Some pretty plants join the party

I bought more plants last week.

Yes, yes. I left work Thursday night. Brian was hanging out with a friend, so I went to Walmart to look at what they had.

Things were bought. Things were not regretted.

ANYWAY! I put a lot of my new plants into pots Monday. The herb tower is now a thing and I have two new flowers to join my old daisy (which also got a new, roomier, better-soil home).

I started by bringing everyone outside and test-driving a couple pots.

First I wanted to work on the herb tower. I only bought three live herbs: lavender, sweet mint and rosemary. There is also a packet of chives seeds that I haven't yet attempted to do anything with.

You may have noticed the pots full of bottle caps in some of my other photos. My mom alwasy taught me to add rocks to the bottom of a pot for drainage for plants. Living in apartments the last few years, rocks weren't always easy to find. But I drank a lot of sodas.

Exhibit A.

I started saving caps from soda, shampoo, milk, juice and coffee creamer bottles, as well as whole empty energy shot and liquid water enhancer bottles. They are a good, lightweight option to add a drainage element for container plants when rocks aren't easy to come by. I guess it's also kind of a "green" option, but that wasn't my thought process at the time.

Anyway, I put a layer of the plastic bottles at the bottom of a large terra cotta pot. I filled it with the potting soil I also bought at Walmart (mixed with the less-good soil from old plants), then checked to see where a smaller clay pot would fit on top of it.

It was originally going to be centered.

Then I actually read the instructions on the lavender and mint peat pots. They said to remove the bottoms of the pot and leave the pieces in the hole that the plant was going into. I used a pocket knife to carefully rip off the bottom of the pots.

 After I got them into the edge of the large pot, I decided that placing the second pot, where the rosemary would go, a little off-center would look better and leave some more room in the bottom. So that's what happened.

View from above.

 I put the rosemary, which didn't come in a peat pot, into the top and admired the work. I think it came out looking pretty sweet.

Like I said, I also bought some chives seeds, and I'm trying to figure out if I want to put them in the spaces of the herb tower seen here, or give them a separate place to call home.

But with the herbs done, I moved on to the two flowers I bought.

I'm not usually an ornamental-plant type of person, but these two had really pretty purple flowers and one was kind of a trailing type of flower that was also labeled to be heat tolerant. It was an easy sell.

The last hanging pot I had was buried in the garage, but it had a built-in drainage tray, so I didn't have to use more bottle caps. :-)

When I pulled the plant out of its plastic pot, it looked like this:

I know a lot of store-bought plants are cramped in their pots, but I always feel kind of bad when I see how crowded they get. The roots were too tight together to really pull apart any (I tried), so I just had to make sure it had room to spread out in the new pot.

I'm so enamored with these kinds of plants.

Next came the delphinium. These were on display outside the garden center and I literally spent a few seconds lusting after the blooms the way most girls would lust after shoes. Just look at the blue-on-purple color scheme going on here.

It reminds me of those galaxy pictures you see online.

I didn't take photos of the repotting of this one. I'm sure you get the idea by now. Plus I was listening to a YouTube playlist on my phone and you may know how the music stops if you try to do anything else, like take a picture.

 Since I was on such a roll, I also brought out the old sweet potato vine (I'm thinking it's dead, but not entirely sure) and my gerbera daisy to join the fun.

Gerbera daisies are supposed to be one-year plants, but I've had mine for three now. I bring it in in the winter, where its green leaves whither and die off, but new green sprouts come up. It was sending up some new greenery when I realized how slowly it was growing. It has been in the same pot for a while now, so I moved it to a larger home and replaced the old, tired soil with some fresh stuff.

It kind of looks like size overkill, but trust me, this daisy can get pretty big.

The rest of my plants are still doing well. The garlic got some fertilizer and the pepper sprouts, celery and mystery bulb get water regularly. Once the roots start showing at the bottom of the pots for the pepper sprouts, I'll move them to the garden bed, where I hope to see them flourish. The final step I need to finish before moving anything to the ground is adding some compost to that soil. I will also need to get the radish and pumpkin seeds started, and buy a banana pepper plant for Brian. I'm still contemplating tomato plants, but that can wait, as they won't be starting from seed.

Also! Speaking of mystery plants (the bulb hasn't changed much on the surface) the mystery sprout I put in the corner of the garlic pot poked above ground!

What ARE you???

I hope everyone else's spring projects are shaping up, if you have any. And in case anyone has any misinformed thoughts that gardening or repotting are clean activities, I'll leave you with this reminder that it's easy to take photos of only the good-looking angle and results

Here's to a happy, green spring for everyone. May you be as happy this season as Acer was laying in and nibbling on the grass while I was working.

In memory of Grace

I hadn't mentioned my dumbo rat Grace in a while. She'd lost motion in her back legs and tail, wore a gaping wound in her back leg from dragging herself around and appeared to have lost the ability to even notice when she was urinating. Friday, Brian and I finally had to admit that it was no longer fair to let her keep living as she was.

We called the vet, who confirmed that things were not going to improve.

She was put to sleep Friday morning.

I miss my clumsy, scuffling, burrowing little rodent. My first non-fish pet since I left home. So, here's a photo collection.

**(What follows the photos is a detailed story of Grace's final days. If you prefer not to read, this is your disclaimer.)**

The day she came home, June 1, 2013.

 

She became adept at knocking the lid off her ball, but wasn't always quick enough to get herself out. 

 I won a free pet portrait at a raffle and this is the picture of Grace I sent to the artist and her depiction.

 "That's me!"

 Teaching Brian to use the touch screen.

Bat Rat helping Audrey in the kitchen.

 Hickory dickory dock, the rat ran up the clock.

 Every now and then, I'd catch her sleeping in a tucked-in position. Those ears!

 A family picture.

 Halloween laughs.

 Very helpful file inspections.

 One of the last pictures I took.

~*~*~*~*~

I had cried about the idea of losing my girl when we first noticed her legs not working, about a month ago. Apparently pet store rats are prone to this degenerative thing due to overbreeding. The vet speculated that it was due to a blood clot that found its way down her spine.

It was hard to think about losing her, because even without her back feet to use she was still so spirited. She still wanted to be held and burrow in the bed covers and know what was going on.

Part of the difficulty was that Grace had been with me and Brian through a lot of the hardest times of our relationship: alternating joblessness, crappy jobs, money troubles, moving to Temple, taking care of his grandmother, coping with losing her, dealing with an estate, more joblessness, etc. etc.

For a while, I thought she'd be okay, honestly. Then I picked her up one day and found she'd worn, literally worn, a wound in her leg from dragging. I was scared.

Shortly after I noticed that her back end was stained yellow from urine. Apparently she couldn't feel when she peed, so it was just sitting there on her fur (and presumably the wound).

I couldn't take her to get put down on my own, so Brian took Friday off work so we could go together. We gave her yogurt and fruit and sunflower seeds as we were getting ready, some of her favorite treats.

The vet and tech seemed as sad as we were. They had worked on her in January to remove a tumor from her chest. In fact, when Brian called the office and identified himself as "Gracie's owner," the girl on the other line immediately knew who he was talking about. I'm guessing they don't get a lot of rodents out there, or maybe Grace was just that charming.

She hated that bandage, but her stitches from the tumor removal healed without a hitch because of it.

They were very kind through the procedure, even letting us be with her as she went to sleep for the last time. I literally had snot dripping from my nose I was crying so hard. We wrapped her in a handkerchief that was normally a hammock for her, accepted a box of tissues, and left the office.

Grace is buried in the backyard next to my raised bed. I'm thinking of planting a pink rosebush over her grave.

The most touching moment of the day happened later though. We were getting in the car so Brian could drop me off at work when a guy ran up from a van with a bouquet of flowers for us. They were from the vet's office, with a card offering their condolences. Live flowers. Delivered.

I know that a  small vet's office couldn't possibly afford to send flowers to every euthanasia case. All I can figure is that they loved our rat as much as we did. I'm still in shock that they'd make such an effort, but very grateful for the kindness. With some time, we will return to them for care for our next small pets.

More about Audrey's plants

Hello and happy St. Patrick's Day! I hope luck is favorable to everyone today.

It's not been a particularly standout day for me so far. I go to work in about an hour, but I wanted to update you on all my plants! (I know you've just been on the edge of your seat to know what I do next with them.) I finally moved my sprouts (bell pepper, celery and garlic) to the wild outdoors yesterday.

The gathering of plants and supplies... on the grill...

Wild is a loosely-used term, of course. The most wildlife my backyard sees is rabbits, which will probably cause their own issues later in the season.

Anyway, the tiny bell peppers we've followed from seed... 

to sprout...

have graduated again! Yesterday I moved seven stalwart sprouts 

 Plus a rogue blade of grass

into some roomier peat pots.

I water plants in peat pots by filling a container with water, so the roots are encouraged to grow deeper to reach it.

What I did was crack the eggshells that the sprouts were contained in so that 1. the roots could move past them without having to go up and out and 2. so the shells might biodegrade faster and put more calcium into the soil.

While pulling out the shells that hadn't shown proof of life, I did find one sprout that might be a late bloomer. The root still looked alive, so I put it back in the egg crate to see if it just needs a little more time. Maybe it'll poke up, maybe it won't, but I owe it the chance. 

Then there's the garlic. You'll remember the weed-like pace at which these boogers grew.

 A difference of just one week.

Well the leaves were getting so tall they couldn't support themselves, and I knew the bulbs underground would need some room to grow soon. So to my long pot they went.

At first I tried to separate the plants, but the roots had grown through the bottom of the pots (proof that watering from the bottom does encourage deeper roots, in my opinion). I didn't want to damage them by pulling them apart, so I tore the peat pots into thirds and buried them in the soil as a unit, just with room to move out from one another. 

As far as the celery, I added a second stalk a few weeks ago, so there are actually two of those now. They were pretty uneventful plants: just bury them in dirt as deep as the top of the original, cut-off stalks. 

Now, there were some unintended replantings yesterday too. The first was a surprise. I found this fist-sized bulb under a bag of birdseed in a pot on the porch probably a month ago. I didn't know what type of bulb it was, and it was shrunken and moldy looking. So obviously I stuck it in some dirt to see what would happen. It was actually sitting in the long pot that I put the garlic in. When I took it out to get the pot ready for the garlic, I found new roots growing! Not one to discourage progress, I put it into a smaller pot of its own and moved it to a sunny corner of the porch with the celery.

What IS it??

I really am excited to see what it may turn into. A flower, I'm sure, but I'm not sure what kind. 

Also, while digging dirt out of a plantless pot for the various replantings, I found a couple of very-alive sprouts inside. I'm not sure if they were damaged in my shoveling, but they were interesting, so I stuck them in the corner of the garlic pot. 

And remember the rogue grass from the egg carton?

I felt bad just pulling it out, so I also stuck it into the garlic pot. Yes there's a whole yard of grass out there, but this guy grew because of ME. It has a soft spot in my heart now.

So I managed a lot of moving and digging yesterday. Here's hoping the next frost that's supposed to happen this month either doesn't happen, isn't that bad, or gives enough warning for me to bring everyone back inside before it happens. 

The radish and pumpkin seeds we bought a few weeks ago are still in their packets. I also found a packet of container-appropriate spinach seeds that I'd forgotten I bought last year. Maybe they would still sprout if I put them in some water? The sweet potato sprouts are also still in the kitchen, but I want them to be a bit bigger before they go outside. 

The future still has more for this year's gardening ventures. I haven't even started with my herb plans yet, my tomato tower is just awaiting some fresh soil before I get some plants for it. And the shallot things that I bought several years ago are still sprouting, despite being out in freezes and dry weather and rain and no dirt. They need a home too. 

Clearly I've found a way to stay busy when I'm not working. 

And my dutiful daytime domestic activity companion is just as excited as I am.

On being a pharmacy cashier

All right, I just submitted my first timecard for the new pharmacy cashier position I started last week.

 I get to wear comfy clothes.

First, I want to state how glad I am I started a part-time job instead of taking on a full-time. I have felt so exhausted every morning since starting this job, and it's only four hours a day. If this was going back into the corporate world, I probably wouldn't have managed to do anything but work and sleep last week.

That stated, I think I will like this job. There's a lot to learn on using the computer systems, but everyone else seems to have a good grasp on it and I was already starting to get the hang of it after the second day. Obviously the easiest scenario is when everything goes right: the person gives you their name, you find their prescription in the proper bin, you scan it, they pay for it, and they go on their merry way.

Unfortunately, everything goes right seemingly two or three out of ten times. The rest of the time, the prescription hasn't been put away yet, the doctor hasn't called in a change in medication yet, insurance hasn't processed or paid their part yet, etc. etc. Usually it's not too hard to fix these problems and inform the patient of the situation. Other times you get the people who swear this happens every time or want the prescription 10 minutes after leaving their doctor appointment.

All that aside, it's not a bad gig. The people I am working with are great. Good senses of humor, generally, and happy to help when newbie Audrey has another question.

I'm even scheduled to work a whole eight-hour shift (eep) next Saturday, so I have a lot to practice and get proficient on this week. Not an insurmountable task, and hopefully I'll readjust to working again. I even got sweet new shoes with some birthday money this weekend so my feet aren't killing me when I get home.

Mmmmemory foam.

Birthdays and adulthood

Holy moley birthdays are not as much fun as a grownup.

I knew the fanfare lessens as you get older and birthdays haven't been as big a deal since I left college (particularly after the 20th Birthday party my friends threw for me), but for my 26th yesterday I really felt the luster leave.

On the bright side, Brian and I went to lunch with Jacque and I got a free ice cream, which was nice. And it was fun to hang out with Jacque mid-week. Brian and I picked up some cheesecake and wine after before heading back to town so he could drop me off at work and go make a call.

It was only my third day at this job, and though I had been asked how old I was the past two days and mentioned that my birthday would be Wednesday, I didn't expect recognition for it. But logic doesn't always communicate with that hopeful part of the brain that hopes someone would remember and at least say "Oh yeah, happy birthday." No one did. I didn't expect anyone to, but part of me hoped someone would. It kind of put a damper on my mood.

But after I clocked out and sat down to wait for Brian to pick me up, my sister called and sang me happy birthday, as did my aunt, uncle and cousin, so that was nice. And when we got home, Brian fed Acer, cut up the cheesecake and poured some wine. We didn't have any birthday candles, so he improvised:

That is indeed a tealight on a toothpick. Redneck fabulous. 

We spent the evening catching up on Once Upon a Time on Hulu and cuddling with Acer (who loved every second of it). 

All in all, it was not a bad birthday. Twenty-six obviously wouldn't be as much fun as 20 or 21, but standards of fun change. The only thing I really wanted for my birthday was to hang out with my old friends, but it would have been too much trouble to ask them to come down by the time I'd figured that out. It's not a total loss though, there's lots of times we can schedule hangouts.

I did get some boots last weekend using a gift card I'd gotten for Christmas in 2013 and called them an early birthday gift, and we picked up Mockingjay Part 1 at WalMart this morning. My mom sent me a card and some money, so I'm planning to use that to buy some shoes for my new job (which I'm planning to blog about after I've completed a full week), then either some gardening stuff or fabric. I also got an email stating I can pick up a free birthday cupcake from Gigi's in Georgetown before May 1, so there's something else to look forward to.

Here's to 26 not being as big a train-wreck of a year as 25 was. Maybe some new beginnings will take hold.

Where I learned how starting with nothing can mean slower progress

Remember the 100 push up challenge Brian and I started last week?

We just did Week One Day 3, the end of the first week, of the challenge. The last two days, I'd managed to barely reach the minimum of the final set, where you are supposed to do as many push ups as possible before you can't do them anymore. 

Today I was supposed to do a minimum of 10 push ups for my max. I barely managed six. 

Brian said maybe we should re-do the last two days of Week One before moving on to Week Two. While he appears to have done the last few days beautifully, he said it has been a challenge for him too. But being male with a natural propensity toward upper body strength, it's to be expected that he doesn't struggle as much as I do. But since he's the only person I have to compare myself to, it's hard not to. 

He did point out that I managed to complete 38 push ups today (and 33 on Day Two and 27 on Day One) with breaks. Compared to my initial test, where I managed 11 before collapsing, I have to admit I have gotten maybe a little stronger. 

So we are going to backtrack a little on this and see if it helps. Since he does do a job that involves physical labor, he does have some muscle built up that I don't, Y chromosome aside, and I really appreciate him being so encouraging.

Actually, he told me if I finish this challenge with him, he would do the Two Hundred Lunges challenge with me next (maybe following the Two Hundred Sit Ups challenge, if we decide to work down the body gradually). He thinks that if we were do do a lower body-focused exercise, I would have the advantage. Because he has an athletic background and I do not, I think we would be evenly matched at best. The sit up challenge I feel would be a similar match. 

But, as disappointed as I am with how I'm doing in just the first week, it is kind of nice to have a physical project to focus on and a partner with whom to do it. 

By the way, we have only taken one progress-picture of our arms. We did not get a before picture, but we took a photo after Week One Day Two. We might do weekly photos to look at our progress, which should be fun to look at later. 

Awesome news!

I start a new job Monday!

Yes! Actually, I got two phone calls yesterday. One from Buc-ee's, where I'd sent an application last month. They conducted a short phone interview and told me if the general manager wanted to hire me, I'd hear from them within 24 hours. The second from the staffing agency, saying that the pharmacy I'd interviewed with the week before for a cashier position had made the decision to hire me. I let the agency know my availability (where they decided to start me next Monday), and I went in this morning to go over some privacy information/laws/procedures for the company the pharmacy is run through. 

I did not get the call back from Buc-ee's, which was actually a relief. While it would have paid better and been more hours than the pharmacy position, it was going to be really hard to go from not working at all for two months to working eight hours a day on my feet again. I mean, I could do it if I had to, but it was going to be rough. Taking a part time job means I can ease myself back into the working world and probably take another part-time job for the morning if I so desired. 

It's funny, because after I called the agency to do the weekly check-in (letting them know my availability) Monday, I was talking to the dog, telling him we could use some good news, and good news came. Right when I was starting to wonder if I'd ever be considered good enough for a job again. 

On an unrelated note, Brian and I were talking about exercise on Sunday and I just had to open my mouth and tell him about the 100 push up challenge/training program I'd read about online years ago. Basically, it starts by asking you to do as many good-form push ups as you can do, then you follow a regiment to get you up to being able to do 100 consecutive push ups in six weeks.

Brian got excited about it. 

So we started the challenge with the initial test on Sunday. He got 21 good-form push ups before collapsing. I got 11 modified-style push ups (the girly ones, where you are on your knees instead of your toes) before I was done. 

Today we did the first day of the challenge. I had to do reps of six, six, four, four and then max (I made it to seven), while Brian did ten, twelve, seven, seven then max (he made it to 13). 

We have a ways to go, especially since both of us were still sore from our initial test two days ago. But doing things as a duo holds us each accountable. We will see how this progresses.