My Money Tree

Since I was so remiss in blogging last week, I am blogging twice today! What's the occasion? I'll tell you - the "money tree" mystery plant that Rockstar Tailor talked me into buying at the plant sale for a whopping $1.00 bloomed today! So I raced over to Rich's house and took a picture of it in the dwindling daylight. My best guess is that this is a balloon flower. Does anyone else know?

Here are some other flowers blooming in Rich's garden, just because they happened to be there when he bought the house. There are some daylilies by the south side of the fence.

Then there are these flowers, which I believe are phlox, by the west side of the fence. They are over five feet tall and smell wonderful. (Wish I could put the scent on my blog for you, but Blogspot doesn't allow that yet.)

And here you can see plants growing on the roof of Rich's next door neighbor's house.

Meanwhile, inside his house, Jolly Bob, The Professor, Dr. Cheung, and Greg are happily hanging out with Rich's Christmas poinsettia, which still has some red bracts.

Back on my own balcony, I am having a "problem" with "weeds." Check it out. First there is my voodoo lily, which I bought at the Farmer's Market last year. It was dormant all winter, and at first I thought it was completely dead, but then it came back. It kind of looks like a cute little polka-dotted palm tree. All was good... and then I noticed a second, smaller voodoo lily coming out of the pot!

Then there is my red dracaena. The strangest-looking seedling began growing in its pot, so I let it go, thinking it must not be a regular old weed. As you can see in the photo below, it appears to be a baby neantha bella palm. How this happened, I have no idea; once upon a time this dracaena was in a pot with some other plants, including a neantha bella palm, but I separated them several years ago. Yet this baby just sprouted a few months ago.

Here is a clearer photo of the tropical visor I bought from Rockstar Tailor's website. (Since I am her neighbor, I just went over and paid in cash, and she allowed me to add some custom decorations: the blue beach umbrella and the orange drink.) You may remember it from my video "Happy Birthday USA."

For the final concert of Early Music Camp, I gave myself this manicure by putting metallic red polish over metallic blue polish. The result was a metallic raspberry, as you can see below.

I was more pleased with my pedicure, which was black polish with a clear polish full of sparkles over it. Yes, I was Twinkle Toes! If you are wondering why I have so many wacky colors, all I can say is: don't run an errand at the drugstore when they are having a sale on wacky colors for $2 apiece.

Famous Hat