My first attempt at orchid pruning

Orchid sprouting new leaf and roots

Orchid flowers dying

Aww. My orchid finally ran out of gas, or at least the flowers did. They lasted until the end of June. Six months!

Supposedly, I can get another spray from the same stem. Just cut it at the first node down from the spent flowers. Or cut it two or three nodes up from the base. Hmm. Comes out to the same thing.

So I gave it a little snoop. And…

Mulberries!

Nearly, nearly ripe mulberry

Ripe, ripe mulberries

Along with the daily pint of mixed berries, today I finally picked two whole mulberries. Two delicious, rich-tasting mulberries from a tree I planted this spring. A tree that I nearly killed by leaving it in its shipping box for a week and watering the wrong end.  I’ve heard that mulberries are robust trees (a kind way of saying  “invasive”) but that’s robust. How, do you ask, could I possibly have watered the wrong end?

Readercon 20 coming right up

Readercon 20 starts this Thursday through Sunday. Even it’s my favorite con in the area, it always sneaks up on me. There’s already friends and teachers I expect to see.  And there’s so many interesting things in the schedule, I’m sure I’ll be a blithering wreck by Sunday afternoon.  So, my posting may get a bit irregular in the next week or so.

The water lily and the guppies

Water lily

This is why I keep guppies–for the water lily. One water lily in a free-standing black tub. Keeping even such a small lily pond means setting up a whole system. I add  hornwort and anachris to aerate the water. I add water hyacinths to help clear the water with their roots and for a few more flowers.  The snails and the duck weed just show up. As do mosquito larvae. And since we’re expecting a bumper crop of mosquitoes this year, the lily pond needs fish more than ever.

Summer, still?

Coneflower

Ah! Another barbeque perfect day. How long can it last?

And the first coneflowers are stretching out their purple wings, oblivious to their inevitable, tatty fate. For now, they’re sunny and happy and ready for the bees.

Yay, summer!

Pink lily enjoying a rare bit of sun

Finally. A nice sunny day! Just in time for the Fourth. The lilies are happy too, all pink and yellow, swaying in the sun.

Other than that, no fireworks here. You should be outside watching yours.

Hugo 2009 roundup

Well, I’ve read all of the Hugo nominees that I’m going to. I managed the first chapter of  Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross, and kept putting off returning to it. The perky tone of Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi is exactly the kind of YA that punts me right out. Then I ran out of time. Plus I remembered I’m reading them for the sake of finding stories I like, so I’m can’t say anything else about them.

Here the whole list, ordered roughly by how much I enjoyed them.

True Names

Filled with computronium, parity checkers, references to running hot or slow, and sockpuppets, “True Names“, by Cory Doctorow & Benjamin Rosenbaum is a breakneck story about the struggles of numerous instances of personalities fighting in various levels of reality over love, power, and–what else?–suzeranity over the universe. Beebe is a chaotic civilization of personalities. They include Nadia, who made a killing with the YearMillion bug, Paquette the philosopher, and Firmament, whose birth was turned into a hit musical production. They are opposed by Demiurge, who wants everything to be orderly. Their common enemy is  the terrifying onslaught of Brobdinag. It all tumbles into a startling record scratch of an ending that shifts into party music.

Iceberg in lettuce

Lettuces in situ

Lettuce in a bowl

Iceberg lettuce looks like something you have to form, not at all like a natural object a plant can grow. But they do grow. With all the rain, hard cores have been forming inside. It’s been amazing to watch the leaves curl inward and iceberg itself. But with all the rain, some of the outer leaves are starting to rot. So I rescued one. And now I know the difference between an iceberg and a lettuce.

The Tear

Ian McDonald makes difficult reading. I had to machete my way through Brasyl and it took me three tries to read “The Tear.” It’s a dense story, filled interesting ideas and  beautiful language on a grand scale. There’s so many peoples and places and worlds and universes, it’s just too much to take in at one sitting. Before I was even half way through, I felt like I was trying to eat a 72 ounce steak plus a whole chocolate cake with raspberry filling and mocha buttercream icing. I kept wishing it were a novel so I’d have a book to set down and digest for a while before diving back in.