damselfish | The State of Sam

Finals have been over for a week now, and I'm only just starting to settle. I have no idea what I did for the past week (other than combat supreme unjustice from the school, which I won't go into here). I finished editing draft 2 of Morgan and printed it out (it doesn't fit in my binder, who knew 262 pages would be so long?) and now my future stretches out before me. Kinda. I'm gonna be working full time, so I probably won't have the sort of time I need for writing.

Oh what the hell. I do nothing but make time.

I don't know what I want to do with that, though. Swans? It's 15k words long so far, but I don't know how I feel yet, and part of me wants to write utterly shameless romance*. Shameless in ways Swans isn't. Gaaaah, self!

Anyway, in the middle of finals, I ended up being super naughty. I went to Fairchild's Food and Garden festival with the intention of buying some curry powder from the spice lady, and ended up coming home with garam masala, madras curry power, and... something else.

So I went to the festival and saw people walking out with plants, and I said "well, I could use something to put in the little pots now that I'm gonna transplant my other two hibiscuses, and anything to stop me from buying more hibiscuses, I've got a real monoculture going on outside...." What do I do but gravitate toward another desert rose.

It was just so cute! Its roots well-formed from careful replanting (it's also been carefully pruned, unlike my wild rambling one in the background) and the flower color is just so perfectly white and edged in red, like little peppermint stars. Grandpa just picked it up and said "is this the one you want?"

On the plant front: two of my hibiscuses have a horrible fungal-looking infection, and the pink hibiscus is the favored spot for flies to lay their eggs (I hose it down with pesticides every time I spot a nasty infestation, but it's a losing battle). I called up the hibiscus guy and asked, and he said it's white mealy bugs (no it's not, I can tell because one of my orchids came in with mealy bugs and I have learned the one thing worse than the bugs themselves is the honeydew ugh scrubbing sticky liquid bug shits off all my stuff that was near the orchid ugh ugh). But I tell him that Black Dragon and Sunshower are doing well, and he goes "huh" at me.

"Yeah! Black Dragon is blooming like a beast. I'm glad I didn't listen when you told me I wouldn't be happy."

"...Really? I've grafted maybe 200 of them, and only 20 or so have taken. It's not a strong strain."

"Oh... let me show you a picture."

As we speak, Black Dragon has two withered flowers and is opening up another today. I was told that it would bloom rarely when buying it, and I shrugged. I didn't care. Even once every few weeks, those incredible purple flowers was fine by me. But I'm not getting a flower every few weeks. I'm getting this.

And my late bloomer, Sunshower, because... wow this quickly became my favorite plant on that balcony as soon as it started producing flowers (a year after purchase). At the moment it's dropped all its leaves so it's all scraggly, but it's putting out new ones. And, honestly, after the display of the last few months, I'm okay with it doing its thing.

I repotted it recently (as you can see, that little black pot in front is what it used to be in) and those big plastic pots are where the black pots went into, braced by a ton of mulch. Note to anyone who wants to double pot using mulch: use rubber. It's more expensive, sure, but packing that stuff was a PITA and I'm still picking splinters out of my stuff. Not to mention that it'll rot eventually and it's staining the concrete beneath the pot. This is why being cheap doesn't pay off.

*In the middle of writing this post, Crysi emailed me to say this to me re: the bit of Swans I sent out for preliminary feedback: "This is so awesome. It doesn't have the pacing issues that Pirates has, this is just. So awesome!" Which is the ego boost I need! Yeah, the ego boost from publishing has faded, sucked into the black pit that is my insecurity.