He's smiling at you

These are some of the fruits of our garden!
Red bell pepper, yellow crooked neck squash, cucumber, yellow jalapenos, serrano peppers, anaheim, and green jalapeno. (I couldn't figure out how to make the cucumber and squash look like part of the face.)

Haha, maybe he wouldn't be smiling if he knew that he was about to be turned into a big bowl of salsa! Yum!

My poor sad but fruitful garden

Everybody laughs at how the buttercup squash grew up on the roof of that storage unit. I think it's kind of cool...it sort of makes up for how dumb the torn plastic of our greenhouse looks...


I've had a lot of trouble with this stupid green house thing we built, but at least the peppers are finally producing! We made a batch of salsa last week and will be making another batch tomorrow I think. It's been fun to share peppers with our friends too. I was able to put together a little "salsa kit" with all the peppers necessary for our favorite recipe and give it to my Institute teacher. He has tons of tomatoes too, so he only had to buy a couple things like an onion and lime juice. I'm still trying to decide if the cost of the garden will equal out with the money we save from growing vegetables...It sure has been a lot of work and frustration. I am confident that when we live in a house with a yard that doesn't have 90 mile an hour winds blowing, then our garden will grow better with less work and money put into it.

The four kinds of squash and pumpkins are all mixed up and growing through each other, but that's fine. It's almost like a treasure hunt. I go looking through the vines and leaves every once in awhile and find something new! The cantaloupe has also grown fairly well and I think we'll be able to harvest one very soon.

This makes me happy

The Young Women leaders in my ward are going on a temple trip together (I'm Mia Maid Adviser) so I'm baking black-bottom cupcakes to share on the ride to Spokane.


Just smelling the cupcakes baking made me feel like a little kid. I remember when Mom baked them and it was such a treat! Those were the days when everything depended on Mom and if she said you could have one or not. It's kind of funny now that I could eat the whole batch right now if I wanted, but that wouldn't be very fun. I almost miss having Mom say I could have one, or the great excitement I felt when she said, "I suppose you can have another." Hehhehehe!

Birthday Present

Greg's Mom has been trying to find a bigger bread pan for my birthday, but was unable...so she gave up on the bread pan idea and brought me late birthday present. (They visited the other weekend.)


These are so pretty!


I always laughed at the commercial for this because they show a lady trying to water her plant and the water spills all over the place and she looks disgusted. Hahah! They want to give you the idea that a normal person is incapable of watering their plants. Hahhaha! I'm pretty good at pouring water, but I like these because they are so pretty and you don't have to do anything with the water for a longer time. It probably will be more even than my sporadic watering patterns too.


This is pretty cool. It makes patterns on the paper for your scrap-booking.


You put your paper on top of it and then rub that little blue tool over the top.





It would be fun to use for making cards too. There are lots of templates you can use. My favorite is the one with frogs.

The all encompassing thing of my life

My blog might be a little boring as I am in school now and it's pretty much the only thing I think about, talk about, do, dream about, write about...So here's another update on what I'm doing for my plant class.

(Viburnum dentatum A.K.A. Arrowwood Viburnum of the family Adoxaceae)


As I said before, we have to learn 17 plants a week with their scientific name, common name, and family name for extra credit. I'm pretty good at learning the scientific name and remembering which common name goes with it, but it's harder if you have to only look at a plant and then come up with all the names on your own. SO, I decided to try something new.

Each week when we get our new set of plants to learn, the teacher takes us on a plant tour around campus to show us in real life each plant. On Saturday Greg and I went hiking around campus and I collected samples of each plant to take home, label, and quiz myself with. This is a great idea, if I do say so myself. A picture is only so-so for learning. Being able to see, feel, and smell the plant is way better. So this is my set-up. I have all but three of the plants for the week. (The others were in greenhouses that were locked on Saturday.)


I want to do this every week, so pretty much I'll have a new set of plants here each week for the rest of the semester, and again the next semester until about May.

(Wisteria sp. A.K.A. Wisteria of the family Fabaceae)



(Campsis radicans A.K.A. Trumpet Vine of the family Bignoniaceae)


I remember this one by saying to myself, "It's radical to see a trumpet while you're camping. Campsis radicans trumpet vine." I remember the family name because it makes me think, "Big Nose," and somehow that makes me think of a trumpet. Sometimes I end up remembering certain names just because they are so weird and hard to remember. I keep thinking, "That is the weirdest thing! How am I supposed to remember Hylotelephium x 'Herbstfreude'!" and then I remember it because I thought that so many times. Hahaha!

Chemistry is not quite as fun. I've been spending most of my time on that and feel like I'm not learning it very well. I understand the lecture, and when he says something it makes sense, but then I'm not able to think of it on my own when it's time to do homework or a quiz. The other frustrating thing is that there are so many typos in my lab manual that I don't know if I'm having trouble because I don't get it or because there was a typo. For our last lab, there were post-lab questions and calculations and you have to go read the beginning of the lab to know how to do it. In the example problem they used numbers with the decimal in the wrong place and the units wrong. (They labeled something as L/g instead of g/L.) I think chemistry is hard enough without all those mistakes that make it worse. My teacher actually wrote the lab manual so I'm thinking about circling all the errors and at the end of the semester giving it to him so he can fix it for the next group of students. Seriously, doesn't he know how to proof read?
I don't have any fun pictures of chemistry so I'll just end this post now.
Thanks for visiting my blog.

Can you say...

...Solenostemon scutellarioides?

That's the name of one the plants I learned last week. It is more commonly known as a Coleus. My teacher said when she was in college it used to be called, "Coleus Blumus," but then they changed the rules of naming plants and came up with this more interesting name.

These pictures are all of coleus plants. It's interesting and kind of tricky to identify plants because sometimes there are 10 plants that look different at first glance, but then they end up being the same kind of plant.

Anyway, I am happy to announce that I got 50/50 plus 5 points extra credit on my first plant quiz! I was so worried about learning all those new weird names, but it turned out ok. She's kind of easing us in to this semester because last week we just had to learn the names only.

This week we have the same list of plants and the quiz will include identification. We'll take a blank paper and go around the lab to check out a bunch of different plant samples, and you have to decide what plant it is and give the common and Latin names. You can give the family name for extra credit.
I've heard from other students that the ID part of the quiz is tricky because she will take a plant, for instance, a sunflower and cut the flower part off and you have to recognize it by the stem and leaves only. Or she'll find a sample of a kind of plant that doesn't look at all like the samples we studied in class. She wants us to really get it that there are many variations of the same plant, as you may have noticed from these pictures.

It's kind of fun to know the real names of some plants though. I feel my brain working and growing in a different way than normal, and I think I like it.

More Death

For those of you who have been following the Triops situation, I just wanted to inform you that George died....or was it Fred?


Just a day after the brutal death of Fred, George--overcome by a wave of guilt and remorse kicked the bucket as well. I tried to revive him by moving the bowl around and stirring up the water, but his fate was sealed and he layed himself to rest in the bottom of the bowl next to his half-eaten friend. Together in life, and reunited in death, they exited this cruel world together, entering sewage system of Pullman to be forever mourned. Every time I flush the toilet I will remember you Fred and George.

Why it's fun living in Pullman

It's kind of fun living in Pullman because a few times a year I see this thing go by out my kitchen window. It's harvesting the wheat on the hillside behind our place.


Also, a few times a year that thing drives down the road in town and causes a really big traffic jam. That's not so fun.

The End.

Horticulture

I kind of slowed down on the posting because I started school last week. I'm taking my first horticulture class. I really like my teacher, Dr. Lohr. (She's also the counselor who helps me plan out my class schedule.) It's fun to learn about the plants, but it's also a lot of new stuff to learn in a short time. We have a class website that I use a lot to work on learning the plants with their names and what they look like. If you're into plants you can check it out too!

http://classes.hortla.wsu.edu/hort231

This week we are learning the first plant list: Annuals.


The lab last week was kind of fun too. We all had to introduce ourselves in front of the class using the microphone. I think it's funny that some of my teachers use a microphone in class. The biology teacher has one of those little ones stuck on the collar of his shirt. There are about 300-400 kids in that class though, so it probably would be hard to hear without the mic.


Anyway, one of the goals my teacher has for this horticulture class is to teach us how to speak in public. It's kind of nice that I've already had practice with that through church things. Most of the kids in class had never spoken into a mic before.


The other thing we did in lab was study a few plant samples (in our group of 3 or 4 people) and discuss the differences and similarities. I thought it was fun, but I also kind of had to laugh. I could imagine a lot of people saying, "Well, they all have green leaves, and they're different cause they're not the same plant. Big Woop." It takes a special kind of patience to spend 30 minutes inspecting two plant branches and find something in the tiny details like, "This plant has slightly longer petioles than the other plant."


The other thing about this class that is cool is that if I do really well on the first two major exams I can skip the final. We have three major exams in class and she will drop the lowest one. That would be a big load off my shoulders to not worry about the final in this class...then I could spend all my time on studying chemistry--which I'm sure I'll need a lot of time for that.

Death and Destruction

This is the last picture of Fred and George when they were both alive...



I tried putting them in a paper cup so you could see them better. They are joyfully swimming around in circles, which happens to be their favorite past-time.


Yesterday I changed the water in the bowl so Fred and George would be more comfortable, (and it looks a lot nicer too). When I put them back in, they did their usual annoying thing of swimming against the thermometer so it moved and turned and I couldn't see the water temperature. I decided to just take it out of the bowl because I was tired of trying to move the bowl around to see the temperature. At the time, they were both swimming against the thermometer from opposite sides, and when I pulled the thermometer straight up out of the water they crashed into each other. It was kind of funny. They just swam at each other nose to nose for a minute and then one veered off to the side and got out of the way. I noticed from time to time that they would run into each other again and do that same thing....like they were blind or something.

Well, this morning when we got up we found a horrifying, well, really just gross disgusting site. They apparently had a battle to the death while we were sleeping, because one was dead. The live one was eating the dead one straight in half. Gross! (And I just cleaned their water! Now it's going to be all dirty again.) When I got home from school today, the live triops was A LOT bigger, and the dead one was completely severed in half....the head is floating around partly eaten and the tail is resting at the bottom. Gross! I can hardly stand to look at it because it's so sick. Hahahhahaha! I was thinking of trying to scoop the dead body out of the tank right away so it wouldn't foul the water, but if the other guy wants to eat it up, well, I don't want to intrude.

This is George, returning to the scene of the crime...



...taking a few more bites of Fred....



Yes George, it's a sad cold lonely world now. You've eaten your best friend and now you have to deal with the consequences.




Just thought you might like to know how the triops were doing.