Blooming Agave and Working Telescope

 

Today Travalon and I got the boat onto the water with a lot of help from our neighbor, and we took a short ride into the channel. Travalon drove me to work, and I didn't get there until after 11:00, so I worked until about 6:15, when he came to pick me up. Nobody was around except Seabird; we couldn't take the Alumni Boat Ride today because they aren't starting until July (and then only going through August - I'm sure I took one in September in the past), so we went to the Botany Greenhouse to see a flowering agave. 

This is a plant that grows for thirty years, blooms once, and then dies. We also saw lots of other plants.

These are baby welwitschias! 

There was a little piece of a succulent that had fallen off, so I asked if I could take it, and the woman working there said sure. I told her I'd worked there as a student hourly over thirty years ago, and she wanted to hear my stories. I sure do have a lot of them! 

After dinner, Travalon went to watch USA beat Paraguay in the World Cup, while Richard Bonomo came over to help with my telescope. Here's a photo I took of it in the foyer with my plants last night:

It looked cooler in real life than in this photo. Left to right the plants are a fake one, Lazarus the corn plant dracaena, Keith the dracaena marginata, the ponytail palm, and the black calla lily. They are hiding from the storm because they all (but the calla lily) got blown over on Wednesday. (I don't know who put a fake banana plant in the foyer, but it has been there a while.) This morning I put the plants back out, but Keith got blown over again, so now it is on our three-season porch, which is sort of like being outside but sheltered from the wind. The yellow warbler came to our railing again, but when he saw Keith he got weirded out and flew away. Maybe Keith will keep him from constantly trying to attack his own reflection.

This is random, but I found a tiny letter R on the bathroom carpet. (Bathroom carpet?? I know. It was like that when we moved here, and we've been too lazy to change it.) Since that is my first initial, I picked it up and stuck it on the back of Mariah my diary.

Longtime readers may recall that I got this sticker last year during the Mammoth Hike Challenge, and also that on the front of Mariah are googly eyes we got on the towel Santa on our cruise.

Rich did Night Prayer on our porch because while I was talking to Tiffy the internet cut out on me there, so I came inside to continue our conversation. I convinced her to go out and check out Venus and Jupiter, but she could only see Venus because buildings were blocking Jupiter. They are further apart now.

Rich got the telescope to work, but there's a booster lens to increase the power three times, and he couldn't get that to work. He sais there's also an attachment for an iPhone if you want to take photos. Without the booster, the planets didn't really look any different than through binoculars, although you could just barely see some moons around Jupiter. Venus just looked like a big, bright spot. Hopefully we can get the booster lens working, and maybe we can figure out the iPhone attachment so I can take a photo of Jupiter's Big Red Spot if we can see it.

Famous Hat