Okay, we’re on a roll here. I now have three plants which I am going to attempt to keep alive. Two of them have survived since last summer, mainly because they’re succulents and I have all but ignored them (proof that they thrive on blatant neglect, particularly where I’m concerned).

I have:

Crassula argentea (Jade plant)

Adromischus cooperi (also a member of the crassulaceae family)

and the already pictured Dracaena marginata magenta bush.

Wahey!

Congratulations, you have just bought a dracaena marginata magenta bush. Your new plant looks like this:

Except it’s a younger plant and isn’t quite so lush.

Fingers crossed now.

Follow-up to Catwoman is also a Non-Selective Herbicide

I just found out that I didn’t kill my plant at all and that the flower was meant to go kaput. I feel a bit dopey. In fact I am rather a lot dopey. Oh dear, my poor dear plant, alive and in a bin. People who can actually take care of plants must be thinking ‘what a dolt’, and I completely concur, with the benefit of hindsight. In retrospect and in feeble excuse, it looked nothing like my flower prototype. In the spirit of the ‘it’s someone else’s fault’ culture, why don’t the blooming (ha, see what I did there?) plant tags give you critical information like this? Grouse grouse. This will teach me to do a bit more research on plants instead of picking up pretty specimens willy-nilly.

I can now add ‘plants which you thought you’d killed but which were really alive but which you killed because you threw them in the bin’ to my list of plants that I have sent to my plant graveyard.

But onward we strive! My list of plants that I am resolving to experiment with now looks like the following (in no particular order):

Dracaena marginata
Dracaena sanderiana (’lucky bamboo’)
Zamioculcas zamiifolia
Sansevieria
Spathiphyllum

Scheme scheme scheme.

From the OCLC, here be a list of the titles that have both made it to the OCLC Top 1000 list and been banned according to the 4 volumes in the Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature series.

In the interests of seeing how erudite you are (or not, as the case may be), this has been doing the email rounds:

1) Put in bold the ones you’ve read completely.
2) Italicize the ones you’ve read excerpts or abridged versions of or which you recall having started to read and never finished.

#1 The Bible

#2 Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

#3 Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)

#4 The Koran

#5 Arabian Nights

#6 Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)

#7 Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift)

#8 Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)

#9 Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

#10 Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)

#11 Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli)

#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)

#13 Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank)

#14 Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)

#15 Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)

#16 Les Misérables (Victor Hugo)

#17 Dracula (Bram Stoker)

#18 Autobiography (Benjamin Franklin)

#19 Tom Jones (Henry Fielding)

#20 Essays (Michel de Montaigne)

#21 Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)

#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon)

#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)

#24 Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)

#25 Ulysses (James Joyce)

#26 Decameron (Giovanni Boccaccio)

#27 Animal Farm (George Orwell)

#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)

#29 Candide (Voltaire)

#30 To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)

#31 Analects (Confucius)

#32 Dubliners (James Joyce)

#33 Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)

#34 Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)

#35 Red and the Black (Stendhal)

#36 Das Kapital (Karl Marx)

#37 Flowers of Evil (Charles Baudelaire)

#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D. H. Lawrence)

#40 Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

#41 Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser)

#42 Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)

#43 Jungle (Upton Sinclair)

#44 All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)

#45 Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx)

#46 Lord of the Flies (William Golding)

#47 Diary (Samuel Pepys)

#48 Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)

#49 Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)

#50 Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)

#51 Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)

#52 Critique of Pure Reason (Immanuel Kant)

#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)

#54 Praise of Folly (Desiderius Erasmus)

#55 Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)

#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X)

#57 The Color Purple (Alice Walker)

#58 Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)

#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (John Locke)

#60 Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison)

#61 Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe)

#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

#63 East of Eden (John Steinbeck)

#64 Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)

#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)

#66 Confessions (Jean Jacques Rousseau)

#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel (François Rabelais)

#68 Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes)

#69 Talmud

#70 Social Contract (Jean Jacques Rousseau)

#71 Bridge to Terabithia (Katherine Paterson)

#72 Women in Love (D. H. Lawrence)

#73 American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)

#74 Mein Kampf (Adolf Hitler)

#75 Separate Peace (John Knowles)

#76 The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)

#77 Red Pony (John Steinbeck)

#78 Popol Vuh

#79 Affluent Society (John Kenneth Galbraith)

#80 Satyricon (Petronius)

#81 James and the Giant Peach (Roald Dahl)

#82 Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)

#83 Black Boy (Richard Wright)

#84 Spirit of the Laws (Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu)

#85 Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)

#86 Julie of the Wolves (Jean Craighead George)

#87 Metaphysics (Aristotle)

#88 Little House on the Prairie (Laura Ingalls Wilder)

#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Jean Calvin)

#90 Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse)

#91 The Power and the Glory (Graham Greene)

#92 Sanctuary (William Faulkner)

#93 As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)

#94 Black Like Me (John Howard Griffin)

#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (William Steig)

#96 Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)

#98 A Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)

#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Dee Alexander Brown)

#100 A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)

#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Ernest J. Gaines)

#102 Émile (Jean Jacques Rousseau)

#103 Nana (Émile Zola)

#104 Chocolate War (Robert Cormier)

#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin)

#106 Gulag Archipelago (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)

#107 Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert A. Heinlein)

#108 Day No Pigs Would Die (Robert Peck)

#109 Ox-Bow Incident (Walter Van Tilburg Clark)

#110 Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)

Eeeeh, that’s a bit poor isn’t it.

Follow-up to Indestructible

It is official – I am Plant Killer Extraordinaire. I have killed my tropical plant in orange gel thingy. This orange gel thingy was not after all the ultimate antidote to my serial plant killer status. I am clearly easily taken in by pretty ornamental plants in supermarkets that are placed with the fresh flower display for a reason (note to self: believe sticky label on plant container that says in big block letters DO NOT ADD WATER TO GEL).

For those of you who were wondering what happened to my living stones, they died. One of them was eaten up by some interesting white fungus and the other shrivelled up and popped its clogs, both despite (valiant, yes indeed) rescue attempts.

So now I have my eye on a jewel orchid (Ludisia Discolor), but have rather sensibly decided to leave it in the garden centre until I absorb some superior gardening skills.

It’s been a while. The past month has (mostly) been a blur of long days and not-long-enough nights, but having emerged (mostly) intact I am now turning my attention to somewhat more idle pursuits (as evidenced by previous pig post).

I’d resolved to be back with more of a flourish but have rather sadly discovered that after the month-long hiatus I actually don’t have anything particularly fascinating to write about. It has also just occurred to me that rather than this impressively introspective blog post, I instead opted to trailblaze my way back into the blog world with a picture of a pig. Such is life.

So I’ll tell you about my alter-ego, Catwoman, instead. Catwoman has one enviable gift (apart from sleeping for more than 12 hours if left to her own devices): she is blessed in the art of stealth tactics. Watch and learn as Catwoman sits stealthily near state-of-the-art intruder alert systems without being detected! Gasp in wonder as Catwoman walks stealthily within the range of state-of-the-art intruder alert systems without being detected! Bow down to the might of Catwoman as Batman enters the fray and immediately falls victim to the laser beams that Catwoman has stealthily thwarted! All hail Catwoman!

Okay, I admit to that last paragraph being somewhat artistically interpreted. All it really is is that Catwoman doesn’t set off infra-red alarms* because she is circulatorily challenged, but that’s not nearly quite as interesting, is it.

*She also has the enviable skill of avoiding detection by certain proximity readers that automatically open doors for you, by virtue of her being slightly vertically challenged as well.

Especially for someone I know, who continues to avoid pork because of the innate cuteness of pigs, this is Gerald (as named on the BBC website):

Peeping out from a picnic basket no less.

(Also posted in response to her complaint that I haven’t blogged for eons).