Milestone: 100th Bloomed Anthurium

The photo should speak for itself, I think (right-click to view larger image):¹

1st (leftmost) column, top to bottom: 0279 "Tristan Shout," 0085 "Carson Trucks," 0259 "Tasha Salad," 0231 "Rhea Listick," 0200 "Mario Speedwagon," 0234 "Ross Koz," 0035 "Alyssa Edwards," 0046 "Aurora Boreanaz," 0243 "Sal Monella," 0247 "Selma Carr"
2nd column: 0594 "Charity Case," 0066 "Barbara Seville," 0241 "Megan Gigaterra," 0386 "Violet Chachki," 0565 "MysterE," 0346 "Lois Carmen DiNominatre," 0206 "Marcia Dimes," 0058 "Betty Larsony," 0357 "Rhea Litré," 0236 "Roxanne Debree"
3rd column: 0555 "Mystique Summers Madison," 0351 "Pat McCooter," 0344 "Formica Dinette," 0202 "Mason Pepperspray," 0216 "Gillian Jamm," 0112 "Dottie A. Rebel," 0213 "Nadya Falt," 0088 "Charlotte F. Babylon," 0116 "Eileen Dover," 0282 "Dave Trading"
4th column: 0271 "Wanda Reulthemal," 0597 "Raven," 0276 "Zach Religious," 0232 "Rhoda Badcek," 0273 "Wes Coast," 0132 "Eve Stropper," 0125 "Anya Wei," 0257 "Summer Bederth-Enuthers," 0144 "Graham Reaper," 0280 "Jujubee"
5th column: 0235 "Rowan DeBoate," 0281 "Laganja Estranja," 0237 "Roxy Casbah," 0220 "Nora Morse," 0239 "Russ Teanale," 0371 "Deb Autry," 0179 "Katie Boundary," 0110 "Delta Badhand," 0238 "Rudy Day," 0149 "Heather Boah"
6th column: 0275 "Yvette Horizon," 0288 "Cookie Buffet," 0255 "Steph N. Wolfe," 0558 "Amber Waves," 0040 "Ivy Winters," 0108 "Deena Sequins," 0564 "Shannel," 0223 "Patty Cake," 0365 "Murray Hill," 0245 "Sawyer Ad"
7th column: 0126 "Erin Dirtylondry," 0218 "Noah Fence," 0283 "Anne Pursand," 0415 "Darby Dragons," 0059 "Bijoux Tuit," 0076 "Bob Humbug," 0335 "Donna Fanuday," 0264 "Trey Lerpark," 0212 "Rogue," 0063 "Audrey Quest"
8th column: 0083 "Carmen Adairya," 0214 "Anita Knapp," 0267 "Natalie Attired," 0244 "Sara Problem," 0586 "Vera Special," 0334 "Jean Poole," 0203 "Anna Mae Hemensouz," 0205 "Venus D-Lite," 0034 "Alaska Thunderfuck," 0560 "Jill O'Schottz"
9th column: 0556 "Frank Lee Grande," 0041 "Anna Graham," 0416 "Holy McGrail," 0373 "Shangela Laquifa Wadley," 0031 "Sylvester," 0580 "Marsha Marsha Marsha," 0329 "Gladys Panzarov," 0290 "RuPaul Charles," 0360 "Heidi Gosique," 0171 "Genevieve la Difference"
10th column: 0215 "Nathan Ofithlam," 0097 "Colin Ambulance," 0328 "Polly Esther Blend," 0118 "Elijah Sturdabowtit," 0330 "Faye Quinette," 0120 "Eliza Boutisecksis," 0002 "Alexis Mateo," 0005 "Chad Michaels," 0338 "Anne Fibian," 0026 "Peaches Christ"
In case it didn't speak for itself enough for you:

0212 "Rogue," in the post from Friday, was the 100th of my Anthurium seedlings to bud and produce a full bloom, which happened about a month ago. I then spent like a week and a half trying to create the above composite image for this post, which I know it doesn't look like a week and a half of effort but getting the colors to shade into one another, even this imperfectly, was a difficult problem to solve.

There are 8 new first-time blooms since I put the picture together a month ago, who you'll be meeting in October, and I'm watching another 13 buds that may or may not ever open. For a while this summer, I was seeing a new first bud every two days on average, which I'm pretty sure has never happened before.

So this post and image isn't the end of anything; the posts will keep coming. I'm just taking a moment to say, hey, wow, 100 blooms is kind of a big deal, and here's what four years of Anthurium breeding can get you.

-

¹ Which is still not as big as the original 61.5 mexapixel version of the image. I didn't even try uploading the original file.

Anthuriums no. 1000 to 1028

So a lot of things are going on with the Anthuriums lately, some of them more interesting than others. In the past, I've tried to just let a certain amount of stuff build up and then dump all the news on you at once in a big post like this or this, but so many things are happening so quickly that any draft I attempted to write would go out of date as I was writing it. Also I suspect those are sort of a lot to ask of y'all. Those posts tend to be really long, and you have things to do, places to go. So I'm going to try, instead, to treat them more like the recent Schlumbergera posts¹ and focus on individuals or small groups of seedlings.

The positive part of this is that I should be able to update the blog nearly every day until . . . I don't know. Until the Anthuriums stop doing things. The negative side is that it's all going to be about Anthuriums, and will probably be just as repetitive as the Anthurium Update posts were, just spread out over a longer period of time.

So that's what I'm thinking will happen. You've been warned.

This particular post just marks a new milestone in the Anthurium-breeding process: the seedling ID numbers have just rolled over into four digits, as of 19 February. Here is #1000, "Thorgy Thor."²

No, she doesn't look like much yet, but she's still basically a preschooler, in human years.³ Give her time.

-

¹ Which are possibly not over after all; there are at least two previously-unbloomed seedlings with new buds at the moment (099 and 111). Who wants to bet they'll both be some shade of orange?
² (The performer rhymes "Thorgy" with "orgy," not "corgi.")
³ Thorgy's six months old in this photo.
I spent forever playing with numbers in Excel trying to get a formula to convert Anthurium age to human age, figuring that seed sow date was more or less equivalent to birthdate, first bloom was more or less puberty, and age when a seedling's seeds were sown was parenthood (which first motherhood in the U.S. is averaging around 25 years old, according to a sort of rushed and non-critical internet search), but the Anthurium life cycle doesn't scale well to a human life cycle. The best overall approximation I could come up with was a fifth-degree polynomial (y = 0.000000279x5 - 0.000047302x4 + 0.002328818x3 - 0.020959355x2 + 0.381271297x, where y is the human equivalent in years and x is the actual age of the plant in months), which was obviously not particularly easy to calculate in one's head and consequently isn't very useful. And also might not bear much relationship to reality in the first place: I don't know the maximum possible lifespan for an Anthurium hybrid. Don't even have a guess. But let's go ahead and say Thorgy's a preschooler anyway: it's true metaphorically, whether it's true biologically or not.

Very Large Numbers

If Google's count can be trusted -- and why wouldn't it be; it's Google -- this is PATSP's 2000th post. It is not at all clear to me how I should be feeling about this, but I think we can all agree that it's a pretty big number, blogularly speaking. Consequently, there should be some Gazania photos ('New Day' mix, if you're keeping track), as Gazania is the Official Celebratory Flower of PATSP.

We also passed the one million word mark last November. Is there really that much to be said about plants? Probably not really, but, you know, I repeat myself sometimes.

Of course, we also got the three-millionth page view at the end of last March, too, so I guess people don't mind a little redundancy.

What's in the future for PATSP? I don't exactly know. For a lot of different reasons, I'm less interested in plants than I used to be. This has more or less killed the plans for the book. I feel bad about that -- I wanted to read it just as much as some of you did -- but I just can't force myself to work on that now. I did try. This may (MAAAAAAY) mean that the plant profiles are coming back in the next six to twelve months.

Having said that, the blog itself will probably endure. I am uncomfortable with having this much information about myself in Google's hands, and have been for some time, but that particular toothpaste has been out of the tube for years; nothing much to be done about it now. I do still have plenty of ideas for posts, including a solid half-dozen ideas right this minute, so my personal expectation is that Google will give up on hosting PATSP for free before I give up on writing it.

I'll still be surprised if we reach post #4000, but my surprise is not a reliable predictor of things. So we'll see what happens. 2000 posts is still an accomplishment, so let's have one more Gazania:

Milestone: 2,000,000th page view

Yesterday, StatCounter recorded PATSP's two millionth page view.


Unlike with the one millionth hit, I wasn't watching StatCounter when it happened, so I don't know who was #2M or what they were looking for, but it's still an occasion worth marking.

I don't have much comment about this beyond noting that it's happened, but traditionally, these sorts of things are marked by photos of Gazanias (the Official Celebratory Flower of PATSP), so:

Blogiversary

I've now completed a fourth year of blogging at PATSP.

I'm not sure how I feel about that, or whether I feel anything about that. The longer I do this, the harder it becomes to imagine doing anything else, so the less noteworthy it seems. I've been blogging, so I keep blogging, because I don't remember how I filled my time before blogging. It's not a bad thing, it's not a good thing, it's just how life is.

Maybe I'm not in the blogiversary spirit today. (Bloggy Claus is going to come down the tube and leave spam in my inbox for sure!)

Ah, well. I've been saving Gazania photos for this for five months,¹ so let's break 'em out.




-

¹ (Gazania is the Official Celebratory Flower of PATSP. Even, apparently, when I don't feel particularly celebratory.)

Milestone: 1 Kiloplant

As I mentioned yesterday, I did a lot of propagation on Thursday and Friday of last week. I also had to move a lot of plants around to make room for the new ones, so the spreadsheets are a huge mess and I'm behind on watering.

But. As the title said, I've hit a milestone in the number of official plants I have in the house: as of Saturday, we've reached a kiloplant. It's a fuzzy milestone, because depending on how you look at it, the plant count has both been well over 1000 for a long time now (cuttings and seedlings that I think might not make it don't get counted as plants on the spreadsheets, but they still have to be cared for like plants and take as much work as the official plants) and remains under 1000 plants still (though I'm reasonably confident that most of the new plants I started will survive, inevitably I'll realize that some of them were put on the spreadsheet prematurely, and they'll die), but according to the spreadsheet, for the moment, we've arrived.

Here's the graph:



I would say that 1001 is obviously too many plants, but I've been saying that I have "too many" plants since, like, 600 plants ago, and somehow I keep managing to find places for them and take care of them, so maybe it isn't actually too many. I'm not sure.

I considered trying to go around and get pictures of all of them to post, give each plant a chance to represent, as the kids say ("East Side Basement in the hizzouse!"), but even just trying to get a picture of one shelf at a time, that would take hours and hours to do, and there'd still probably be plants you couldn't see because of the camera angle or whatever, and they wouldn't even be particularly good pictures, probably. (What I would really like to do sometimes is take all the plants outside and put them in the yard so I could take a photo of all of them at once. However, not only would this require perfect weather, it would also literally take me all day to do. I've done the math. Even if the husband helped, I think, moving the plants outside, taking the picture, and then moving them all back inside would at least take most of the day.) So instead, I'll show you pictures of the new plants that put me over the top.

Years ago, I started a tray of Zamioculcas zamiifolia leaflet cuttings. (And when I say "years," I mean years: I'm not sure when it happened exactly, but I remember where the tray was located when we lived in the apartment, and the spreadsheet suggests November 2008.)

Many of the leaflets dried up and died, but I didn't dump the soil, because that doesn't always mean that there's no chance of getting a plant out of it. The leaflets form tubers at their base, which can stick around and grow (somehow) even after the leaflet's gone.

Still, though, I've continued to hang on to the tray, waiting. Every so often a batch of them would sprout, and I'd take them out and repot them, but I left the others. Then last fall, another batch sprouted leaves.


So yesterday I decided to once and for all see what was going on in there, pot up what tubers I could find, and free up that space for something else. It turned out that almost every single cell had a tuber in it, whether it was sprouting leaves or not:


The roots are supposed to be delicate and easily damaged, so I tried to be as careful as I could, but I expect I still probably ruined a few tubers during the transplant. Still, I put three or four in each pot, so I should wind up with moderately full-looking plants even if some of them do fail. They don't look like much right now, but I added some fertilizer when I watered, so hopefully the tubers that haven't produced leaves yet will get the signal and take off.


It's not a very practical way to get new Zamioculcas plants, obviously, waiting two years or more for almost nothing. But it's a way.

Site-related: Blogiversary

Today is the third anniversary of PATSP's first post, hence the Gazania photos. (If you're new: Gazanias are the official celebratory flower of PATSP.)

Good to Grow just turned one a few days ago, on October 12, as did All Andrew's Plants. Life Among the Leaves had its first birthday a few days before that (Oct 8). This seems like a disproportionate number of houseplant-related blogs to all be launching in the same month. I mean, there are lots and lots of blogs out there, so it stands to reason that there would also be lots and lots of blogs starting in October, but it still strikes me as interesting. Is there something about October that makes people want to start houseplant blogs?


I don't know. I personally started PATSP in October because I'd started working in the garden center in August, and it took me two months to decide that I wanted to write a blog, decide that I had enough stuff going on at work to write about, and write a few introductory posts so there'd be something to look at when and if people arrived to read it. Nothing special about October per se.

But on the off chance that there is something special about this time of year, and that there might be people reading this blog right now who are just waiting for a title or something, let me throw a few title ideas at you. (If you don't have a blog and want to use one of these, feel free to take one. It's not like I need more than one blog.)


If you spend as much time playing video games as you do propagating plants, perhaps you should consider the title First-Person Rooter. (The address http://firstpersonrooter.blogspot.com is available.)

Or maybe you're more into cactus and succulents. I think Cactus Makes Perfect would work nicely for any succulent enthusiast with an experimental, trial-and-error approach to indoor gardening. Or outdoor gardening, too, I suppose. It might also work if you're a Three Stooges fan. (http://cactusmakesperfect.blogspot.com/ is available.)

Alt-rock fans with a harsh approach to underperforming plants might blog at The Violent Stemmes, though I think it would maybe have to be a group blog to make any sense. Or maybe it wouldn't make any sense regardless. Not sure about that. (http://violentstemmes.blogspot.com/ is available.)

Oh yeah -- I should probably mention that they're all going to be puns like this. Sorry I didn't think to warn you earlier. I realize that puns are the lowest form of humor, and that even when people find them amusing, they still groan, and that puns fall flat if the audience doesn't know the references. But they're not boring, at least: a groan is better than a meh.

If it helps, it was fairly hard work coming up with them, and that's time I'm never going to get back. Spreadsheets were even involved. (Truth.)


A photographer with a special fondness for botanical and nature photos might write at Leafcake Pictures. Especially appropriate if there's a little artistic nudity possible. (http://leafcake.blogspot.com/ is taken, though devoid of posts, but http://leafcakepictures.blogspot.com/ is available.)

The one I'd personally be most interested in reading, Curses! Soiled Again!, would be the daily musings of a supervillain, with emphasis on his/r home garden, houseplants, and other hobbies. Who wouldn't want to watch the Joker's ficus tree grow, check out the blooms on Mytzlplyk's orchid collection, or hear about the spider mites on Magneto's crotons? Am I right? (http://cursessoiledagain.blogspot.com/ and http://soiledagain.blogspot.com/ are both available.)


Anyway. Just throwing them out there. If any of these speaks to you, feel free. 'Tis the season.

And here goes year four.

Milestone: 1,000,000 page views / PATSP De-Lurking Day

UPDATE: At 12:05 AM, CDT, on Saturday, September 11, 2010, someone in Mosman, New South Wales, Australia looked at the Salvia elegans profile (which they'd found via Google) and became hit #1000000. I can prove part of that:


-

Celebratory Gazania.
Unless something really unusual happens, PATSP is going to get its 1,000,000th page view at some point today. Maybe very early tomorrow, if traffic is slow.


I feel like I should say something about this, but I don't know what one is supposed to say. A million page views wasn't something I considered or anticipated when I started this. (Which is good, because if I'd had that goal to begin with I would have been very depressed. You know how many I got the first day? Seventy-six. And a lot of that was just because it was the first day and people were coming from Garden Web out of curiosity: by the third day, that had dropped to twenty-one.)


But then, none of this has really gone the way I was expecting. The idea when I started was that this would be practice space for book-writing, and a place to share pictures of the stuff I was working with at my then-new garden center job. A little over 660,000 words and 1145 posts later, there's still no book (When would I work on a book, for fuck's sakes? The blog takes 40-45 hours a week.), and there's also no longer a job.


In short, blogging has turned me into an unemployed loser, just like people always said it would.


Or possibly I was an unemployed loser already, deep down, and blogging just unlocked my potential. There's a definite argument to be made there.¹


Whatever. This is really more about you guys. I mean, you're the ones who loaded the pages. So:


Some websites have occasional "de-lurking" days, where people who visit a blog but never leave comments are invited to do so. So just for today, if you normally never comment, or even if you do, say hi. I don't care so much what you say -- leave a link to your own blog, tell me what you do for a living or how many grandkids you have, tell me you like my shoes -- whatever.


I will still delete anything resembling spam, though, so please do try to sound like a human being.



-

¹ I would probably be sounding happier about the milestone if I were feeling better physically: I've been having a lot of (literal) headaches this week, and don't know why. The list of possible causes includes: sleep disruption, unusual levels of physical exertion, dehydration, allergies, stress, eyestrain, and changes in the weather/humidity. Or the husband could be poisoning the food. I mean, he says he isn't, but of course that's exactly what he'd have to say if he really were.
And it could be the case that none of these are correct and it's some mysterious and unimaginable ninth thing, though my personal guess is that it's some combination of stress and the change in weather.

Mr. Subjunctive: the Nina Interview

I noticed not too long ago that I was going to have my 500,000th page hit at PATSP soon, and I thought I should do something special for the occasion (besides Gazania pictures: if you've been reading the blog long enough, you know Gazanias are the official PATSP flower of celebration). On Poor Richard's Almanac, in the comments for this thread, our friend Ben suggested that maybe Nina could guest-write a post for the occasion. So I asked her, and she said okay, but it turned out that she can't muster enough force to press the keys on my computer's keyboard, so I had to transcribe, and then I figured as long as I had to be there anyway, she may as well just make it an interview with me, so that's what we're doing. (I think the main reason Nina agreed to doing an interview is because it sounded like less work.)

Anyway. So we passed 500,000 early in the day yesterday, and so here, in celebration, is the interview. Nina's dialogue is in boldface, mine is in regular type.

-

So I just jump in and start asking questions?

Pretty much.

Okay. What kind of crickets do you like to eat, the brown ones or the black ones?

Well, I'm not big on eating any crickets, actually.

Ah. A mealworms man.

Not really.

So what, flies, then?

Maybe we could sort of direct the conversation away from food?

Whatever you say. How has blogging changed your life? Also please tell me what blogging is.

Well, it's -- wait a minute. You didn't read the background papers I gave you?

I skimmed them.

That was one of the things I explained in the background papers.


That was a million pages long! You actually expected me to read all that?

Well yes. I don't just write long documents for the hell of it.

Jeez. My bad. I'll read next time. Just tell me what blogging is so we can get this over with.

Blogging is writing. On the internet.

I see. What sorts of things do you write about?

Mostly stuff the plants are doing. Occasionally you, or graffiti, or . . . you know, stuff. Whatever. Sometimes I do plant profiles, where I research a particular plant and write about where it comes from and how to take care of it and stuff.

So blogging pays well?

It doesn't pay at all, actually. You know, I really wish you had just read the information I gave you.

It doesn't pay at all. So you're writing long documents for the hell of it and putting them on-line even though you just, not thirty seconds ago, told me that you don't write long documents for the hell of it?

Holy crap. I'm getting called out on contradictions by a lizard.

Just answer the question, please.

Um, yeah. I guess. Or no. It's complicated. It's not about the money, obviously. But there are rewards to it too. People leave comments on the stuff I post, and sometimes I can ask questions and people will answer them, or whatever. There's sort of a community thing there. Engaging with other people and all.


Interacting with this on-line community is better than interacting with people face-to-face?

Well, since this is mainly going to be seen on-line, I'm going to have to say yes. On-line people are vastly superior.

Very diplomatic. What do you do when you're feeling frustrated because you really want to lay eggs but can't? Or can you lay eggs?

No, I can't lay eggs. I'm to understand this is a problem you've experienced?

Sometimes. But I'm asking about you.

Well I don't . . . humans don't lay eggs, so much. Actually. And I'm a male, too, so even if humans did lay eggs, this wouldn't be a problem I personally would have.

Wait. You're a male? Where's your pink throat fan, then?

Well, again, human, not anole, so no throat fan.

Well this is embarrassing.

Not at all. You'd be shocked how many people can't tell male and female anoles apart, either. To answer the intent of your original question, though, maybe a hobby would be good for those frustrating moments? Though I'm not sure what would be good for someone without opposable thumbs. Maybe you could express yourself through dance?

You think I should dance?

Well you can't take up crochet, or painting, so. . . . I mean you don't have to. I'm just throwing it out there as a suggestion. Lizards do dance sometimes.

Hmm. I'd like you to get me some of that water.

You really don't. It doesn't work like that in real life. I could bring you some tequila sometime, though.

Tequila will do that?

We'll, it'd sure as hell do something. I don't know if it'd make you dance. [pause] Usually it just makes people think they can dance.

So is this the interview going well?

I'm really not sure. It's not striking me as being very well-focused.

What were you expecting? It's my first interview.

And you're a lizard.

I don't see what that has to do with anything.

Some of your better reptiles will read the background information before charging into an interview.

Hmph. Just for that: if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?

I don't know. What kind of a dumb question is that?

You can't just say it's a dumb question. You have to answer.

No I don't.

Yes you do! It's an interview! You have to answer all the questions!


Okay fine. A pine.

Why a pine?

Okay, seriously, this is the last question I'm answering.

Aw, already?

A pine because they're slightly prickly but they're fairly stable. Also they like cold weather. Or maybe they don't like it, but they handle it well.

And also they smell.

Back in the cage, you.

Amphibians

The move is accomplished. No plant casualties reported so far, though the husband tried to put all of his plants (two spider plants, Chlorophytum comosum; two pothos, Epipremnum aureum; and a corn plant, Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana') out in full sun on the east side of the house, with predictably ghastly results. I expect the Epipremnum and Dracaena to make full recoveries, but the Chlorophytums may be toast. Which I suspect was actually the (subconscious, passive-aggressive) idea in the first place, though he says otherwise.

Unrelated photo of a frog which may or may not be the gray treefrog, Hyla versicolor, which was spotted on a garage door a week or two ago. Even if it's not the gray treefrog, it's pretty inarguably a gray treefrog.
Everything in the apartment was cleaned. Everything in the new place, with a few exceptions, is still dirty and still needs to be cleaned. We also have contractors running all over the place putting in fences, replacing windows and doors, cutting holes in the floor for heat/AC vents, installing the heater and air conditioner (though we don't know if we can actually use them yet: they may or may not be done), and doing stuff with concrete, plumbing, and electrical wiring I'm afraid I don't even understand well enough to enumerate. Also we've had somebody in to hook us up to cable and internet. Obviously.

Yet to be done: harmful chemicals will be employed to remove carpet glue from the concrete floor of the plant room (at which point the majority of them will be relocated to the plant room, though the particularly fussy, decorative, or irreplaceable ones will likely remain in the house), three of the five (!) microwave ovens we now possess will be disposed of in some fashion,¹ the pink bedroom will have to be painted something a little less pink (assuming we can agree on a color which don't hold your breath), the other rooms will also have to be painted, the wall which was knocked out will have to have the studs removed and replaced with beams, which will then be painted (maybe) and have shelves put in them, everything will have to be swept and dusted and cleaned, the aquarium will have to be assigned a location and set up (ideally before all the fish die), plants in excess of requirements will have to be sold on consignment or given away or otherwise removed,² furniture will be lugged up and down stairs endlessly, the upstairs bathroom floor has to be redone, the downstairs bathroom needs to have walls and lights put in,³ books and clothes and suchlike all need to be unpacked and sorted and placed in appropriate locations, the downstairs non-bathroom area needs to have its carpet removed, its carpet adhesive dissolved away, and then get re-covered with epoxy or something, and all this while laundry continues to get done, plants continue to be watered, mail continues to be checked,⁴ bills continue to be paid, and so on. And then at some point in there we have to get married, I guess. And I may go back to work a day or two before June is over as well. And I think I was supposed to write a book proposal somewhere in there too, soonish, if not necessarily in June.

American toad, Bufo americanus. Also from the house.
So the point is that there's a lot of stuff to do. I do anticipate returning to a regular blog posting schedule at some point relatively soon (in the next couple weeks?), but we're not there yet. We'll aim for a post every few days until things have calmed down enough to resume daily posting.

-

¹ How two people get five microwaves: 1 The husband had one when we met. 2 I had one when we met. When we merged households, neither of us was willing to give up our microwaves, so we kept them both, and it turns out that it's often surprisingly convenient to have two microwaves, so we got accustomed to having two and now couldn't imagine having only one. (Or, well, I could imagine it, but obviously it'd be totally impossible for someone to actually live like that.) Then 3 a microwave came with the house, and 4,5 the husband saw a couple stainless steel ones that he thought were cool a long time ago, and bought them, and they're still in storage (along with two of our four dining room tables and two of our three bicycles) because we don't have anywhere to put them right now.
² Which also means that some method of determining how many plants two people might reasonably be understood to require will have to be invented, obviously.
³ 'Cause right now it's just a toilet sitting on one side of the laundry room, next to an enclosed shower, which is kind of awkward. Particularly when there are contractors wandering, antlike, all over the house, for eight or nine hours every day, and one of them could pop out of a corner at any moment. Not that we don't have an alternate, less public toilet too. But it's upstairs, and sometimes it seems worth the risk if it means not having to make a trip up the stairs.
⁴ Less trivial than you would think: here, mail is only delivered to your home if you live on one particular street. If you live on any other street, you have to pay for a P.O. Box and go pick your mail up yourself, except that we can't do that yet because the town is out of P.O. Boxes at the moment. So they're just holding our mail somewhere back behind the counter, and we'll have to go during business hours and ask for it until somebody moves or dies or whatever and we can take their box. Upon first hearing this, the husband and I questioned whether it was even legal -- neither of us had ever heard of anything like this before, and I grew up in a town in Iowa about an eighth this size. So this is freaky and inconvenient and borderline, I don't know, communist or something. When asked, residents of the town just shrug and say that that's how it's always been. The postmaster said "maybe someday" they'll deliver mail to everybody, though according to the husband she said it in the kind of tone that indicates that you don't really think it's ever going to happen, like "maybe someday I'll take that trip around the world I've always wanted" or "maybe someday I'll resume those piano lessons I was taking when I was in third grade."

Site-related: Blogiversary

This is, in fact, a single pot. We got two like this where the mound of flowers was on the order of four feet across. Why? I do not know, but they make for a hell of a picture.
PATSP is officially a year old today. In that time, we've met sixty-eight plants:

There were the groups (Horde, Fraternity), the professionals (Actor, Landlord, Community Organizer, Lawyer, Teacher, Supermodel, Secret Agent Man, Avant-Garde Artist, Athlete, Dancer, Infomercial Pitchman) the not-so professionals (Employee, Dilettante, Also-Ran), a couple real people (Greta Garbo, Amy Winehouse), a few fictional people (Auntie Entity, Goody Two-Shoes, Romance Novel Heroine, The Wandering Jew, John Q. Public), royalty (Princess, King & Queen, Celebrity), mental patients (Psychopath, Neurotic, Basket Case, Sadist, Melancholic, Paranoiac), romantic interests (Exotic Stranger, Ex-Girlfriend / Ex-Boyfriend, Hooker With a Heart of Gold, Blind Date, Femme Fatale, Mister Right), losers (Schlub, Stoner, Dork, Brain), winners (Lucky Bastard), some bad boys (Criminal, Bad Influence, Con Artist, Evil Genius, Cult Leader), some friends (Friend of a Friend, College Roommate, Pal), tragic figures (Sacrificial Virgin, Feral Orphan, Unsung Hero, Ghost) and a wide and motley assortment of others that fit into no particular category (Teenager, Kamaaina, Practical Joker, Messenger of God, Identical Cousins [1] [2], Urban Cowboy, Single Mother, Damsel in Distress, Schoolgirl of the Underworld, Samurai in a Dress, Twenty-something, Caveman).

I do occasionally wonder what happens when I run out of plants to profile, but I can think of a half-dozen uncovered plants in the Bromeliaceae alone, off the top of my head, so I think we're probably safe for another year, at least. And there's no shortage of characters to go with the plants, either.

A festive NOID Anthurium photo, because I've recently realized that I can't rely on Gazania to do all the celebratory heavy lifting around here. I mean, until next spring, I've only got just the five Gazania pictures.
What's next for PATSP? Well, there'll be some more of the same: work-related posts, profiles, pretty pictures, random plant events, all that good stuff. I would also really like to bring back the LOLplants, who I've missed, and finish the pest profile series (still to come: scale, fungus gnats, thrips, aphids).

And besides more of the same? Well, I have some ideas. I've been wanting for some time to introduce a regular weekend round-up feature where I could put up links to other blogs with noteworthy posts, sort of a just-in-case-you-missed-it post. The main obstacle to doing this so far has been that I don't always have enough time to read as many posts on other blogs as I would like, so collecting the links in the first place is kind of an obstacle. But I'm working on it. I also have a similar idea involving interviews -- but I've said too much already. There's at least one item of plant-related fiction on the way, which I have to say is not really working out that well at the moment but I'm still hopeful, and I expect to see more imaginary plants in the fictional botany series. Also, I know I've been promising to write one forever, but I really will get to a review of Amy Stewart's Flower Confidential at some point, and then at some point after that I'll start on a review of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief.

The other monster mum. There was also a maroon one, that I didn't get a picture of before it sold.
So I'll try to make it worth your time to show up. Thanks for reading.

Site-related: Blotanical results (with links)

PATSP has received the Blottie (I'm gonna call them that, even if nobody else does) for Best Indoor Gardening Blog. (Full list of winners and nominees here.) I considered going into an Oscar-acceptance parody speech here (". . . and I wanna thank my parents, and Jesus, and all the little people. . . .") but decided that the better way to go was to play it a little straighter than that.

So I'll just say that I appreciate Stuart's efforts to put the awards together, especially considering that the awards and the ongoing feed issues hit at more or less the same time, which I'm guessing means he was doing twice as much work on Blotanical this month as he was expecting, and very possibly four times as much as he usually would. (Stuart's Blog, Gardening Tips 'n' Ideas; Blotanical home page)

I'd also like to sincerely thank everyone who voted, whether for me or not. As a lot of you know, blogging is kind of a weird gig, in that you start doing it before you know whether anybody's listening or not, and sometimes you get feedback about whether you're doing it right, and sometimes you don't. Those of you who voted for me presumably think I'm doing okay, which is nice to hear, and those of you who didn't have just pointed me to four other blogs from which I can steal ideas.


[evil laughter, lightning, crash of thunder]

So but anyway.

Soliloquy doesn't really need the extra attention, as she already won two Blotties (Best Canadian Blog, Best Commenter) and was a nominee for two others (Best Photography, Blotanist of the Year).

Balcony Gardener is, as it sounds, not so much an indoor gardening blog as a small-container gardening blog, but there are obvious overlaps between the two. Neither of us use shovels much, for example. Also some good, solid close-up photography, which is always nice. And Canadian, which I am trying very hard to suck up to as many Canadians as possible until I know how the U.S. election has turned out. (At which point I will either return to my normal level of trying to ingratiate myself with Canadians, which is still high for an American, or redouble my efforts, depending. Anybody who knows of any good Canadian horticultural programs should really, really get in touch with me. No, seriously. You should.)

Houseplants is a friend of the blog from way back, with a particular interest in the early conservatories and Wardian cases and so forth. Plus also lots of orchid pictures.

Indoor Gardener makes me think, well, maybe we could grow basil in here after all. (There was a previous bad experience.) The question is more whether the various Euphorbia, Cereus, Synadenium, Aloe, Pandanus, Coffea, Yucca, Hatiora, etc. specimens could be persuaded to share their window with something edible. I kind of hate to ask (you know how cranky Euphorbias can be). But if I ever were to decide that I wanted to grow herbs and vegetables in the apartment, Indoor Gardener is the first place I'd go to find out how. Until then, the husband and I will just keep eating frozen pizzas.

And finally, since the celebratory Gazanias have been used very recently, as well as the Gerbera of Accomplishment, we're going to have to go with a different flower for this occasion. So: the Streptocarpus of Public Recognition.

Streptocarpus x 'Purple Martin'
In about three weeks, we'll have a blogaversary (blogIversary? Which is it? Neither one looks right to me.) happen, too. When it rains, it pours.

Milestone: 100,000th hit

Moments ago, at approximately 10:05 PM (CDT) on September 24, 2008, PATSP got its 100,000th page hit. It was from someone with a Portland, OR IP address, who as best as I can tell was doing a Google image search for "coffea arabica neighborhood (public domain)."

This seems like a big enough deal to dust off the Celebratory Gazanias again:



Plus, what the hell, let's have a Gerbera of Accomplishment, too.

Milestone: #s 399 and 400

I don't know if anybody bothers to watch the running plant population number in my profile in the sidebar or not, but yesterday the husband and I went to Cedar Rapids, and stopped at three plant places, and bought plants #399 and 400, below, for a grand total of like $14 and change.

(L-R) Dieffenbachia 'Tiki,' Podocarpus macrophyllus

I don't need this, obviously. Nobody really ever needs more than about 350 plants. (Maybe 375, if you really like plants.) It already takes way too much time to water everything, and that's especially problematic now that I'm starting to spend increasing amounts of time watering at work, too.

But the prices on both plants were very good, and I'm in the process of working on the Dieffenbachia profile now, which I have the unfortunate habit, when I'm writing a profile, of buying every new variety I see of whatever plant I'm writing about.¹ (God help me when we get to Phalaenopsis.) So, 400. They're not all going to stay around indefinitely, or at least that's the plan, but for right now . . . well, for right now, I need to be watering things.

-

¹ For what it's worth, the Dieffenbachia post is shaping up to be crazysexyeducational, probably a two-parter like Sansevieria trifasciata (Part I; Part II) and almost certainly in my personal three favorite plant profiles. Plus I'm getting very, very fast at typing the word "Dieffenbachia."
I don't, on the other hand, have any idea when it might be posted, or how readable people will find it.