Another Guessing Game

I don't know how well everyone else enjoyed my last guessing game, but I thought it was great fun. Here's another one. Can you guess what this is?

After everyone has had a chance to guess, I'll tell you what it is on Monday or Tuesday. Thanks for guessing! :)

My Tree is Climbing Out!

If anyone sees a Hairy Tree on the loose, it's probably mine because mine is trying to climb out of it's pot! This is an example of when to re-pot a plant. Look how innocent he looks just sitting here on my desk:

Take a closer look:

He's climbing out! Someone once explained to me that you know to re-pot a plant when it starts pulling away from the sides and pushing up like a cake does when it's done baking. I hadn't seen it until this one. When you see these roots you'll see why it's pushing up:

See how huge the roots are? Here's another look:

One last view of the bottom:

So it looks like a new pot will be on my list of things to pick up when I go in to town next. :)

Crayon Art

A few years ago, I did this Crayon Art from a picture my sister took. The picture is the trees up our walk way at work. Here's the original photo:

Here's the Crayon Art I did:

I know it's not the greatest thing ever, but I love crayons for art. Crayola is the only brand to buy. I have a big box of something like 300 crayons which I need to get out more often. Silhouette pictures like this one are my favorites. Do you draw, color, paint, or do art of any kind? I'd love to see pictures of them if you do. You could post them on your blog and leave me the link here if you'd like. :)

Flowers Galore

I took a few more pictures of the top tier of that garden I posted a few days ago. Here they come. This is Aster, Daisy, and Vinca:

Here's the pink Aster with Vinca:

This Vinca is SO very pretty to me. I fell in love with it at the nursery:

Here's a close up of the pink Aster flowers:

And here's a close up of the purple Aster flowers:

I might be playing favorites, but I sure think I have the prettiest garden there is! :)

Papaya Grove Strikes Again!

I keep being amazed by my Papaya grove. Every once in a while another one sprouts! It's seriously been 7 months since I first planted the seeds. It took about 4 months for them to first spout. I took this picture of another newcomer yesterday:

Isn't that amazing? These are some of the most fascinating plants I've ever grown from seed. I love growing things from seed, by the way. It's so rewarding, but when they die... :( it makes me SO sad. I'm worried about this little Papaya grove I have. It has white powdery mold and I can't get rid of it. I'll be taking home some spray to see if I can help that today. Let me know if you know of any other ways to get rid of the dreadful stuff.

Name This - Guessing Game

This is a picture of an everyday item at a not-so-everyday angle. :) Go ahead, give it a guess:

After everyone has guessed at what it is, I'll tell you. Whoever guess right, or at least the closest, gets a high resolution copy of any of my blog images emailed to them just for fun. Whoever doesn't win gets one too. Be sure to include which image you would like a copy of in your reply. :) Thanks for joining and I hope you all have a good time.

Pretty Flowers Everywhere

My garden is SO pretty right now. I snapped a few pictures to share with you today. This first one is my pink Aster. Is this pretty, or what? This is the second year for this plant. It did get transplanted this spring:

This is purple Aster. It's the same age as the pink and also got transplanted the first of this spring:

I sure like Verbena. The purple and red flowers here are Verbena with the purple Aster in the background:

Here's some red Verbena:

This is a patch of white Alyssum. I love the petunias peaking through the middle. I just wish there was more of them. :)

Here's the full top tier of that garden from the back:

This is my rose garden. I love this garden. The foliage is so dense that weeds don't hardly even try to grow here:

Here's the pretty corner of this garden. It looks so beautiful here:

I took another shot since I love this corner so much!

This is a (I think) watermelon plant that came up volunteer. It adds a nice enough effect that, even if it doesn't grow any melons, I left it there:

I was amazed at how these petunias climbed up this wall by sneaking up behind the fencing:

This is a view of the Lantana (that came up from last year) and roses from the top of the stairs:

I'm expecting the mums to burst forth into color any time here now that it's cooling off. I've had a lot of good times gardening this year. This time of year it really feels like it's all paying off. :)

"Perfect" Aquarium Filter with a Fishy Translation

A little while back I got a new filter for my aquarium. I always get a kick out of funny translations. This one gave me a huge source of entertainment. This "Perfect" brand filter had far from a perfect translation. Introducing the new Perfect Outside Filter:

MULTI-LAYER FULL OF VARIOUS FILTER MATERIALS
HIGH EFFICIENCY OF BREEDING NITRO BACTERIA
PERFECT FILTRATION CAPABILITY
Touch the perfection

This gets better. Look at the parts diagram:

1. INPUT AND OUTPUT DISCRETENESS
2. BARRELHEAD
3. MAIN BODY
4. DRAINING SKEP COVER
5. DRAINING SKEP
6. OUTPUT CURVY BAR
7. CONNECTED BAR
8. SPRAY BAR
9. SPRAY BAR COVER
10. DIRTINESS ENTRANCE
11. CONNECTED BAR
12. INPUT CURVY BAR
13. JOINT OF DIRTINESS ENTRANCE
14 INPUT BAR
15. INPUT COVER
16. SUCKING DISC FOR FIX
17. PIPE

Now if that didn't confuse you, the "Operation Guide" most certainly will:

1. According to the diagrammatic representation, the buckle (1) and (2) should be unfolded at first, which will separate the main body and barrel head.

2. Putting the draining skeps with filter medium into the main body in turn. And pressing the barrelhead with your hands to combine the main body and the barrelhead. Then you should fasten the buckle (1) and (2).

3. Pulling the securing buckle to take out the input and output discreteness .After this, the input and output pipes should be installed and they will be fastened by nuts. Later, putting the input and output discreteness to the former place and press the securing buckle to fix the input and output discreteness.

4. According to the diagrammatic representation, installing the input and output curvy bar in the aquarium. (Notice! The curvy bar with spray head is output curvy bar, and the curvy bar with dirtiness entrance is input curvy bar.)

5. According to the diagrammatic representation, pressing the blue buckle forcibly and leave it immediately. The blue buckle will rebound. And the input bar absorb water into main body at the same time which compel the air out of main body through output bar. When the level of water in output bar is equal to the level of aquarium, you may electrify the equipment to make it work.

Without the "diagrammatic representation" I don't know if I would have even figured out how to install the silly thing! By the way, it is a very nice filter and my turtles (and I) have really enjoyed it. :)

A New Spin on Cake Fans...or Fan Cakes

September 7th was my 5 year birthday working for the company I'm working for now. I decided to make a cake to celebrate. I made it to look like a ceiling fan and wrote "I'm a (Company Name) Fan!" on it. I blotched out my company name for privacy reasons. Here are some pictures:



So, are you a cake fan, or a fan cake? :D

Where's My Penny Cutter?

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements. -Ernest Hemingway

This is kind of off the wall and has nothing to do with my home or garden, but I'm a grammar freak. I was communicating with someone over Google Talk today about a USB adapter he needed for his phone. I found one on eBay for $0.99 with free shipping. He was commenting on how cheap it was.

"Very cheap.
.99, amazing.
.99 cents"

At this point I replied with, "Umm. That's less than a penny." He knows that. He just wanted to get at me. He next typed, ".99 cents would be VERY good. Bother you?" "Yes, actually. That's one of my least favorite grammatical errors." Naturally, he got to harassing me since he now knew I didn't like it. "I had no idea. Is it wrong to say .99 cents?" I replied with a simple " :) " to which he continued, "I could maybe afford .99 cents. .99 cents is a good deal. I may have .99 cents. Can I borrow .99 cents?" I told him, "No. My penny cutter is broken." He said, "See if you can find one for .99 cents?" I replied, "I can't and that's not a question either, while we're knit picking grammar..."

I'm always amazed at how many people are confused with that. It's not 0.99 cents, people! Do you realize that's 99 hundredths of a cent? It's either $0.99 or 99¢ but NEVER 0.99¢ or 0.99 cents.

Another one that makes me smile, but doesn't bother me so much, is when people say, "Guess what?" "Guess what" is not a question. It's a command sentence and should be ended with either a period (that's the little dot, remember? Like this: ".") or an exclamation mark (!). That's probably confusing to people because we use "What?" so much. When you say "Guess what" to someone, and end it with a question mark, it almost makes it sound like you didn't understand yourself. "Guess! Huh, what?"

I could go on and on about grammar errors, but I'll just bring up one more. See this little guy? " ' " He's called an apostrophe. I'm sure you've seen him about being used both correctly and incorrectly. The most common mistake I see with him is when he's placed in words that are meant to be plural. "We are picking apple's." Ok, so this implies either "apple is" or that the apple owns something. "Apple is" simply doesn't make sense in this sentence unless you were to say, "We are picking. Apple is...." which you can see is going nowhere really fast. If we see it to mean that Apple, whoever this might be, owns something, the first problem we run into is that he should have his name capitalized. We wouldn't want him to feel like he's being degraded, now would we? The next problem is, supposing we are picking something that belongs to Mr. Apple, WHY DID WE STOP THERE?! What were we picking of his? What's that period doing there before the sentence even got through telling us what we were doing?!

Maybe another time I'll carry on some more about things like "your or you're", "than or then", or when commas are supposed to be used. Just my luck, I probably messed up on each of the areas I've been ranting about in this very post. :) English really is a very fascinating language. What do foreigners do for entertainment? They can't say things like "Mete out the meat to all you meet" or "Pare that pair of pears" or even "Did you read what I read about a reed in red?" I just love English! I also love to see people use proper grammar. :)

Hummingbird Visit

We had a hummingbird pay us a visit at work yesterday. We have big windows out front of our building. I suppose it flew into one of them and knocked itself out. One of my co-workers brought it in so we snapped a few pictures.


After we took pictures, he took it back outside. As he went to put it down by a tree, it came too and was off as happy as ever. :)

Started Some Peach Pits

I started some peach pits on Saturday. We had a couple of our big peach trees clear loaded with fruit just drop dead and all the green fruit just fall to the ground completely unusable. :( We chose another one of the trees that we've liked the fruit to and started 4 pits.

I'll let you know when they sprout. :)

Sweet Williams

I was able to get a few fabulous pictures of my beautiful Sweet Williams:



I just love these flowers, and they smell so....well, sweet! :)

Why Do I Garden?

Randy over at Creating Our Eden posed an interesting question. How did you develop an interest in gardening? Well, I guess it kind of came natural with me. My grandmother is an avid gardener although my mother is not interested. I never really got into gardening much when I was younger. I thought it was all but a punishment to have to weed. I still don't like to hoe and rake, but at one point I remember realizing that I actually didn't mind weeding flowerbeds by hand. That was when I was 13 or so. I still didn't do it very much and never thought of actually planting anything. Then I got an office job. After about 2 years, my sister told me about a coffee house plant she'd seen at Home Depot. My company had just given us Home Depot gift cards and there was a bit left to spend, so I sent my card with a co worker and he picked up my coffee tree for me. That was my first house plant. It was just a little bunch in about a 3" pot when I got it. This is what it looks like now:

Well, the house plant was a refreshing and happy addition to my little office. He grew and brought me happy thrills with each new leaf. What a fascinating world the world of plants is! I remember being so gleeful and summonsing the whole office to come see when the first two leaves bloomed out. I even took a picture of new baby leaves when another branch started coming on:

So, what does all this have to do with gardening? I don't exactly consider house plant care as gardening, but it does give me a little piece of my hobby when I'm in the office. What this has to do with gardening is, that is how my love of plants got started. When that gets started, well we all know it's non-stoppable! A few years later my boss came and asked me to take care of a few plots with some plants. He told me to plant some things around the trees and make it beautiful. There was no limit to how much I could do. Truthfully, he's a better gardener than I, but I'm sure glad he let me do it. I was elated when he asked. Can you imagine being paid to do what you already enjoy?

I sure had a lot to learn and I still do. My first lesson was that bulbs don't bloom all year long. (Is that embarrassing, or what?) I was pretty much a novice on the subject, but I loved plants. I actually had a very pretty garden that year. My boss had his wife take me to a nursery and get whatever plants I wanted. She introduced me to SO many different things. I got lots of different things and put them in the ground. My second lesson was that you have to break up the root ball or your plants will get root bound in the ground. (Yes, that was embarrassing too.) I had kale that wouldn't grow because it was root bound.

My boss would have people bring me different plants and flowers so I could make it beautiful if he got to thinking I hadn't put enough in or was afraid to ask for more. :) This made so I had petunias, verbena, hyssops, lantana, rose bushes, desert rose, ornamental kale, and lots of other plants, that I developed a love for, in my very first garden. I don't think my love of gardening is going to grow old like some hobbies do. I love gardening. Weeding is so relaxing. You don't have to do any brain work to weed. You can just rip out the weeds and let your thought wander around without anything bad happening. (Good luck doing that in an office.) So anyway, that's why I garden, and that's where I got started. (Now I just need to figure out how to do it more.) Thanks for reading. Happy Gardening!