making a house a home

Our little household has grown by leaps and bounds. Leafs and grounds? Hm. There are an awful lot of coffee grounds out back... Anyway, the bedroom seems to be at its final stage in evolution: it has been painted, there are curtains, there is a bed. And the living room has turned into a nursery. NO! Not that kind of nursery!

A dead basil plant sits next to the south window to show neighbors how in denial I am about it being dead... but next to it there are sprigs of 'showy flameflower' (did you read that as 'flamethrower' the first time?) and up in the corner, a spider plant. Below the spider plant is my eccentric aloe, who is always in 'time out' because it likes the shade in the dark corner and it won't get run over by the puppy there.

(Prior to space heater and piles of plants - but aloe is still in time out. You'll note that a thrift store sleeping bag is now Anakin's living room bed. Happy puppy!)


















The shared wall has a book shelf that hosts a photo of our West Coast kin, along with pothos spp crawly plants that will take over the entire room eventually. They're sacreligiously arranged in bottles that used to house Don Julio tequila, Arrogant Bastard Ale, an Irish whiskey of sorts Patron, and some other novel brews. These are the perks of living in a town with diverse taste in alcohol. In an old thrift store teapot, two sprigs of 'time out aloe' are taking root. Apologies for poor photo quality.


















The one somewhat-useful table in the living room keeps the big barrister cabinet thing from attacking us (it wants to fall down if you look at it too long). The table hosts a jalapeno plant, wandering jew, and some funky off-brand of parsley until the weather warms up. The table also provides nighttime housing for some of our patio plants... we've got frogfruit (that's not transplanting very well at all), some native forbs (same story as frogfruit), some clusters of candelilla (can-deh-lee-ya), and quite a few Harvard agave pups. So many agave pups... Our secondary table-thing is the roosting place of a 'Texas bird of paradise' plant and a purple prickly pear, so no surface is immune! Maybe in the spring, the living room table will be useful for things like meals - but for now we enjoy the plants more than we feel inconvenienced.

As for the daily rotation of porch plants, our super-awesome neighbor across the street procured some sprigs of Mormon tea and gopher plant(??) for us as well, hopefully we'll glean enough knowledge by osmosis to keep the rest of the plants alive! It does feel strange, taking hummingbird feeders and plants in at night and then worrying over them when we do leave them out and the temp is below 40... guess it's just the 'new plant' jitters.

And here's the porch now: after "401 North Senate Street" was interpreted by one shipper of a package, our PO box has competition. Anything that can't ship to a PO box can go to 401... not Senate Street. Those fancy numbers? Are classic blue tape, of course!


















PS - Anyone who noticed the yellow mop bucket in the corner of that photo: 10 points! It's our new laundry wringer. To save my frozen fingers and crazy strong biceps, of course.