the whole bath trying to escape, which made washing her pretty challenging. Now, she goes kind of catatonic and can barely be convinced to move. (I guess that's an improvement?) This is her bath time thousand-yard stare.

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¹ Probably an exaggeration. But Cannas would be much more helpful than any of the other stuff we've tried, considering how fast and how well they grow. Check out what the husband dug up last October:

As for whether Cannas are edible, well, apparently they actually are. Or at least some of them are. I don't know how to prepare them, and it's not clear that they'd be any good, since they've been bred for looks, not taste. But eating Cannas is apparently a thing people do actually do.
² No. Seriously.
³ Bad news: the beginnings of an ear infection. We caught it early enough that it shouldn't be a big deal, but still.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I tried to get a picture of Nina yesterday, but I did something dramatic with the camera that freaked her out. She ran away, under the Episcia, and then when I tried to nudge her out of there she ran into a corner. And I do mean ran into a corner. She hit the wall and then tried to continue running for a bit even though she wasn't getting anywhere, before deciding that that wasn't working, so obviously the thing to do was to try to intimidate me instead.

Sadly, none of the pictures turned out particularly well. This was the best one:

She's got her mouth open and tongue out, she's arching her back a little, and for a while she was doing something with her throat that I can't really describe, though she doesn't seem to be doing it in this photo. (Male anoles have a dewlap that they can extend during courtship; she sort of seemed to be doing that, except I don't think she actually has a dewlap to extend, and I couldn't really see it very well to begin with.)

Just in case anybody was worried: she calmed back down once I went away, and appears untraumatized by the experience.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture, with bonus Question for the Hive Mind

I mentioned in the last Sheba/Nina post that the Ctenanthe burle-marxii I'd planted in there had died and I wasn't sure what I was going to replace it with.

That question has been settled, at least for the moment: I bought a Peperomia puteolata ($3 at the ex-job) to fill that space, and also put in a Canna seed just for the hell of it.

There's no picture of the latter, because it hasn't actually produced any foliage yet. I just made a hole in the seed coat, soaked it in water until I saw a root emerging, and then planted it in the terrarium, so it may or may not work. If it does work, it will either quickly become too large for the space or struggle along without enough light until I take pity on it and kill it. Not sure which way that will go. But I had a ton of seeds from last year that I never got around to starting, so I figured I may as well try that and see how it goes. Nina, I'm sure, would like something in there that's a bit more climbable.

Meanwhile, Nina is shedding her skin again.

That's not as big of an event as I've made it sound -- she does it all the time, actually -- but I don't very often get a picture of it happening. In the above, the fungusy-looking stuff in the upper left is just dead-leaf debris from the Episcia -- I'm pretty sure there's no actual fungus. The brown and green in the upper right is a Begonia 'Tiger Kitten' leaf that the crickets have eaten a hole into. When the picture was taken, Nina had only managed to clear the old skin from her face, though when I looked in again about half an hour later, none of the dead skin was there anymore.

Speaking of skin: Sheba's whole allergy situation is improving, though slowly and incompletely. We could probably be more aggressive about the Benadryl: I've been giving her 25 mg in the morning when I feed her, but she usually doesn't get a second dose. Even so, her right side is basically filled back in completely. Her left side still has some spots, but they're noticeably better than they were two weeks ago, which I suppose is something.

I also have a weed-ID question for your consideration, which may or may not be related to the Sheba-allergy stuff. When the weeds first started to come up this spring, I decided to let a couple of pokeweeds (Phytolacca americana) stay, because I think they're kind of pretty. One of the pokeweeds turned out to be something else: although the young plants looked more or less identical, and both have developed extremely thick stems (maybe 2 inches / 5 cm in diameter?), the leaves on one of them never got any bigger than about 4 inches (10 cm) long, and are narrower than those on P. americana. Also the stem has stayed green, not pink, and the flowers are tiny and white and obviously something completely different. The non-pokeweed also grew much taller (about 12-15 feet / 3.5-4.5 m), as you can see in this picture:

And here's a close-up of the flowers:

I've let it continue to grow, because . . . I don't know. After the drought got to a certain point, I kind of decided that I was happy enough to see anything growing, and I didn't care what it was. Plus I was curious about what it was going to do. The overall plant shape, and the shape of the leaves, resemble some of the Amaranthus species pictures on line, especially A. tuberculatus, A. australis, and A. cannabinus, but none of those are quite a match (maybe the flowers haven't developed enough yet, though). In any case, I'm wondering if anybody knows what this is, and whether or not it, by itself, could be causing Sheba allergy problems. The flowers are fairly small and inconspicuous, so wind-pollination wouldn't be out of the question, right? And if it's wind-pollinated, maybe it could also be allergenic?

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I'm not planning to bring back the Saturday pet pictures as a weekly thing -- it winds up being a lot more work than you'd think -- but it's been a long time, so.

Nina's been fine. Or at least she's been fine as far as I know: sometimes it's hard to tell.

Post-replanting, some plants have done well, and others haven't. The Episcia 'Coco' has been happy, as you can see, though the crickets do nibble at it (hence the hole in the leaf in the bottom left of the picture).

The Murraya paniculata is in decent shape, too; the crickets leave it alone, and it's produced a little bit of new growth. I'm a little concerned that the terrarium may not get enough light to keep the Murraya happy, though.

The Begonia 'Tiger Kitten' has had a more mixed response: the stuff on one side (labeled 1 and 2 in the photo at the above link) has been growing well, and is producing a lot of new growth; the stuff on the other side (6 and 7) has died. One of those (I think #6) was basically completely devoured by the crickets, who prefer Begonia to Episcia. I'm not sure what happened to the other one.

The Ctenanthe burle-marxii (3) that I was sure would do fine was the first plant to die, and I'm not sure what happened to it. I might try to replant it, since I do have others, but I also might take this as a sign and leave it open, or try a different plant. I may have Aglaonema 'Peacock' cane segments rooted in a little while; that's probably the leading candidate if I decide not to replace the Ctenanthe.

Sheba, meanwhile, has been having another round of allergies, worse than those in the spring. We did have the vet look at her (we were there anyway for the annual Bordetella shot), and he said he thought it was just allergies, and that we should get her 25 mg of Benadryl twice a day if this continued, and that would probably take care of everything. Which was fine, but then we didn't immediately run out and buy the Benadryl, because this had gone away on its own previously without any intervention. So Sheba's gotten noticeably more uncomfortable (as of Tuesday, when I'm writing this), but we're working on it. A large part of the issue might be that it's ragweed season, and I've just found out that the husband has been walking her near weedy areas. I mean, not that the pollen doesn't get everywhere, but we might be able to limit her exposure a little bit.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

They said it would never happen. Some even said it couldn't be done. But I've done it: I cleaned and replanted Nina's terrarium.

She got part of a strawberry as a house re-warming gift, though as far as I could tell she didn't actually eat any of it.
Gone is the Pellionia pulchra. It grew well, it handled drought like a champ, but it choked out everything else, and eventually started choking out itself, even. So behold the next crew:



1: Murraya paniculata (seedling)
2, 4, 6, and 7: Begonia 'Tiger Kitten' cutting (4) and rooted leaves (2, 6, 7)
3: Ctenanthe burle-marxii
5: Episcia 'Coco'

The Ctenanthe has lived with Nina before, and did awesomely; I'm less sure about the other plants. They should all be fine in a terrarium, but I don't know if they'll be fine with the transplanting (which was kind of rough on the Begonias in particular) or the inevitable cricket-nibbling. There's also some danger that the Episcia and Ctenanthe may grow fast enough to crowd out the other plants. It's not even a particularly hypothetical danger, since that's basically what the Ctenanthe did the last time it was in the terrarium.

But we'll worry about all that other stuff later: right now all I care about is that I actually got it cleaned up, after many months of procrastinating, and consequently should be able to enjoy several guilt-free months before I have to do it again. It's surprising how much of a load off my mind that is.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

The Pellionia pulchra is really getting out of control. I have plans to replant the tank, honestly I do, and I feel like a terrible lizard father every time I look at it. Replanting is a big production, unfortunately, so it's difficult to find the time to do it.

Also still trying to get the availability list presentable, so the selling can commence. Not doing a terribly good job on that either.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I intended to do a Nina picture this week, but when I got the camera ready and pointed it at the terrarium, I couldn't find her. Tried blowing puffs of air in to startle her, so I could see where she was, but that just induced her to jump under the Pellionia thicket before I saw where she was.

I then crept back up on her later, but she saw the camera move or something and, again: under the Pellionia. And the next day, same thing.

I'm pretty sure this is me being clumsy, not Nina being jumpier than normal, but either way, it doesn't matter: I couldn't get new Nina pictures. So here's one from December 2010:

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I am occasionally impressed by Nina's ability to stick to glass surfaces, but then I remember 1) all the hard-water buildup probably makes the glass a bit rougher and easier to stick to than I'm thinking it is, and 2) I bet if I only weighed three grams (0.1 oz), I'd stick to lots of stuff too.

The lid is not normally open on the cage; I opened it for the picture because I can't get good pictures through the screen. I don't get good pictures without the screen either, but try to ignore that.

(Side note: if you are one of the many, many people to whom I owe e-mail currently, I am very sorry. Don't hold your breath.)

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Yes, Nina is still around. I don't post about her a lot, both due to embarrassment over how water-spotted and overgrown her terrarium has gotten and because she just doesn't really do that much that needs documenting -- I mean, if you've seen one Nina photo then you've pretty much seen all of them. But yes, she's still here. I also still need to replant the terrarium (possibly without the Pellionia pulchra -- I'm happy that it's done so well in there, but it might be nice to have more than one species represented, too¹). Replanting is one of those things I think about every few months but never actually attempt, partly because I dread trying to catch Nina, partly because I can't decide what I want to plant in there instead.²

But in any event, Nina herself is doing fine. I think so, anyway. Not really sure what a lizard "acting out" would look like.

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¹ There was a Fittonia in there at one time as well, but no longer: between being eaten by crickets, rebounding poorly from the inevitable droughts, and being outcompeted by the Pellionia, it faded away to nothing some time ago.
² I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, but never manage to come up with a plan. Most of the options are also problematic because they have the same advantages and drawbacks as Pellionia -- I have lots of material from which to start new plants, and I'm confident that they'd root, but they'd also quickly take over the terrarium, and then I'd be back in this position again.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Nina's leaf impression still needs work, but is coming along.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Thematically blurry!
So hey, I got to go to the Emergency Room again this week. It was more fun than the times I went for heat exhaustion (1) (2), but also quite a bit scarier in places.

The story is, I woke up from a nap on Thursday afternoon and my right eye was blurry. As in, I couldn't read the computer screen with my glasses on, sitting eighteen inches (46 cm) away. This is fairly alarming, but not entirely unprecedented -- it's normal for me to be a little bleary when I first wake up. It's not normal, though, for the fuzziness to last more than a couple minutes. There was no pain, no flashes of light or dark spots, no numbness or weakness or fever -- just really blurry. (It was worse than the blurriness one gets from having one's eyes dilated at the optometrist's, but not as bad as looking at the world through a thin, grease-soaked piece of paper, if that helps at all.)

So, this being 2011, I googled for "sudden blurred vision in one eye," or something to that effect, and a number of pages came up, all of which mentioned stroke and retinal detachment as a possible cause. I have family history of both, so this got my attention. And after about half an hour of blurred vision, we decided to go to the ER; within an hour of waking up, I was at the hospital. (The blurriness cleared up en route, so by the time I got to the hospital, I was seeing normally again, but still, everything through my right eye was out of focus for at least 45 minutes.)

Various drops were put in my eyes, lots of people pointed lights of varying colors and intensities at them, I got an eyeball-pressure test to check for glaucoma, which was better than the usual eyeball-pressure test but still damned weird,¹ and so on and so forth, and then the diagnosis was . . . that my eyes were dry. Or at least the one had been.

Which was kind of anticlimactic. I mean, not that I would rather have found out that my blurred vision was because your retinoblastoma gave you a stroke. And by the way, you also have glaucoma. And you just died. but -- dry eyes? Really? That's it?

The theory is, in essence, that I don't produce quite enough tears to lubricate my eyes properly, plus maybe dry air (unlikely, with all the plants in the house) and seasonal allergies (never noticed 'em before, but I suppose it's possible). As far as I can tell, this is probably true, but it doesn't quite satisfy. I mean, I'd also like to know why Thursday, and never before. I mean, if I have congenitally unlubricated eyes, you'd think I would have noticed before my late 30s.

But I'm okay anyway, I guess.

This whole getting-old thing is clearly not for the faint of heart, though.

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¹ The usual test involves sitting with your chin in a cup while they blow puffs of air at your eyeball. I hate this because I can never not jump when it happens, and I have a fairly low tolerance for being startled anyway. The new test is that they give you eyedrops (which burn slightly) to numb the eye, and then they take a pen-like thing and touch it to your cornea, which tells them how much pressure your eye pushes back with, or something like that. I didn't like the eyedrops, but this was still much, much better than the air-puff thing.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Had a minor Nina-related scare on Monday morning: I'd collected some crickets for Nina while outside with Sheba, because they're all just hanging around out there in the back yard and why not,¹ but then when I went to dump them into her terrarium, Nina was nowhere to be found. Which is unusual, early in the day -- she's almost always out in the open, "sunning" herself.

So I rattled the plants around a bit, hoping to see or hear her, but I didn't, and that went on long enough that I had actually convinced myself that she was probably dead, so I started cutting back the Pellionia to find the body. (I was less sad about this than you might think: I figure she's almost certainly outlived her natural life expectancy, and has had a relatively cushy, if spatially constricted, life for the last two and a half years, so even if it hasn't been everything she might have dreamed, I think I've still done right by Nina. At bare minimum, it has to beat death by pesticide or death by freezing, which were her two options if I hadn't brought her home.)


That went on for a really long time, but eventually I pulled back a branch and she bolted for the opposite side of the tank. So she's still alive. And now I have a bunch of Pellionia cuttings and have no idea what to do with them.

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¹ I acknowledge that there are some reasons why using free-range crickets might be a bad idea (parasites, e.g.), but have decided those are risks I'm willing to take.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I don't post pictures of her that often, mostly out of embarrassment at how water-spotted her walls have gotten, but Nina is still here, and is doing as well as she ever was, as far as I can tell. The Pellionia has more or less taken over the tank, being more drought-tolerant than the Fittonia (though the Fittonia is still in there, which is good, because the cuttings I tried to take have failed, after malingering for months in the basement). I intend to replant the tank at some point, but you know how it is. It's never an emergency, and it's never my most entertaining option when I'm looking for something to do, so on the rare occasions when I think about it, I still don't wind up doing it.

Not that she seems to mind. I suspect she might actually prefer it this way, actually: the crickets are harder to find, but it's much easier for her to hide, when she wants to hide.

Sheba gets a bordetella shot on Monday, which is about all the news there is for her.

Sadly, I've discovered that the anti-vaccine people are opposing vaccines for dogs, too, though in this case it appears not to be about fears of autism (can dogs even be autistic?) as it is about selling people a specific brand of (I assume) high-priced dog food. No doubt this will do the same thing for pet dogs that it's done for children, i.e., result in more cases of completely preventable illness and death, while enriching the anti-vaxers.

*sigh*

As cynical and misanthropic as I try to be, I somehow never quite manage to be cynical and misanthropic enough.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Well, it ate my life from about 11:30 PM on Wednesday night until about 3:30 PM on Friday afternoon, but I think, I'm pretty sure, the malware "MS Removal Tool" is no longer on my computer. Among other things, I have a different antivirus program now.

I had been using Avira, because I didn't have the money to renew Symantec in February when the subscription ended -- Avira is free -- and because previous experience with Symantec and McAfee had left me frustrated with how much they slowed down my computer. So when I saw people in the comments at Consumerist talking up Avira, it seemed like a good idea. The malware problem isn't necessarily Avira's fault; I think it would probably have gotten me even if I'd had Symantec or McAfee, though Symantec and McAfee also sometimes warn you about problematic sites before you click. So I don't know. In any case, McAfee didn't cost me anything: the husband had purchased a subscription valid for installation on up to three computers, a long time ago (I'd gone with Avira anyway because of concerns about my system's speed), so I just used the one remaining installation from that.

It also turned up four viruses that Avira hadn't caught (all trojans, and relatively minor), though, again, in fairness to Avira, I don't know when those viruses showed up -- for all I know they could have been let in by MS Removal Tool at some point after I uninstalled Avira.

So. Now things are possibly back to normal. I don't think I'll feel entirely comfortable on my computer for a while, but I think I can at least use it again. Of course, now I also have a couple days of back e-mails to catch up on.

Maybe I should just be Amish. Find some splinter group that permits air conditioning and fluorescent lighting and married gay couples.

Yeah, doesn't sound likely to me either.

Anyway. So the whole thing's been pretty traumatic. We've also recently had problems with our car (as of 10 June; it was fixed yesterday too), and the VCR ate a tape of Batman Returns Friday morning -- which how we came to have the tape is a long story, and why we were watching it is an even longer story, but it's not what it sounds like, I swear -- so I was pretty sure Mercury had to be in retrograde,¹ but no, I am assured that it is not. So I'm blaming the full moon and/or lunar eclipse instead. (That's the nice thing about astrology -- there's always a reason for everything after the fact.)

Anyway. So that's how things have been lately, and here is a picture of a toad.


The toad's not a pet or anything; it just happened to be in the pictures folder.

And a picture of Nina, clinging to her water-spotted glass.


The reader may wish to pretend that they're not hard-water spots, but blurred raindrops. Though they're not really that blurred. And I've already told you they're hard-water spots.
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¹ Mercury in retrograde is an inside joke from a long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that I no longer remember for sure who the inside joke was originally with or why it was funny, but the husband and I have adopted it for use any time a number of things go wrong simultaneously, because Mercury is retrograde a lot (about three months out of the year) and why not. "Real" astrologers claim it's more likely to produce failures of communication, not failures of technology, though increasingly the two are the same thing, given how much communication is mediated by technology now, so at some point I stopped making the distinction.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Nothing much to talk about today; nobody's run away or eaten anything they shouldn't or been unusually adorable or any of that. Which is fine. Not complaining.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Disturbing Sheba development this week: last Saturday she growled at three little girls who were trying to pet her, and snapped at one (no contact, fortunately), and then on I think Monday, she growled at a little boy who was trying to pet her too.

This is not good. It's also more or less new: the husband tells me she's growled at people when he's taken her on walks before, but they were adults, and she didn't try to bite them. I personally had only ever seen her growl at people while in the car before, and I didn't worry about that much because obviously she wasn't going to bust through the window.

Now, okay, we wanted a dog that would do a little light house-guarding, if necessary, but a dog that bites children isn't good. We can't afford obedience classes, and although one of our neighbors has lots of kids and probably wouldn't miss one if we were to borrow one for an afternoon to practice with, it seems like that would probably be wrong or rude or something, so . . . what's left, besides Cesar Millan?

It's worth noting that the situations were unusual; as far as I can remember, Sheba and I haven't interacted with any kids on walks before. She's been okay with my niece, who's more or less the same age. So it might have been more the novelty of the situation than a thirst for the blood of the innocent. But still. Suggestions?

Meanwhile, it's been a long time since we've had a picture of Nina, and Sheba's been bad this week, so let's have a picture of Nina:


She bites too, though not lately.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I almost came up with a caption for this, but everything was coming out subtly wrong. Feel free to suggest something.

Nothing exciting with either pet this week, though it appears that Nina's Fittonia, the new one with the pink veins, is not going to root. The cuttings I'd tried to start in the basement didn't work either. Perhaps this is not the way to go about propagating Fittonias.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

I went a little nuts this week propagating stuff, and cut a bunch of the Pellionia out of Nina's place in the process. (A little of the Fittonia, too.) While I was in there, I took out the Vriesea, because although it's adorable when she sleeps in there, the plant has been dying. Tiny, roundish silvery bugs (which I've seen before but have never been able to identify) were crawling around near and under the Vriesea, too; I don't know if the bugs were the cause or a symptom, but it's possible I'm going to have to dump out all the soil and start over. Ordinarily I'd try spraying with neem oil or something, but Nina has to live in there, and I don't have an alternate location for her.

The Vriesea hasn't been replaced; I stuck a cutting of the big pink Fittonia in the corner because I had one left over after potting stuff up, but it's not big enough to substitute for the Vriesea and may well die soon anyway. If it takes, then great; if it doesn't, no big loss. Nina's apparently not a big fan of change. Here she is watching the new arrival out of the corner of her eye: