According to Their Needs

Inspirational song: Songbird (Fleetwood Mac)

After a chilly dawn trip to the airport, I stayed home and napped, and completely ignored the outside world. TV stayed off, Twitter stayed closed. My only media were plant care videos. When Mr S-P came home, I asked whether I missed anything important. At first he told me incorrect news, that Stevie Nicks had died. After I cried "What?" he corrected himself and said it was actually Christine McVie. That wasn't any better, in my opinion. I have spent most of my music-loving life grooving on Fleetwood Mac, so this is a sad day for me. In Wayne's World (the first movie, probably), Mike Myers said that if you lived in the suburbs in 1978, you were basically issued a copy of Rumours. Well, we were in a small town, not suburb, but that album was injected directly into my veins back then. Will go to bed listening to it tonight.

I do believe I'm stepping up my plant game. This past summer, I did significantly better at keeping my front flowers and herbs alive and healthy than ever before. After a short autumn break, I'm back at it, but this time, giving some love to my neglected houseplants. It really started months ago, when I chopped up my spindly, overgrown schefflera, and rooted every viable bit of it, eventually planting it back in the same pot, with fresh soil. I've taken some plants into the shower to spray off their dusty leaves and give them a burst of humidity. Today I carted all the plants from behind the couch to the kitchen, and one by one cleaned the leaves with a damp microfiber cloth. I trimmed dead leaves, and then rearranged how they sat in relation to the front window. I googled how much light each one needs, and am hoping that moving the snake plant into the prime light position will make it grow taller.

I even learned how to use Google lens this evening, to identify a plant I've had since my grandfather's funeral (I think). It appears to be a Philippines evergreen, or Aglaonemia commutatum. All these years, I never knew. I've also come to realize that what I thought for decades were philodendrons were actually pothos, or Epipremnum aureus. So I have been watching videos of actual philodendrons all afternoon, and now I need some. Hoo boy, do I need them. And while I'm learning about correct names of my plants, I need to retrain myself not to use "wandering jew." Apparently some have started calling it a wandering dude, but I would rather learn to call it Tradescantia zebrina. More importantly, I need to pay attention to it more. Over the last two weeks, I've chopped the entire thing up and set it in water to restart the whole process. It was not happy before. I'm prepared to do better now.