Botanical Cannibalism

Stay tuned for an exciting announcement tomorrow!  You can follow me at @danafraedrich on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram or @whatiftales on Facebook to keep up with all the latest news.

Some of you may remember a certain lemon balm being mentioned in a certain previous post about Sulky Teenager Plants.   I may have also mentioned in that same post about a problem I have with remembering to water said plants.  Remember these guys?

So happy! So full of life!

Well, now they're these guys:

So sad. So, so dry.

The rosemary is actually doing okay...okay-ish...it'll be fine, but it's a scrubby Mediterranean shrub, so that's not too surprising.  The sage will be okay too.  I've seen it come back from worse.  My poor lemon balm, though...I've watered it in the hopes that maybe there's still some life in there, but I'm not too optimistic.  If it's as dead as it looks, it's going to get churned up into dirt and serve as a home/food for other fellow plants - yes, I plan on continuing in this mad venture.  I'm going to do better going forward.  Really!  I'm going to set reminders and everything!  Don't believe me?  We'll see who has the last laugh.  Spoiler: not the poor plants who will die for the cause.

Here's a creepy thought: plants cannibalize other plants.  Well, they actually eat a little bit of everything, don't they?  Given enough time, they'll eat all of us.  That sort of makes plants the dominant species on the planet, doesn't it?  Any vegans out there?  How does that make you feel?  It gets extra grotesque if you start thinking about other species doing that to each other.

*Short interlude in writing* 

So that led me to look up what species in the animal kingdom eat their own kind.  You know which result left me zero-percent surprised?  Spiders.  Horrible, creepy spiders.  Yeah, yeah, they eat other bugs.  They perform a service.  Well, you know what?  Stay hidden, creepy hell spawn!  Then you won't get dead in my house!  You know what wasn't in any of the lists or articles I read?  Dogs.  Because they're the best (cats were, though.  Yikes!).  I quickly got creeped out by the rest of what I read, so that search has now been closed in my browser.

Right, we need a palate cleanser after that.  Look!  Here's a picture of a cute puppy!  Non-cannibalistic puppy dog.

"Hello, readers! Pet me!"

This post has gotten weird.  In other news, I have a new tool for writing!

I know it looks like the next gen iPhone, but it's actually a mini iPad.  We bid on it at a benefit thing we attended and won.  I'm using it right now to write this blog entry.  I'm pretty pleased with the performance so far.  It does take a little getting used to, as the format of some of the apps are different from both the phone and laptop versions.  I especially like that I can hold it in one hand, though.  Unfortunately, I won't be using Microsoft Word for writing on here.  Apparently the mobile version, which does the whole syncing between devices thing, requires a subscription, and I just can't be asked to pay a continuing charge for a program I already paid for once.  Apple Pages, however, knows how to make a girl happy.  I don't like Pages as much as Word when it comes to functionality - I think Word is both more robust and cleaner in that area - but I can write in Pages and then just transfer to Word with minimal effort.  Problem solved!  The problem of which case to get - with a keyboard?  Corner protection?  Cover?  Style? - was a much bigger ordeal.  The hubs doesn't get to choose for me, but he gets an opinion, which I deeply respect, so there were two days of discussions.  We searched together as a team, though, and eventually found one we both liked.  It should be arriving today.  I'll review what I think of it next week.  Overall, I'm very pleased about this purchase!

In a related yet no less nerdy note, this is also the first time I've used SquareSpace's blogging app.  Also very nice.  I continue to be impressed by how intuitive their products are.  I haven't read any tutorials for using this app.  Just a little poking around has shown me where almost everything I need is.  Very well done, SquareSpace!

If you made it this far, past that turn we took into deep left field, congratulations!  Thanks for reading!