I must say, even though I am not usually the kind of person who waxes poetic about commercial services... I could have the turbotax people's babies this morning.
I've been using Turbotax for the web for the past 5 years (Which is cool on its own, since they have PDFs of my last 5 tax returns available right there online.) It's a great tool, I've been really happy with it when I didn't have very complicated taxes. Since I don't own a house, I usually take the standard deduction, super easy.
When I first moved to California, though, That first year I had to file state taxes in both California and Kentucky. At that point in time, Turbotax only let you do one state tax return. It was a total headache. States don't make it easy, at all.
Anyway, this year, I have to file taxes in both California and Missouri. I was looking forward to the messy process of trying to figure out if I should file resident or non resident in each state, and figuring out how to deduct one state's taxes in the calculation for the other and all that stupid crap, when, lo and behold, Turbotax for the web tells me it can do up to 3 state income taxes and make them all work amongst themselves correctly. Dude, how awesome is that? I have to pay a whole new fee for each state's return, but I know that that extra $30 is saving me hours of confusion, and I sure as hell know that my time is worth it.
I did all of my taxes in an hour this morning. I think this deserves a trip to Starbucks.
So Rusty had to go back in to work today. He left at 6, and I was expecting him at home around 8-ish.
Just before 8, I heard an indistinct scratching rattle noise outside. I thought it was Rusty digging through his pockets for his keys. To be nice, I opened the front door. Immediately, something furry ran in, and I squealed and ran out.
Anyway, I hung out in the breezeway, nearly hyperventilating, for about 10-15 minutes until he got home, and met him out in the parking lot, then explained quite panickedly about the situation and why I couldn't go back inside until he took care of the unidentified creature.
Please note we have the worlds two most useless cats. Carmen is old and very blase about such things, she would not wake up from her beauty sleep for some random woodland creature. Pushkin just gets bewildered.
Anyway, Pushkin was some use, he was able to lead Rusty to where the creature was cowering. Rusty ended up putting a box over it, and sliding another piece of cardboard underneath. We took the box out to the nearest stand of trees (our apartment complex is kind-of built around existing clumps of trees. It looks beautiful, but sometimes I feel like we're a little *too* close to nature)
It turns out the unexpected houseguest was a very cute, but completely terrified squirrel. Poor guy. I wonder what convinced him to scratch on my door to get in.
For those of you that are following the progress of my garden, here are this week's pictures: Please excuse my complete inability to work the autofocus this week.
The enormous tomato: (It's a one-plant jungle) I finally did give in and loosely tie the stems to the hanging hook with old knee-highs, since I was starting to feel concerned that the stems were getting *really* heavy.
Here's a cluster of little tomatoes:
And here's the tomato I showed you guys last week. It's cherry-sized, but instead of being round, it's shaped like a regular tomato!
The experimental tomato, however, is still languishing. Not dead, but not really all that alive either:
The pepper is taking off, it's covered in buds, and I'm really looking forward to having a huge crop of habaneros in a month or two:
The strawberries? The plants look healthy enough, but they are still not growing flowers:
Finally, check out my morning glories/moonflowers: (I've made them a trellis out of jute twine) Despite the look of the picture, they are not speeding acoss my balcony at 60mph!
I'm sure no one noticed that I'm late with my update this week... And to make it worse, some of the pictures are terribly out of focus.
I took these pictures of a bloom on my rose last week - The bloom is about 1.5 inches across: (There are a total of 7 unopened buds on the plants)
This are the plants again on sunday. It's blury, like I said, but you can see a bunch of buds opening:
See my strawberry plants putting out runners:
Although the picture is blury, you can see what a behemoth my tomato plant has become:
Finally, my morning glories/moonflowers have made it as high as the railing... I don't expect blooms for another month or so, but I hope once they grow into a space with more sunlight, they'll grow faster:
I'm going to start with the seriously most spectacular thing in my rarden right now:
The runners on my strawberries are putting out runners!
My tomato is gi-normous!!!
Check out the little green tomatos!
And my peppers are looking petty awesome too:
Finally, my vines have made it well up and over the railing:
My tomato is getting so heavy, it's actually hanging crooked:
One cluster of ripening tomatoes:
Another cluster of ripening tomatoes:
Look at all of these peppers!
Here's the experimental tomato, it has really perked up amazingly since being re-potted. In this picture, you can see the support I'm using. It's designed to hold a flowerpot, but it makes a pretty tomato support.
Remember that little morning glory bud I posted last weekend? (Scroll down, I'll wait ) This is what it looked like tonight:
I'm pretty sure this one has got to be a moonflower bud, since it looks so different from the other one:
My brain is all over the place... come back, brain!
I did take garden pictures last weekend, I'll post them tonight.
Last weekend, I took my parents' cat back home to Kentucky. She was staying with me while my parents were out of town. Well, according to my mom, the cat is totally out of sorts since I left, sulking, only coming out when she's on the phone. My poor kitty. I am giving my mom instructions to pick the cat up a lot, call her silly pet names, and basically do all of the things she never tolerated when she was younger and snootier.
I have a nasty headache. I took advil and drank a big glass of water, but neither is helping.
Rusty was out late at the campaign office waiting for the primary results to come in. This would be the 2nd night in a row of crummy sleep because I hate to sleep in our bed alone. (Though I sleep fine alone in my old room at my parents house, but that kind-of makes sense)
Perhaps the bad sleep and the headach are related. Nah, that would make too much sense.
The guy whose campaign Rusty was working on didn't win the primary. He was the leader in St. Louis County, but lost in St. Charles and Lincoln counties. Damn. Also, there was a pretty sane, rational guy runing against the incumbent in the Republican primary, I would have liked to see him in the election, but he got crushed.
Mercifully, no one here is stomping around about running as an independent.
Dear Joe Lieberman, Put on your big boy pants and deal with it. You lost. Fair and square, you lost. If you wanted to run as an independent you should have started there to begin with, but you threw your hat in the ring with the democrats, and you lost. YOU LOST. Seriously, grow up.
I love my plants. I snagged leaves off of my mom's jade plant and christmas cactus when I was home visiting. They're both suposedly pretty easy to propagate, so I hope I can convince them to sprout. I've got them outside in the heat with ust a tiny bit of water every couple of days, so I'm hoping the mama leaves don't succumb to rotting. As long as the mama leaves are ok, there will be baby plants... eventually. Though I'm hoping the warm weather will help them sprout a little faster.
I am so in love with the idea of sharing plants, and growing plants off of cuttings from friends and family. There's something warmer and sweeter about it than just buying something at Lowes (not that I don't have a bunch of Lowes plants too)
Yesterday, we cleaned the kitchen so I could make lasagna. I love my clean kitchen. I just want to stand in the middle of it and bask in its wonderfulness.
Tonight, I'm going to do something similar with the living room, so I can lie on the couch and bask in its wonderfulness too.
When I'm PMS-y, I get the overwhelming urge to clean. This is good, since it means the apartment is clean once a month, at least. Today, while I'm home for lunch, I'm going to fold laundry. Fun! I need to remember to pick up some mesh laundry bags next time I'm at Target.
I am absolutely enchanted by those liquid soaps that foam by themselves. I've got one from Method in the bathroom, it smells like green tea and aloe, and feels so soft and nice. In the kitchen, I've got Dial that's all yummy and pear-scented. And when I was visiting my parents, I used the Aveno facial cleanser that foams itself, and loved it too. I just really love the foam texture, and the fact that it soesn't leave you with little soapy blobs or slimy smears to try and rinse off your hands and face. Plush, I just enjoy foam.
Saturday morning, I am hauling myself to the salon as soon as it opens, and getting my legs, underarms and eyebrows waxed, and getting a manicure and pedicure. In a spa chair. And I'm going to ask them to paint cherry blossoms on my big toenails. (In general, I am against "nail art" on principle... but I like having little sakura blossoms on my big toes. Everybody needs a little whimsy in their life)
Why won't this damn headache go away?
Seriously, where the hell did 2006 go?
It was a big year for me. I went to England, I passed an actuarial exam, my mom had her hip replaced, I bought a house - I feel like there were even more big things that happened, but I don't even remember anymore. But needless to say - It was quite a full year.
This year, I'm hoping for a little more simplicity. I still want to pass exams, but I'd be happy to let the rest of my life chill out a little bit, and spend a year on personal growth and stuff.
I set some pretty ambitious dance-related goals, but I've resisted making "resolutions" for my regular life.
I do have some plans, though:
I mentioned it in my dance goals, but I'm working the Couch-to-5k plan already. I'm a week in, and it's so gratifying, though it's hard to believe that I will ever be able to run 3 miles at a time. Once I can, I'm hoping to enter a couple of local 5k races this spring.
I've been putting together my study plan for my next exam. I'm starting 4 months in advance, so I can take it easy with just studying a couple of days a week, and still make it to 400 hours of study time by the time I sit for the test. If I can put in 400 really, honestly committed hours, I should have no trouble passing.
I'm putting a moratorium on buying stuff. No BPAL, not bath/body stuff, no tea, no books, no yarn, etc. I have more than enough of all of the above, and I'm just not going to buy more until I use what I've got. It's all just sitting around waiting to go bad or go stale, and taking up space. This way, I save money, I don't let the things I already have go to waste, and most importantly, I get back the space I was using to store all of that stuff. And I am 100% sure I need less clutter in my life.
There we are, no resolutions, just a few straightforward goals. (and I think there's a huge difference between goals and resolutions.)
For three days before my period every month, I go into this wild phase where I will scrub/swiffer/sweep/etc anything in the house that will sit still long enough to be cleaned. This is the time of the month when floors get mopped, closets get organized, etc. I have to say, if I had to pick and chose my PMS symptoms, this is definately the most useful.
I am fairly tidy the rest of the month, but not stepford-clean-freak. Unfortunately, my fairly tidiness would be enough if I lived alone, but I don't. I live with the king of the slobs. The guy who tells me, "oh, no, honey, you don't have to clean up after dinner, I'll do it." But two weeks later, the pans would still be on the stove if I left it to him. He left a 2 square foot pile of Magic cards right in front off his side of the couch for over 2 weeks, so he had to sit down at the middle of the couch and scooch over. Every time I suggested he move them, he informed me he wasn't done sorting them yet. (the baffling part is that he bought two huge boxes of Magic cards on Ebay to replace the collection he had as a teenager - but doesn't know anyone here who plays, so plays the computer game version instead!)
Anyway, he's been all like "I don't have time to do anything other than cook because I work 50 hours a week" - Except I work 40 hours, then study for another 12+ every week, and I still find time to keep up with the dishwasher, take out the trash, change the cat's litter, and do all of both of our laundry.
Of course, he also sleeps 12-13 hours every friday and saturday night, routinely waking up well into the afternoon. But he refuses to acknowledge the fact that if he took better care of his body, by quitting smoking, eating better and working out, he would need less sleep to recover. He's 30 freaking years old, It's time he started to realize his body's not going to hold out forever.
And the part that makes it the most frustrating is that he's a computer security engineer. He's smart and capable of rational analysis. He'll sulk and be moody for a week if he put on enough weight to have to go out and buy 3 new bigger pairs of pants. But he isn't willing to give up his 48-64 oz per day of Minute Maid Lemonade (why not just eat the corn syrup with a spoon?) and wonders why he puts on weight. He thinks he'll get thinner doing situps, but thinks cardio is useless and horrifying.
Why is he willing to put in so much energy into a job he despises, but is completely unwilling to put any effort at all into us having a nice, relaxing, and non-chaotic home... whoich I would have thought would be more motivating than the world's most soul-sucking job?
Like a lot of other people, I have some blog-like things elsewhere on the web, but I don't update them much. On the other hand, even if I don't post often, I am lurking here at the forums a lot, so maybe I'll be more inclined to post.
Anyway, I just got back from a week in London, so hopefully soon I'll have a bunch of pictures to post.
I'm really tired and out of it. It's not even the sleep thing, I managed to sleep from about 10pm-4am last night which is enough to make it through the day just fine... the hard part is the damn eating. I 'm not hungry at meal times, and ravenous in between. I should be back to normal by wednesday.
I do have a BPAL-related confession, though.
When I moved, I got rid of my low side-by-side dresser, replacing it with a tall chest of drawers. Unfortunately, that means all of my cosmetics and perfume have been relagated to inconvenient storage. I keep meaning to get a table to put in the bay window in my bedroom to use for all of that stuff, but I haven't gotten around to it.
Because of that, I've only been wearing Beaver moon when I remember to, and Anne Bonney when I go out. I have a box with about 60 5mls sitting in it, totally unused. Seriously, how stupid am I? I either need to pull them back out and enjoy them, or swap/sell them away so someone else can enjoy them, and just work on constructing a solid stash of Beaver Moon, Samhain '04, Embalming Fluid, Anne Bonney, and Snake Oil.
(I feel even worse, because there are a couple of *seriously* sought-after unavailable blends in my stash that I've possibly only tried once and held on to for almost 2 years. I have no idea what I'm waiting for. I feel selfish not getting them out to someone who would really love them.)
Evanesce wrote:
I think right now, most people's blogs consist mostly of "this is my first post" and a few exploratory entries, trying to figure out what they want to say. I'm hoping that once people realy figure out what they want their blogs to say, and settle into their voices, there will be a lot more to comment on.
I've always wondered how people on the forum built personal friendships. I don't think of myself as shy, but I've also never just out of the blue PM'ed people, and it's been on only very seldom that people have out of the blue PM'ed me. maybe I just don't sound interesting or inviting when I type. But I do certainly wonder.
As for the chat, I've ducked in a few times and it was empty, but I guess I should stay in so when someone else comes by, then it *won't* be empty. I hope it takes off... I really enjoyed the #bpal IRC chats we used to get going. I'd love to see that become a regular thing.
On an unrelated note, I think I'm going to be the first to use the trackback function. I love trackback.
In her post, please be upstanding for the mayor of simpleton, Clover asked:
Even though I'm writing this here, I'm going to "ping" her post, so that when she goes to look at it, she'll see that this post is in reference to hers.
Hi, Clover!!!
Oh. My. God.
My boss called me in to her office this morning to tell me she just put in her two weeks notice. I'm happy for her, she's going to a larger insurance company where there's more upward potential for her (she's already the senior actuary in our little division) But dude, again?
I first came on board with this company last September. I was brought on to work for a guy who was crazy smart. Unfortunately, his work style did not mesh super-well with the rest of the office. He ended up jumping ship this past spring to go be the chief actuary at another small company. I wasn't too bummed out, since I ended up wotking for *his* boss, who was also a super-actuary She's the one who quit today.
This is even more familiar, because when I first got hired out of school at the big consulting firm I worked for in San Francisco, I got hired by seriously one of the most brilliant actuaries I have ever met, and worked directly under him for the coolest 6 months ever. Then he got headhunted away to be chief actuary at a big insurance company. After that, I ended up working for a couple of mediocre-by-comparison managers who totally didn't inspire me, but at least they didn't quit (Well, one of them did, almost right after I did - that would explain why he was so happy for me!)
Part of me has gotten into the habit of thinking (is it me? Do they hate having me work for them so much? But you know, that's really just not it. Somehow, thanks to good interview skills, good luck, whatever, I have managed to maneuver myself into these great positions. Even 6 months working under a mega-egg-brain is so much more educational than 3 yars working for someone who's just average. Unfortunately, having a mega-egg-brain opens a lot of doors, and those are the kind of people getting chief-actuary-type jobs thrown at them. And until i get to management-level, I won't be reporting directly to chief-actuary-level people.
I guess the only thing to do is keep doing what I'm doing now, maneuvering myself to work for managers who are right on that susp, to learn as much as I can right now.
Now that I've totally geeked out on some of the forum blog technical details, I think it's time to settle into actually posting.
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This spring it seems that I'm traveling like mad. This would be great for someone who liked traveling, but I don't. I can't help it. I hate sleeping away from home. even the nicest hotel comes in 2nd place to my own bed in my own room.
Last week, I was in England. Five days in Oxford, and 2 in London. I was totally enchanted by Oxford. London, on the other hand, was so gray and dismal. I loved the museums, but beyond that... Also, I don't think of myself as a prude, after all, I loved living in San Francisco, but... Walking down what seem to be normal downtown shopping streets and seeing sex shops and casinos just mixed in with the cafes and stores just seemed odd and a littledissonant. Also, what's with all the betting parlors? On every block, almost.
I unfortunately missed out on two places I wanted to go: I was planning to take a day trip to Stonehenge, but when I called the tour company, they were totally booked. Then I thought I'd take the train to Bletchley Park (where they cracked the Enigma code) but their museum was going to be closed until April 1. I was sad.
Everyone has been asking me about the food. Well, Oxford and London were both covered in very nice French boulangeries, which have great coffee, tea, and chocolate croisants. Many of them also serve sandwiches where they take a length of baguette, make a cheese-heavy sandwich with it, then smoosh it on a panini grill. The long narrow shape makes them much easier to eat than the kind of paninis we have here.
Also, the Indian food is spectacular. I can see why people joke about it being the national cuisine of England. The non-ethnic restaurants we went to were less impressive. They really do sadly overcook their vegetables.
I had fish and chips at a pub in Oxford (it was away from the tourist areas and was populated mostly by locals (I got chatted up by a handful, so I'm sure they were local). They served it on a regular plate, and it didn't taste any different from fish and chips you would have in the US. On the plus side though, the pub had Strongbow on tap. I love Strongbow...
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I took lots of pictures, so hopefully soon I will have some to post!
I got home from Atlanta yesterday.
I was there for a weeklong exam-prep seminar. I've mentioned on the forum that I am an actuary, midway through the 9 exam process of becoming fully credentialed as a Fellow of the Casualty Actuary Society.
So, this exam covers a number of topics:
Loss Modeling
Survival Models
Credibility Theory
Simulation
Interpolation and fitting
It took 4.5 full days to take a sprint through all of the material, including problem solving techniques. I would guess that the material covered would take about 3 full semester college classes. Unfortunately, outside of a handful of colleges with actuarial science programs (which generally only prepare people for the first 4 exams, anyway), the whole actuarial exam thing is all self-study. I've been studying for two months now, and the seminar I went to was basically an opportunity to fine tune which topics need more study, and to learn useful clues to look for in the wording of problems to simplify solving.
I have 5 weeks left before the exam. I have scheduled for myself 32 hours a week outside of work for studying:
4 hours per day - Mon, Tues, Wed, Fri
Tursday nights off for dance class and sanity
8 Hours per day Saturday and Sunday
Ooof. This is going to be a rough 5 weeks. To get in at least *some* excercise, I am planning morning yoga a couple of mornings a week. I'm home for lunch today, and doing laundry. I will have to fit chores in at odd times, and will be needing all of my boyfriend's support. He's a sweetie though, and very understanding.
I was talking to a number of actuarial students this past week whose spouses/partners didn't get it. Like, "Come on honey, you've been studying for like 2 hours. I'm sure you'll be fine. Put it down and spend time with me!" That's the nasty part, most study guides say that it takes 300-500 hours of study time to pass each of these exams. That takes a lot more than 2 hours each saturday morning. I had a boyfriend like that, and my abject misery at failing exams over and over didn't help the relationship any.
Anyway, I have to go move the laundry to the dryer and head back to work. Oof.
inkdark moon wrote:
I was going to comment in response, but then my comment turned into a novel, and I decided to re-think my response and write it up here instead.
I can say with absolute certainty that I am happy with my life now.
I mean, in a moment-to-moment sense, I am frustrated with the exam process I have to complete for my career, and I'm busy and tired, but in an overall sense,. I'm happy.
But, the thing is, it's the things that are causing all of that busy-ness that make me happy. I have, by grace or luck, stumbled into a career that I enjoy. And the whole exam thing means that every day, when I get up, I know I will spend anywhere from 4 to 8 hours that day, studying, learning new things and intellectually challenging myself. And studying it all on my own makes it way more rewarding than college ever was.
The biggest misery in my life is to be bored. I hate it. Everything around me can be falling to pieces, but If I am setting goals and occationally achieving them, I'm happy. If I'm learning new things, and having to stretch my brain to do it, I'm happy.
So I guess what I'm saying is that my own happiness is both an internal thing *and* the result of my interacting with the world. My happiness comes from knowing I can rise to a challenge. My goals and my challenges are different from everyone elses, and the things that are important to me aren't important to others... But I have found the things that I am passionate about, and the *path* I am taking to get there makes me happy. I've succeeded in the realm of my career to find a job that challenges me intelectually.
And I have been lucky in my love life to find a guy who loves me so much, he gently holds me to my *own* standards instead of his. Seriously, that's love. He wants me to meet my own goals and grow in the direction I chose. It's a daily struggle for me, but I try to do the same for him.
As for why there are so many depressed people... I think the modern world, for all of the supposed choices we have in every part of our lives, is actually very disempowering. We are all constantly overstimulated with exhausting trivia, and by the time we start looking inwards at what we want and need, we're too tired, and our heads are too full of marketing and other people's opinions.
I'm not saying I'm above it. I'm there just as much as anyone, asking myself, "Is this what I want? What my parents want? What my friends think is best for me? What is "socially acceptable"? What I have been conditioned to believe someone of my social/financial/whatever station should do?"
I think one lucky thing that happened to me was studying TaeKwon Do as a teenager. Right in the middle of those very formative years, I had a chance to learn a little about setting and achieving goals as I moved up the ranks. As I advanced, I was given more and more responsability, and, cliched as it sounds, I really did learn the satisfaction that comes from a job well done. I learned how good it felt to push myself so far beyond the limits I thought I had.
I know I have more thoughts on the subject, but I'll leave it here for now.
I have a good friend who has had a lot of trouble with her finances. My boyfriend has trashed his too. His stupid brother makes 6 figures, and is still so damn broke that he sometimes has to borrow money to pay for groceries at the end of the month.
I am constantly frustrated with finding out just what my friends *don't* know about personal finance. I'm not talking about investing in stocks, etc. Just simple things, like how to maintain a little savings, manage their credit cards, shop for basic insurance, etc.
I hate the fact that society somehow assumes you lear about money management at home, but the fact of the matter is that most people's parents aren't capable of giving the advice their kids need. Now that people get married when they're older, a lot of people have to figure out how to get their finances off to a good start when they're still single, while their parents may have already been married and living off two incomes at their age. Also, let's face it, the economy has changed a lot since most of our parents were 25.
The number one piece of bad advice that too many of my friends have tried and failed at: "Make a detailed budget and stick to it."
Ha!
Only the most compulsive among us can actually make that work. That's not to say a budget isn't a valuable tool. I have one. I break costs down into general categories, and use it not to plan future spending, but instead to track retrospectively where my money goes.
The simple fact is that purchases expand to use all available money. I get paid twice a month. So on the first of the month, I pay all of the bills due in the first half of the month, and on the 15th, I pay all the bills due in the 2nd half of the month.
Also on the 1st and 15th, I have a set amount automatically transfered into my savings account. Personal Finance books call this "paying yourself first". After my savings is taken care of, I spend whatever is left however I want with no guilt.
Anyway, it's true what they say. If you take it out at the beginning, you really don't miss it. When you're worried all month about coming in under budget, it's stressful. When you know you've already taken care of savings, money management is much more straightforward day-to-day. Even if you just put $25 out of each paycheck in the bank, in a year, you'll have $600 in the bank. And even though that doesn't sound like much, it represents a helpful financial cushion in case you have sudden expenses. If you can slowly increase the amount you put away, you come out even further ahead.
As for a budget... At the end of every month, I download all of my transactions from my bank, pull it into excel, then sort them all out into categories: Rent/Food/Gas/Bellydance/Eating Out/Etc. Each month I sit down and go over them, and take stock of where my money is going. If I find that something is out of balance, I try to make practical changes. For example, if I see that I have been going overboard on eating out, I make that something to be conscious of in the following month. I don't aim to be compulsive about my spending, just conscious of it.
I think that is most of my friends' biggest problem. They spend unconsciously. If they just asked themselves, "Will this item be worth as much benefit to me as the amount of time I have to spend working to make the money to pay for it?" - BPAL, a great vacation, etc are things that meet that criteria for me. More brightly-colored knicknacks from Target don't.
Anyway, I'm done ranting now.
I've been studying all day.
I just stomped out into the living room and had a very nice ranty monologue about how the two problems on the May 05 exam that involved Buhlmann credibility with Poisson distributions were very easy credibility problems, *but* one expected you to just look at the distribution function and just *know* that it's a Pareto distribution, and the other relied on knowing the formula for solving gamma integrals, which I guess is just one more thing to memorize, but seriously, has nothing to do with Buhlmann credibilty at all, it's a computational technique.
Imagine me going into a *lot* more detail about my displeasure. Imagine my boyfriend smiling sympathetically, and nodding in all the right places. Then asking me, "did you have a nice conversation with yourself?" It wasn't mean the way he said it, just cute.
Anyway, It's going to be a tough 4 days, but I think Wednseday, I have a pretty good chance to nail it.
My strawberries:
My Habanero pepper:
My hanging basket tomato: I swear it's growing so fast I can almost see it happening!
My "Experimental" tomato: - I'm trying it out in a self-watering container made from a 3 liter bottle. I know it won't produce well or have the best-tasting tomatoes, but it amuses me. I'm going to wrap the container in mylar to keep the roots from burning.
My herbs: Thyme and basil
Because the forum limits the number of pictures per post, I had to split it up.
My miniature roses: I had a bad aphid infestation while these buds were forming, so these flowers are a little ratty looking, but there are a ton of new buds that should look beautiful when they open!
My pot of morning glories and moonflowers: I planted 2 of each, I'm planning to grow them up the balcony railing. I planted them kind of in the 4 corners, but I guess some sloppy watering moved them around a bit. The two little sprouts are the morning glories, and the two moonflowers are sprouting as we speak!
My moonflower seeds breaking through the soil: How awesome is that?!? I feel like I'm in 1st grade again! I am planning to take more pictures of them in a few hours to see how far they've come
My moonflower seeds 24 hours later:
I had too many pictures for one post...
Here are my mini roses, I have 5 buds that will be opening in the next week or two. As prissy as they are, the roses are pretty rewarding.
I got more indoor plants this week too, I ordered an African Violet from Bluebird Greenhouse - By the way, they are *awesome* - The plants came in beautiful condition, and they sent me a free gift plant! I decided to go with a fancy greenhouse because I didn't want to risk getting a buggy plant from Lowes or Home Depot.
This is the one I ordered, Newton Quiet Resolve. I have seen picture's of other people's plants on the web, and this one often has very variagated leaves. Mine aren't showing much in the way of variagation yet, but the plant will be in my office under my flourescent desk lamp 9 hours a day, so the variagation will hopefully become more pronounced. (Check out the one about 1/3 of the way down on this page)
This is the free gift, Aca's Passionate. This one is going to live in my bedroom.
Between 3 and 3:30 eastern time today, exam results come out!!!!
I am completely useless today. There's a message board for actuaries (I guess there's one for everything!) and I keep reloading, looking to see if results are out early. I mean, I'm working and all, but not very efficiently.
Oof.
Here is my lovely tomato... I picked 7 tomatoes off of it today, we ate them with little buffalo mozerellas, fresh basil, and balsamic vinegar.
I haven't shown the basil lately, take a look!
Here's the other tomato plant, it's turning into a total jungle, it's really taken off since I re-potted it. It's got a bunch of little green tomatoes on it.
The peppers are showing no signs at all of ripening:
The roses are putting out new buds, I'll have more flowers soon:
I think there's as much strawberry foliage outside the pot as inside:
