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 picture

I know a lot of y'all hate snow, but I am going to miss it so much when it's gone. I'm not a fan of slush, of course, because . . . well, I don't think I need to defend that, because who likes slush? And I acknowledge that snow is dangerous to walk or drive on, and that it's frequently accompanied by unpleasant cold, and all that. But snow is just so neat.

This particular snowfall happened on 18 March, and was an unusually heavy, sticky, wet snow. Not my favorite type, necessarily, but I'm happy to take anything. (It was gone within a couple days anyway.) It's looking like Eastern Iowa may be clawing its way out of last summer's drought, though officially we are are still "abnormally dry" and a couple inches short of normal. Our long-term forecast for this spring is warm and wet, which potentially means thunderstorms and tornadoes, my other favorite kind of weather, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I suppose I should probably mention the dog in the photo at some point.

Sheba's doing fine. The ear infection went on forever, but seems to have cleared up finally. Or at least her ear doesn't smell terrible anymore. Hopefully those are the same thing.

She's still getting hot spots, off and on. This is irritating to all three of us, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with whether or not she's taking the Benadryl, and in any case it's been harder to convince her to take them. So long as it's just one, every once in a while, I think we're all just going to have to live with it. Everything else seems to be fine.

Nina says hello. The terrarium is still in shambles from the last batch of crickets, and it looks like possibly the Episcia is on its way out, but it's been clear for a while that eventually the terrarium was going to fill up with Begonia 'Tiger Kitten,' so this isn't the most surprising thing in the world.

*

EDIT: I have elected not to completely disable anonymous commenting for the moment; instead we're going to go with captchas for a while, to see how much that cuts down on the spam comments (if at all). Or at least that's the plan. One of the quirks of Blogger is that I apparently can't see the captchas when signed in, so I'm not sure whether that's actually happening now or not.

If the captchas don't solve the problem, then we'll move on to disabling anonymous commenting entirely, but hopefully this will be enough.

Unfinished business: various

As I predicted, the Cryptbergia seeds (or at least "seeds" -- I'm not sure we ever definitively proved seediness) have all failed, due to some combination of fungus and incompetence. Womp-womp.

Not much else is going on here, really, which I guess makes it a good time to look through the back posts and see if I have any updates about them. All these are from September 2012; turns out there were no posts in October or November that require follow-ups.


Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture, with bonus Question for the Hive Mind (1 Sep 2012)

Nothing ever came of the Canna seed. Not really surprised by this, though. More surprising: the Begonia 'Tiger Kitten' has more or less completely taken over the terrarium. I think this is mostly because it's more drought-tolerant than the Episcia 'Coco' was. (I have a tough time knowing when to water the terrarium, because it's less convenient to actually touch the soil, and every time I open the lid I'm convinced that Nina is going to take that opportunity to jump out and run into the living room, where Sheba will eat her. So I don't open the top very much.) The Peperomia puteolata is still present, as is the Murraya paniculata seedling, but overall, it's kind of a mess. And I sort of wish that the crickets didn't eat the plants so enthusiastically. I mean, I understand: they're crickets. It's what they do. But it's just depressing, with all the dead leaves, holes, ragged edges, and what have you. Perhaps I am not emotionally stable enough to keep anoles in a planted terrarium.



Random plant event: Sansevieria cylindrica (4 Sep 2012)

It's taken a while, but the third leaf is now slightly bigger than the second.

Sansevieria cylindrica.
Come back in late 2016 and I may have a fourth leaf to show you. CAN YOU HANDLE THE EXCITEMENT.¹


Random plant event: Rhipsalis NOID (12 September 2012)

The Rhipsalis seedlings are still alive, and are slightly larger than they used to be. This is neither unusual nor unexpected, but it's a thing that happened. I wound up potting all the surviving seedlings into two pots together, because it seemed like they were likely to give me a really sparse, uninteresting plant if I didn't put several of them together, and also because it wasn't clear how many of them were going to survive. (As far as I can recall, though, all the seedlings that made it out of the vermiculite have survived in soil, and possibly I should have just started them in soil to begin with.)



Random plant event: Zamioculcas zamiifolia 'Zamicro' (19 Sep 2012)

I wasn't expecting this, but so far, 'Zamicro' actually has turned out to be easier for me to grow than the species. I suspect that this is not actually about the cultivar so much, and has more to do with these getting better watering and light (the species plants I've started from leaflets also did well in similar conditions, until they were transplanted), but who can really say.


For now, they seem to be happy in their little 4-pack cells, and I'm inclined to leave them there for as long as that seems to be working out. Whenever I do have to transplant, I'm going to take the advice of Steve Lucas at Exotic Rainforest and make an especially sandy and fast-draining soil for them. I am more or less convinced that this Zamioculcas-growing secret I've been missing.

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¹ NO YOU CANNOT HANDLE THE EXCITEMENT.

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

Most of the pet news belongs to Nina at the moment. Her special UV-making light bulb burnt out about a week ago. It got replaced on Wednesday, but there were a good four or five days there where she was sitting alone in the dark, making passive-aggressive comments about how she was fine, no need to worry about her. So that kind of sucked.¹

There's nothing big going on with Sheba, aside from an isolated case of donut theft on Thursday morning. She's normally very good about not eating people-food unless we specifically offer it to her, but this doesn't seem to apply to food on the husband's desk, for reasons neither of us understand.

(The husband was able to locate a replacement donut, and the remainder of the morning passed without incident.)

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¹ The burn-out was premature, and probably caused by me trying to get more light on the other side of the terrarium. The placement of the hinge in the top of the tank makes it more or less impossible to light both sides of the terrarium at the same time, but putting any strain on the base of the compact fluorescent bulb makes it burn out. So I'd tried to get some light to the plants on the unlit side of the tank, and shortly thereafter the bulb burnt out. Lesson learned, at least for a little while.
Really, we should never have been using a gooseneck desk lamp for the terrarium in the first place, but I wasn't expecting her to live this long (3 1/2 years!), either. Had I known, I maybe would have tried harder to find a more durable lighting system.

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

Sheba's allergies have, for the moment, subsided. I stopped giving her Benadryl a couple weeks ago, and her bald spots have filled back in, so I guess that's over for another few months.

Other than that, not a lot going on with her. She's spent more time in the car than usual lately, because I keep ending up having to go to Iowa City for one thing or another (4 times in 2 weeks! It's normally closer to once every 4-6 weeks.), but everything's normal outside of that.

Not much Nina-related news either. One of the Begonia 'Tiger Kitten' plants in her terrarium is suddenly in a big hurry, and I suspect I'm going to have to do something to keep it in bounds eventually so it doesn't overrun the other plants, but aside from that, her little world isn't changing much. I'll try to get a picture of the plants in the next couple weeks to show you.

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

Nina's in there somewhere.

I tried to get a Nina picture this week, but she wouldn't stay still long enough for me to get the camera ready, so the above is all we get. She really is in there somewhere, though.

Meanwhile, I did hear back from Merrifield Garden Center, regarding this post, but it was short: they understand my concern but "don't know anything about this." They did give me the number of their IT person to call, which I might do on Monday, but if I do: is there really anything useful I can tell him? I mean, in theory Merrifield should be able to stop the site from using their name and logo through legal means, but I don't know how that would work, since the site's registered to someone in the Netherlands. Surely there must be a government agency that deals with this sort of thing, right? And that's not really something the IT department would be dealing with anyway. So . . . any suggestions?

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

As you might imagine, my week was mostly consumed with the beginnings of the RATJ. Had I known what a crazy huge amount of work it was going to be,¹ I would probably have tried to get it all lined up before announcing that it was going to happen, but oh well. The first round, all sixteen days' worth of it, has been written and scheduled, so now it's just a matter of waiting to see the results come in, and try to figure out what it all means.

While this was going on, we had a prolonged power outage on Wednesday night. The local electric company had notified us that this was going to happen, but they'd told us two or three weeks ago, and we'd forgotten about it. Things turned out fine anyway (the power went out just as dinner was ready), but we wound up going down to the basement to hang out after dinner, and it was there that Sheba discovered a medium-sized black dog watching her from behind a large mirror, who had no smell but was giving her increasingly threatening looks. So we got to be sort of alternately entertained by and embarrassed for her, as Sheba defended us against her reflection.

Does not recognize herself in a mirror.
On the plus side, I feel (somewhat) safer -- her German shepherd ancestry does, apparently, kick in when she thinks something threatening is going on, and we had wanted a pet that could be a guard dog if the circumstances called for one.²

The power was back on after a couple hours; according to the power company, this is supposed to make our connection to the grid more reliable or something. If true, that'd be great -- we lose power here a lot. It's never more than just a flicker (often the clocks don't even need to be reset) but it's just long enough to shut off my computer, and then I lose whatever I was working on, plus I have to wait fifteen minutes while I restart the computer and re-open the applications I was working in and so forth.

Anyway.

I attempted to get a photo of Nina this week too, but as usual, she darted into the Pellionia when she saw the camera, and then a couple days later I got the usual signed 8 x 10 glossy in the mail. It's not that I don't appreciate the effort (how is she even getting to the Post Office?), but it's not really what I'm wanting from her. So frustrating.

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¹ No individual step is particularly difficult or time-consuming, but there are a lot of steps, most of which require repetitive cutting and pasting of text, and they all have to be done accurately and (sometimes) in a particular sequence, so the overall project winds up being pretty time-consuming and tedious:
*Create 16 new posts.
*Copy and paste the rules and footnote to each one. (16x)
*Change the footnote references for each post. (4x/post)
*Number the "Match" lines. (4/post)
*Copy and paste the competitors. (8/post)
*Italicize the competitors' botanical names (~9/post)
*Add the labels for each post (9/post)
*Change the date and time for each post so they go up on their appointed days. (x16)
*Add in links to past plant profiles, where appropriate. (~3/post)
*Create a collage of pictures for each of the eight plants in each post, and upload to the RATJ photo bank. (Which is just an unpublished blog post; it's easier to keep them all in one place, already uploaded, and it'll make it easier to find them later when I have to re-use photos for the later rounds of the RATJ.) (8/post)
*Caption the collages with variety or species IDs, where appropriate. (8/post)
*Paste the collages from the photo bank into each post. (8/post)
*Create 64 new polls.
*Change the times on the polls to end on their appointed days. (x64)
*Copy/paste the code for the polls into the RATJ posts. (4/post)
*Publish the RATJ posts. (x16)
² (One remains slightly concerned that, her German shepherd side having manifested to chase off an intruder, the Labrador retriever side might then kick in, causing her to chase down the intruder and drag him/r back to us so s/he could be chased off again.)

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

I almost got a good photo of Nina this week, but when I opened the top of the cage to get a better, less hard-water-stained angle, she skittered away into the underbrush. The terrarium underbrush is presently about 180% Pellionia pulchra. It's probably about time to cut those back again. So today's picture is of Sheba, once more:


Sheba's had a fairly normal week, though we did take her to Southeast Iowa on Sunday, to see my sister-in-law and a number of her friends. There were many people around, most of whom she hadn't met before, and some of them were even small children and teenagers, and Sheba was fine throughout (to the point where multiple people commented on how well-behaved she was).

There were only two moments where she wasn't doing well: in one case, a small child got up directly in her face and was also touching her head (Sheba growled, showed her teeth, and swung her head away, but didn't snap at the kid), and in the other, a second dog was involved, and the second dog started growling at Sheba first. That was odd, because they'd met before, and had gotten along okay then. Granted, that was close to a year ago, and they didn't get close enough to one another to smell each other; there was just a lot of barking and whining and straining at the leash and stuff. But otherwise, she spent a lot of time in the car, met lots of strangers (including one previously-unmet dog), and was mostly fine.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

This picture is from last October.


I realized early this week that I'd missed the one-year anniversary of Sheba coming to live with us; it was the 25th of March 2010, so I should have said something in last week's Sheba picture post, but I'd forgotten. So I'm mentioning it now.

This week (specifically Monday, the 28th) was also the anniversary of Nina coming to live with us. We've now had her for two full years. It feels like longer, though. Actually feels like longer for Sheba, too, now that I think about it.

We should probably have gotten a third pet last week -- it's tradition, after all -- but I think we're okay like this for a while.