Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Prince Edward of York

Well. It's looking increasingly like my itchiness problem is nothing more than dry skin, and possibly it's happening for the first time this winter because this winter is seriously cold, relative to recent previous ones. I mean, January is always cold, but it seems like this winter got colder a lot earlier, has been very cold more often, and has provided unusually few opportunities for thaws. As I write this, on 4 January, the forecast for the day you're reading this, 6 January, is for a high temperature of -10F / -23C. A high temperature. As in, the very warmest it's supposed to get is -10. Wind chill of -44F / -42C, at 8 in the morning.

None of this is unprecedented in Iowa history; in fact, my understanding is that this sort of thing used to happen all the time. (The all-time record low for Iowa City, allegedly, is -26F / -32C, which doesn't factor in a wind chill. We may come close to that on Sunday night: -19F / -28C, according to the forecast, but it's not going to be a record.) But temperatures like this are relatively new to me, and more importantly, new to my skin. Even with all the plants in here, any air creeping in from outside the house will be very dry, and the unusual cold will mean that the furnace will be pumping in hot, dry air much of the time, too, so the plants may not be able to help much. (On the other hand, imagine how much itching I'd be doing without the plants. Maybe I need more plants.)

So: probably dry skin. I'm guessing this partly based on a recent conversation with my dad, who said that he had a really itchy winter the year after we moved from Texas back to Iowa, and that baby oil made it tolerable. And apparently it's never recurred (at least not to the same degree), which was a comforting thought until we actually got some baby oil and I tried it and the itching come back worse than it had been previously. Shaving the itchiest areas actually seems to help more than anything, though that presents its own problems. The itching is caused by nothing in particular, and nothing makes it better. Were it not for the fact that no matter how bad it gets, it comes and goes entirely on its own, so occasionally I'll get a 36-hour break (though most are closer to nine hours), I wouldn't be able to water the plants, write blog posts like this (which is just scintillating, I know), or sleep. If I'm sounding a little desperate and deranged here, well, that's because I am.

Meanwhile: orchid picture. Though it feels a bit wrong to be contemplating orchids with weather like this. Or not wrong, but nonsensical. Surely the same planet can't contain -44F wind chills and tropical orchids at the same time, can it?

Paphiopedilum Prince Edward of York = Paphiopedilum rothschildianum x Paphiopedilum sanderianum

Random plant event: Schlumbergera x buckleyi

I got this plant in September 2010, and have never seen it bloom. There was some brief excitement in 2010, when a flower bud formed, but it dropped without opening. In 2011 and 2012, I didn't even get a bud.

But this year, hey, finally a flower:

There might even have been two. (I'm writing this on 23 December, so I don't know how the other buds fared.) So what changed?

Well. In 2013, shelf rearrangements led to this particular plant being on a shelf about 2 feet lower than it had been previously. That's all that changed, as far as I know, but it seems to have been enough. It wound up further away from one source of artificial light, if only slightly, and a second source of artificial light was blocked by a bunch of too-tall-for-the-shelves plants next to the shelves. Plus, being closer to the floor meant it was a lot colder. Colder + darker = blooms. Apparently. So it can be done.

UPDATE (2 January): I think it wound up just being the one flower. Maybe two. I didn't keep as close of a watch as I probably should have.

Random plant event: Spathiphyllum seedlings

The Spathiphyllum seedlings are just full of surprises, it turns out. Only 14 months old, and two of them have decided to bloom already:

Spathiphyllum seedling number 7.

Spathiphyllum seedling number 16.
Another thing that's surprising about this is that at the moment, some of the peace lily seedlings are in 3-inch (7.5 cm) pots, and some of them are in 4-inch (10 cm) pots, and both of the ones that bloomed are in 3-inch pots.

The conventional wisdom about peace lilies is that they are more likely to bloom if potbound, but I'd always assumed that that was some kind of error, on the grounds that 1) they don't seem to have that much problem blooming if they're not potbound either, assuming that they're mature, healthy plants, and 2) there are no pots in nature, so why should the plants care one way or the other about being potbound. And those still seem like perfectly valid arguments to me, but even so: the ones I left in small pots are blooming, and the ones I moved to bigger pots are not.

So perhaps there's something to the conventional wisdom after all?

Pretty picture: Miltoniopsis Echo Bay

Previously.

Miltoniopsis Echo Bay = Miltoniopsis Woodlands x Miltoniopsis Rose Bay

Random plant event: Dracaena fragrans 'Sol'

So the Dracaena fragrans 'Sol' that I've had since February 2008 has produced a sucker.

This is the first time I've seen a D. fragrans do this, and I actually had kind of forgot that it was even a possibility, so this was a nice surprise.

That said, I'm not really sure what to do about it; at one point, the prospect of having propagatable material for this plant would have been fantastic, exciting news, but now? Not so much. Of all the plants to have more of, Dracaenas are way too big to be very high on my list. So the plan is basically to leave it alone and see what happens. Which is a plan I've been falling back on quite a lot lately.

Pretty picture: Guaricyclia Kyoguchi

The itching came back; last Friday was incredibly bad, though most days have been so light as to have been mostly ignorable, and it only seems to be happening on days when I take showers, so I'm beginning to think that maybe my skin's become allergic to being clean, or something.

The contractors are back too, which is less terrible, but we've discovered a big patch of mold in my office, so that's going to be massively disruptive at some point or another (and has already been at least a little disruptive). Sheba's started biting patches of fur off again (NOOOO SHEBA WHYYY), and I'm still finding scale but at least it increasingly seems to be dead scale.

There are a few random plant events to report. I will attempt to get to those at some point in the next week or two.

Guaricyclia Kyoguchi = Guarianthe aurantiaca x Encyclia incumbens

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Huddle 'Joan'

The continuing story of Why Is Mr. Subjunctive So Damned Itchy All The Time:

Medical professionals have been consulted. Unfortunately, by the time I saw a doctor, the itching hadn't happened for a few days,¹ so there was nothing to show anybody, not that they would have seen anything in the first place, because it never looked like anything, but there was even more nothing to see than usual. And so the visit was inconclusive as to the cause of the itching. We did pretty well eliminate scabies, mold, and imidacloprid as possibilities, though, which just getting scabies struck from the list was worth the trip all by itself. And this is all basically what I expected, that the first doctor's visit wasn't going to settle anything. I was really just hoping to pare down the number of possibilities.

There was also an incidental diagnosis of a very mild case of athlete's foot, though I don't know how that could have happened and am not sure I'm entirely on-board with that diagnosis² but whatever sure I can get some Lotrimin why the hell not.

The leading theories are presently fleas, stress, and dry air/skin. The first will, in theory, resolve itself sooner or later.³ I don't know that there's much of anything I can do about stress, and trying to think of something to do about it would only make it worse, so probably the best thing for me to do about that is to forget that it's even a theory. And the dry air/skin thing is questionable, but the only one she had a concrete suggestion for, so I'm supposed to use different soap and then a new cream afterward and call her in a week to tell her whether that's helped. That seems kind of pointless, though, while I'm not experiencing any itching, because what am I going to report? "I changed soap like you said and went from having no symptoms to . . . also having no symptoms?"

Anyway. Not really feeling any better about the plant collection, and the contractors are actually worse now, 'cause they're done with the outside stuff, mostly, so now they've moved in. So regular blogging is still on hold, for however long it turns out to be. But I've just asked you to think, for a second time, about my skin, and scabies, and added a new horror: athlete's foot. So here is an orchid show picture to make us even again:

Paphiopedilum Huddle 'Joan' = Paphiopedilum Hellas x Paphiopedilum F. C. Puddle

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¹ Tiny bit of itching on Saturday, but nothing like it had been. No itching at all on Friday, Sunday, or up to 2 PM on Monday.
² (it only vaguely resembles any of the images that come up in Google, plus this would be the first time anyone's ever used the word "athlete" in any kind of relation to me so it feels pretty wrong medically and linguistically. I mean, I realize she's the doctor and she would know, but still.)
³ Point of interest: I saw my first actual flea since this whole thing began, last Friday, on my arm. It's plausible that it may have come in from outside with Sheba (who had been outside immediately before, and who was in my office at the time because there were contractors present and she has to stay in the office with me while that's going on). It wouldn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense for a dog-preferring flea to jump on to a dog, then off the dog onto a person, but they call them fleas, not geniuses, so maybe.
Sheba remains at normal levels of scratching and biting; some patches of fur have filled in a lot faster than others, but there's general progress across the board, and she's done with all her medication as of Monday. Also she said to tell you hi.

Pretty pictures: Vanda cristata

I seem to have accidentally fallen into a blogging-hiatus hole. Among other problems to be detailed below, I'm really coming to despise the plant collection:¹ they appear to be playing a game of chicken, to see which of them can have the most and largest problems without getting thrown in the trash. (Currently neck and neck for the lead: Agave desmettiana and Agave americana.)

Meanwhile, we've progressed from The Week of Sheba's Unexplained Itching to The Week of a Grandparent's Funeral to The Week of Contractors. A plan that was started roughly two years ago has finally started being executed, so we're getting some work done on the house, but our influence over which repairs, when they happen, and how they're performed is very minimal.² So there are early-morning noises, and strange people coming in and out, and at one point the plant room door was replaced.³ The whole thing's been disruptive and unpleasant. It surely says something that the high point of the last three weeks was a funeral.

As for Sheba, she's back to normal amounts of scratching and biting since she started the flea treatment, which is great. Unfortunately, the improvement was accompanied by an ear infection⁴ and fantastic, amazing dandruff,⁵ so we don't seem to be winning on that front either.

The reader may recall that I've been itching quite a bit myself lately, and that it got dramatically worse at about the same time that Sheba's latest outbreak began, so it'd be logical to think that when she's doing better, I'm also doing better. But no. My problem was apparently never the fleas.⁶ The itching is pretty terrible on its own, but it also wakes me up at night sometimes, or keeps me from getting to sleep, which amplifies all the previously-mentioned minor annoyances. And of course I have no idea what is causing it or how to make it go away; so far, all I can really do is take Benadryl, which may or may not do anything for the itching, but at least knocks me out to the point where I don't have to be consciously aware of the itching anymore.

As I write this on Monday morning, this week has not yet made its particular flavor apparent. Depression? Loss of internet service and/or electricity? Bureaucratic runarounds? Car trouble? Whooping cough? Sinkholes? Plague of frogs? Robot uprising? Time will tell. Posting is expected to stay confined to once-a-week orchid posts for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, here are some bad photographs of a not-particularly-photogenic orchid.

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¹ Not hyperbole. I know I've said things like this before and then come back around to liking plants again, but it feels like we're surely coming to the climax of . . . something. Two years is a long time to keep a hobby that's costing more in aggravation than it's giving you in pleasure, and it's getting harder to believe that stuff might get better.
² In mitigation: we're not paying for any of it, so it feels churlish to complain. (Not that that stops me, because since when have I minded being thought of as churlish?)
³ Not so terrible in and of itself, but they started when it was 39F / 4C outside, and involved a lot of people just standing around while there was a giant hole in the wall of the plant room, cold breeze blowing freely in and out, so I was understandably worried. (I spent the majority of that day in my office with the door closed trying to pretend that it wasn't happening.) It doesn't appear to have harmed any of the plants yet, but this wasn't that long ago, so they could just be slow to react.
⁴ Not diagnosed by the vet, but the smell is awfully familiar, and obviously emanating from her ear, so.
⁵ If I were a dandruff connoisseur -- and you know that one has to exist, somewhere -- this would be the best week of my life. Right up there with the first time I ever saw The Breakfast Club, probably.

^ This .gif is also a pretty good representation of how I feel when my itching gets really bad.
⁶ (which might explain why I never saw any)