Mishalak

The snow iris are blooming and I am cutting back my pussytoes from the sidewalk. I am also quite sure that the western springbeauties (Claytonia rosea) are reproducing in my yard. They are one of the few early spring flowers from the Rockies and have to form a tuber before they can bloom. The fact that there are plants I am sure I did not place getting ready to boom means that last year there were new plants I did not spot. Also they are happy enough with the conditions I have created under my zombie elm to reproduce so... success.

The most I am willing to do is periodically dig up bulbs or plants to reduce crowding. Mostly plants should settle themselves into locations they find comfortable without my planning or direction. After all if I had a small robot arm I would not want to be individually directing all of them. They need to swarm the hero without waiting to for orders.

2018 March 31

CuteDateSuggestions
cute date idea: we go to a botanical garden. you point out a flower and i immediately eat it

TheBashfulBotanist
As a botanist who works at a botanical garden, please don’t.

Kihaku-Gato
As a Horticulture Tech graduate who had a classmate that’d eat anything that our professor would point out in plant ID, I agree please seriously don’t

Afroman-Aquarium
As a horticultural Tech graduate who ATE anything my professor would point out in plant ID class. PLEASE DON'T.

Veni-Vidi-Vinca (a.k.a. Mishalak)
*pointing out the innocent looking white bloom of Toxicoscordion venenosum* “Isn’t that beautiful,” while grinning one of those Grinch-y grins of a wonderfully awful idea.

(Do let me know if the image is too big or breaks things. I am just getting back into posting on Dreamwidth since Tumblr became too stupid to use. I shall eventually move this post to a date of 2018 when I took it. There is going to be a lot of back posting things here as I rejigger stuff from my Tumblr at http://veni-vidi-vinca.tumblr.com/ to this blog thingy.)

At the request of a great many people (one) I shall be showing off pictures and explaining my villainous theory of gardening. One of the qualities of a villain is having a huge burst of enthusiasm for a project and eventually tapering off to laziness and/or boredom. Semi-natural plantings are perfect for this since once established they do a lot of caring for themselves. In my shortgrass prairie garden, for example, the buffalo grass stays under about 10 cm of height so it requires no mowing, hurah! It does only look that perfect green in the spring and fades a bit even with adequate summer moisture, but it needs much less than grasses from climates wetter than Colorado's front range. If I were trying for a planting like this much east of Kansas City this probably would not work for a lazy gardener unless the soil drained much more freely than even the sandy loam in my bit of earth.

The very impressive flowers are shell leaf penstemons (Penstemon grandiflorus). They are native to only the far eastern bits of Colorado, but they do well with no more care than moving the few that seed themselves in inconvenient locations. Like many penstemons they are short lived, but reseed themselves very freely and will come up through the buffalo grass to an adequate degree.

The Disney version of The Sword in the Stone really is a children's movie. The the sense that it is an adequate work with cute moments, good art, fun songs, and no real plot. It is a series of scenes only barely held together and an ending that is abrupt and not particularly satisfying now that I am an adult. It is not bad, but it is sort of a "cut every corner" this thing is only for kids sort of product. Still, the song about packing and the other one about being evil are quite fun. I mildly would like to add them to my music collection.

Okay. So I saw the Starz American Gods TV series on DVD over at the library and I have given it a try. The musical choices are mostly pretty good and interesting. The show.. It is not bad. It just is not as interesting as it should be. It is about half a very interesting and atmospheric show and half what wants to be entrancing and feels more like filler to me. Long stretches of dialogue that go around and around on the same point without being as profound as they want to be. Then there are long slow lyrical scenes that are just achingly beautiful.

On the whole I think I overpaid very slightly by getting it for free. Not hugely, but it is a hot, beautiful mess rather than must see TV. If the second season comes out on DVD I won't be impatiently waiting for it.

My most specific criticism: Watching a guy repeatedly deny what is going on is dead boring when the whole point of the show is "gods". And he does it for most of the first 7/8 episodes.

And the New Horizons spacecraft did not die. Indeed it kept its promise to the New Year and was as good an explorer, as good a robot, as any ever built.

New Horizons at NASA

This animated film is worth watching if you can stand to watch a film in French with English subtitles. If I had to watch the dubbed version I would have quit 10 minutes in because I did not like the English voice acting. The plot is completely ridiculous steampunk alternate history nonsense, but it is pretty with enjoyable moments.

It would probably have been good for me to get used to living with other people. It is a useful skill. As it is I have lived by myself for almost half my life now and have become very odd and slovenly as a result. It is just too darn easy to leave problems to sit if there is no one else to complain or silently judge about them. It is very nice to live in a clean house with nothing cluttering the floor, but that also requires either an attention span longer than than it takes a muon to decay or actual effort.

It is very easy to get used to doing anything you want whenever you want. Playing music loud enough to rattle your soul? No one on the other side of a wall to mind, so why not? Awake in the middle of the night? Put on a podcast without worry that you might wake other sleepers. Want to alter the layout of the garden paths and kill everything in your way? The committee of one approves the plan and authorizes work to proceed without delay. I am the dictator of my patch of earth and answerable to no one! Muhahahahahah!

People with roommates or partners might be less lonely, but by gosh it is very easy to live as solitary as a puma.

From about 1999 until 2014 I was a member of DASFA. With three years to look back on I am overall happy that I left.

Making any group work can be like pushing a rope uphill. The trouble with special interests groups (as opposed to groups like old line churches or rotary clubs with a more general membership) is that they often attract extreme personalities. A club for rose lovers is a grand idea, but the people who are going to be members are probably people who have the fewest other social outlets, want to use the club as a way to promote their rose business, have the loudest opinions, and the like. A person who has a couple roses and knows quite a bit about them is not going to show up to meetings. Even the otherwise well rounded and stable rose fancier is likely to drop out because hanging with the users and the extremists is not going to be fun.

So it is with science fiction/fantasy clubs. In the modern era due to competition from online resources, the lack of inexpensive meeting space, and lack of free time on the part of potential members they are much more in danger of dying out. New members are turned off by the old guard who are 50% people who have no other social outlet because they are such assholes that no other group will take. There are definitely some good people who I like on an individual basis in the club and who I see at other events, others who I like well enough but we do not have much to socialize over, and then a small group of people I cannot stand.

Yes, I would liked to have been a member of an ongoing club. The thing is that to make that happen I would have needed to be a bad guy who either worked with reforming behavior or threw out troublesome members. That was not what I wanted to do and I think even the members I like would not have gone along with or supported that kind of plan. I think it is healthier for me to not be a member of a somewhat more general group of secular/agnostics/atheists/humanists. There are still people I do not get along with, but there is a general enough attraction to the group that I can make plenty of friends.