damselfish

Yesterday I went to the orchid festival at Fairchild, hoping to pick up another one or two. I'm heartened by my success with my current three, and my ability to get one of them to bloom profusely. The others haven't bloomed, but given how hard people say they are to grow and my benign neglect of them, this is a real big deal. They're still alive. 1 out of 3 is flowering? I am some kind of magic.

I see Fire Dance again this year, which I've been lusting after, but I can't find it for less than $40 and I'm nothing if not cheap. I wander around. We buy my mother a cattlya, and my grandmother buys a dendrobium to stick on a tree.

There's some that have stuck out in my mind the entire day, and I try to hold the stall in mind; it's right under the tree with the mynah birds. I'm momentarily distracted by gelato and actually find hazelnut (omfg you guys! I haven't found hazelnut gelato since Italy!), but at last I return to these little orchids. My grandmother laughs at me, and the way I gravitate toward orange flowers and tiny flowers-- here I am, surrounded by giant orchids, and I go after all the tiny ones. I can't help it, they're just so much more structurally interesting because I never see them, whereas I've seen phaleonopsis time and time again.

( They're Epi. pacifica, which means they're probably epidendrums but maybe epiphyllums? idk. )

To cap the day off, I ran a few dungeons with Pocket Healer and I finally named my fox, Novosibirsk, for the city where the scientist Belyaev studied domestication with foxes. I'd just read the NatGeo article that morning and it was fresh in my mind as I looked at my white fox. She's got a Russian minor, so spent half of Gnomeregan trying to teach me how to pronounce Novosibirsk. Then she sent me the proper spelling of Novosibirsk and said "this is how you say it in Russian," to which I could only reply, "I don't read Cyrillic, but I'm pretty sure the first four letters in that word spell 'hobo.'"

I'm pleased I waited so long on naming the fox, because now I'm pleased with all my pet names. I thought nothing would please me so much as Insurance the dog, but Lunchbox the turtle is getting up there.