Cacti and doodles

 

This time next week I will be sitting at the kitchen table here at the mews writing a blog post and . . . paralysed with fear by the music for the Muddlehamptons' Christmas concert.*

            Yes, choir practise starts up again next Thursday, and right at the moment I'm chiefly remembering that Ravenel scares me.  I'm also remembering that I was sufficiently a damn fool to agree to sing for the bishop at Constantinople** in . . . gleep . . . three weeks.  And didn't I start this doodling*** scam since the Muddlehamptons broke for the summer?  So I'm doing my adding more stuff thing again??†

            Sigh.

            Meanwhile, Thursday afternoon handbells having soaked up a couple of perfectly good gardening hours, I have a courtyard at the cottage still full of plants and the hellhounds, while very restrained and tactful most of the time††, do need a place to pee before bed, as do most of us.†††  I cut back another rampant geranium today.  And therefore have about eight more incipient geraniums sitting in a pitcher of water.  Anyone want a geranium?           

Ajlr wrote: 

I still think most of the standard cottage-garden herbaceous cranesbills are a dead bore. 

It's a big world, there's room for both our views.

*goes off to admire own collection of cranesbills*

I can't get rid of mine.  My predecessor, who had Excellent Taste‡, had quite a few of them.  They're frelling impossible to eradicate.  You hoick up several green-gardening-bags-full and next year . . . there they are again, creeping round the corners and trying to look placatory.  But I make a really poor ruthless tyrant because I start admiring them for their tenacity.  So, I have a few cranesbills.  Feh.  I've even got a new little fleck of alchemilla mollis at the cottage—gods know where it came from:  some daring raid over the wall some night when I had a pillow over my head—which I got all soppy over and allowed to live.  I had sworn undying vengeance on alchemilla mollis at the old house.

I like the willingness to flower/grow of pelargoniums but it's the very distinctive smell of their leaves that puts me off. If someone came up with a smell-free variety I'd be very happy to give them houseroom. Until then, I shall have to stick with my couple of scented-leaves varieties.

I'd say it varies kind of a lot.  The standard bedding geraniums are the ones with the real geranium reek.  The fancy schmancy ones, not so much.  Appleblossom does have the smell, but it's pretty restrained.  Depends on how much you loathe it, I suppose.  Many, many, many, many years ago I used to house-sit at a house with a conservatory that was nothing but racks of geraniums and I could barely stand to stay in there long enough to water them all.  PONG.  Maybe the experience inoculated me. 

Mrs Redboots wrote:  I love cacti, and I especially love Christmas cactuses, and I really, really want a new one this year.

I realized, reading yesterday's post this morning, that any not-a-plant-person will have been confused by my use of the word 'cactus'.  I didn't think Christmas cacti actually were cacti—I thought they were succulents—but apparently they are:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiday_Cactus  The, er, point is that the spiny prickly barbed ones are flesh-eating monsters.‡‡  Succulents, and cacti like Christmas cacti, are soft little things, they just have a funny approach to leaves and stems.  And flowers.   I think my original pink Christmas cactus is one I took over back at the old house, which had been hanging on by a neglected thread for some time—which would make it over twenty years old.  You can keep them under some control by sheer abuse, but eventually your conscience will get the better of you and you will pot them on . . . and then they grow to the size of small rooms and all the cuttings root too.  Quite like geraniums.  ‡‡‡  

Mrs Redboots also wrote:  Amazon—and its minions, including, lately, audible—has no trouble keeping me permanently logged in.

I wish this forum did! Does anybody else find they need to log in afresh at least once a week, or have I done something peculiar? 

A lot of people have answered this already.  I will just add . . . me too.  Being admin is no help at all.   This is why I ALWAYS write posts in Word before cautiously copying and pasting in WordPress.                                

 * * * 

* Unfortunately they just did Handel's Messiah.  I want to sing the Messiah.  I know it's a low taste.  I DON'T CARE.  There are some old war horses that, for some people, just go on being transcendent however often you play/hear them.  Messiah—and La Traviata, and several of Beethoven's symphonies—are that for me.^

            And speaking of Beethoven's symphonies, I want to sing in the Ninth too. 

^ Ravel's Bolero, however, should have been drowned at birth.  I probably wouldn't have gone to see '10' in the first place—the plot irritates me profoundly—but anything featuring Bolero is a Must to Avoid.

            How pleasing not to have to dither about it.  Not to have gone around wringing my hands and murmuring, Oh, gods!  It's the greatest film ever made!  Only it has Bolero in it!  What shall I doooo? 

** Constantinople Hampshire you understand.  I assume the Orient Express has wifi but I doubt it takes hellhounds. 

*** Pam Adams wrote:  But it would be nice to differentiate a Fast doodle from a Tsornin doodle, wouldn't it?

Clearly, Fast is the one without a hellcat (Narknon) lolling at his feet. 

Well . . . probably not.  People who don't themselves sketch or doodle^ mostly don't realise how surprisingly complicated a few scrawly lines on a page is.  The reason the bats in the belfry doodle is going to have its own higher-price category is because it's complicated.  The $10 doodle is basically One Thing.  The $15 doodle is either a repeat of the One Thing or a sort of . . . one and a half things.  A horse and a folstza is inescapably two things.  Bats plus bells in a belfry is at least two things.

            If I could get my ass in gear to tidy up a bats in the belfry doodle^^ enough for Blogmom to post it we could finally get this show on the road.  But . . . I'm hoping to leave the doodle option up for a while longer after the straight auction and the, er, not quite so straight book sale, finish.  If it turns out that doodles continue being popular with a small mad^^^ segment of the blog-reading population, after the bell fund is wound up, we'll just choose a permanent charity^^^^ for doodle profits and keep on. 

            At which point, although I'll have to check with Blogmom about all of this, I assume we could widen the intake a bit.  I don't imagine the small blessed-with-sardonic-humour faction will keep me all that busy, you know?  So you could ask for a horse and a hunting cat (Two Things) for $20.  And the sad truth is I like being asked to draw stuff.  This self-motivation thing is a ratbag, it's not one of my long suits, and it gets used pretty frelling hard elsewhere.

            Also, every new doodle is blog material.  And you know how I feel about blog material.^^^^^ 

^ Apologies if I'm doing anyone in injustice here.  Please remember, as you read on, I'm a very low grade doodler, and be merciful. 

^^ It has not been a good few weeks for much of anything but keeping my head down.  Sorry about that. 

^^^ No, wait, I don't mean mad, exactly.  Um.  Er.  Yes.  Possessing a rich and sardonic sense of humour is what I mean. 

^^^^ Something to do with either critters or books, I think.  They haven't started teaching Seeing Eye dogs to read aloud, have they? 

^^^^^ So don't ask for anything embarrassing. 

† Not to mention Treasures of Montezuma.  

ajlr wrote:  I don't think that Montezuma 2 and 3 are available for the iPad yet. Probably just as well.

I looked it up and you're right.  I have just sufficient self-control not to poke around any farther and see if there's a prospective release date yet.  Stop looking at me like that.  2 is available on the iPhone, and it's clearly going to be better on the iPad.  Ergo.  And speaking of better on the iPad, I've just downloaded Osmos for iPad.  I have it on Pooka, and it will clearly be better on the bigger screen. . . . Clearly.

            Anybody know anything about Master of Alchemy?  Spirit?  Fruit Ninja? 

            . . . I'll get over this craze in a minute, really I will.  I got over Angry Birds.  I did eventually have to install an adult-proof lock on Fingerzilla till the addiction waned, but it did wane.  It only took [gnzzzngt mumble] supplementary Green & Black's. 

†† Usually.  I tweeted earlier about Darkness throwing up on the carpet.  Usually I get him onto the kitchen lino in time.  ARRRRGH. 

††† They're BOYS.  It never ceases to amaze me how bad male aim is with those things^.   I am not going to attempt to teach hellhounds to use the toilet. 

^ Ever since I was introduced to Freud at an unnecessarily young age I have said that it is not penis envy it is directional pee envy. 

‡ Ewww 

‡‡ shalea wrote: 

I gave up cacti, because they bite. First thing this one did was bite me. Second thing it did was bite the clerk. Sigh.

Sounds like my cactus. I don't do cacti anymore, but this one is, at lowest possible calculation, 30 years old and I grew it from a seed (so I have a responsibility to it, of course). 

Yes.  Things do have a way of weaselling themselves into one's life, if not precisely affections. 

 I am more than a little afraid of it because not only does it bite, the spines have seem to have nasty, tiny little barbed tips that embed themselves and then break off.

Some of them are mildly poisonous as well, or maybe I'm just allergic.  Cacti.  Charming.  The problem is that I do find them charming, I just got tired of the pain.  I had an entire little forest of the things in a sink at the old house which I eventually managed to kill off by not getting them indoors fast enough one winter.  Whew.  The one I have left from that era is now this deranged clump of tiny but dangerous bristly nodules all rising off one flimsy stem . . . which I have to keep propped up on the pot edge.  It appears to be thriving in its peculiar way:  it even flowers occasionally just to unnerve me. 

I have neither excuse nor explanation for buying the New Vicious Beast yesterday.  Except that secretly I like cacti.  I just wish I had iron skin.  I swear the NVB hisses when I walk by.

I had come to a conclusion about a year ago that it probably needed repotting and spent a lot of time contemplating how I might do that with a minimum of blood and pain, but was much relieved when a reliable plant nursery employee told me that I probably shouldn't try unless I really wanted to (cacti not only have very minimal root systems so it's not root-bound, and apparently expect very, very poor soil). 

YAAAAY.  Thank you.  Meanwhile, however, I did finally buy some orchid compost yesterday.  I have two orchids that keep refusing to die.  

‡‡‡ Anybody want a Christmas cactus?