[Meme] 5 random facts about yourself

[edenfalling]

Tumblr meme thing, via othercat2: After you receive this, you must share 5 random facts about yourself and then copy and send to your ten fave followers (・ω・) <33

I am bad at the chain aspect of memes, so I’ll just share random facts and if anyone wants to follow suit, please feel free to consider yourself tagged. *shrug*

1. When I was in first grade, my class did a project where each student collected 100 copies of a single item. Any item we wanted. It could be 100 socks, 100 photographs, 100 kazoos, whatever. The due date happened to be the day before my birthday, so I (or technically, my parents) bought 100 little birthday candles. And then we had a snow day, so the due date got moved to my actual birthday and I was SO PLEASED by that.

2. Relatedly, my teacher’s husband brought in 100 paperclips as part of that project. He had them strung in chains of ten and hung from a little spinning doohickey that I think was meant to dry nylon stockings. I thought that was incredibly cool, and from high school onward I have amassed a collection of, currently, 846 paperclips. I string them in chains of 10 and hang them from keyrings, 25 chains to a ring; the rings themselves are nailed to the side of one of my bookcases. The trick is that I cannot buy the paperclips. They must be “found” items: things I pick up off the floor or the sidewalk or desks in public computer labs... which is why I only have 846 after doing this for over 15 years.

3. When my computer is in one of its “I will bluescreen every time you try to wake me from sleep!!!” periods -- which it still has, and which I still fix with percussive maintenance (by which I mean I lift the CPU several inches off the ground and drop it. no, really. AND IT WORKS, which is how I know the problem is a hardware thing, not a software issue), I play solitaire while waiting for it to reboot.

4. I first alphabetized my fiction collection when I was seven years old. (Look, my mom is a librarian. I think it’s at least partially genetic.)

5. I currently own six spider plants. (I have a lot of other houseplants too, but here and now we’re talking spider plants.) Two of them I got from my mom, one from my sister, and the other three are the descendants of babies snipped from now-deceased spider plants of my own... but they all trace back in a direct line to a pair of teeny baby spider plants my sister and I received from one of my mom’s colleagues when I was eight years old. Spider plants are FOREVER. *grin*

Shortly before I dropped out of college for mental health reasons, I had four spider plants, which I named Strawberry, Herring, San-san, and Ankh. You see, I had taken an intro to karate class to fulfill my phys. ed. requirement, this required learning to count to ten in Japanese, and I have never claimed to have a good sense of humor. (Ichi -> Ichigo -> Strawberry. Ni -> Knights Who Say Ni -> Herring. San-san -> self-explanatory. Shi -> Death -> Sandman -> Ankh.) They all got infested by a weird scaly parasite -- little circular brown dots in varying densities -- that caused their leaves to weep clear sticky fluid and eventually killed them. I was able to save uninfected baby spider plants from Herring and San-san, which are the ancestors of three of my current spider plants, but Strawberry and Ankh died childless. (No, wait, I lie; I cut two babies off one of them a few years earlier and gave them to someone else as a birthday present, because I’m a cheapskate.)

For those who are curious, yes, I do name all my houseplants. I don’t remember exactly when I started doing that, but it amuses me too much to stop. (The weird looks I get when I tell people I name my houseplants are also amusing.) My current spider plants are Nefertiti, Euryale, HayJay (short for Herring Jr.), Castor (acquired from Vicky; Pollux died, alas!), Damocles, and Babylon. The latter two are in hanging pots, because see above in re: questionable sense of humor. *wry*

Comments

[branchandroot]

My jade plants are just like that. Generations have come and gone, unkillable by man or cat (despite concerted effort on the part of some cats)! It's really kind of amazing.

[edenfalling]

I only have one jade plant, but it seems determined to live forever all on its own; I think I've had it going on fifteen years. Snake plants are similarly tenacious. :-)

I've never figured out what makes some plants so unkillable when others -- ivies, pink spots, violets -- will shrivel up and die if you look at them sideways. And then there are the ones in between. I have a wandering jew spiderwort (specifically the Tradescantia zebrina variety) which, if potted, will randomly uproot itself and try to shrivel every few months, but which has thrived in an old Planter's peanut jar filled with water for ten years now. I have to snip the rooted bottoms off the various stems now and then as they grow, and shove the new stem base through the root mass into the water, but that is much less bother than ever trying to put it back in proper dirt.

[branchandroot]

It's definitely down to the habitat it evolved for. Desert plants like jades will grow in /shredded rubber/ as long as you water them now and then so they can stock up. Violet and ivy both developed for far less extreme, but still very specific environments, and if you can't replicate those, you're SOL. *sighs* I could wish otherwise.

[edenfalling]

Me too, especially since I really like ivies. The longest I ever managed to keep one alive was roughly five years -- the Paper Lady was one of the varieties with the dusty green leaves edged in white, very pretty! -- but eventually it just up and died. Didn't even take two weeks from the first sign of trouble to utter devastation. During the Paper Lady's life, I had another ivy (the Golden Lady) with beautiful gold-green leaves. I babied that plant to unbelievable degrees, but it only lasted about eleven months. Ivies are amazingly finicky plants, especially when you consider they are related to invasive ground cover that devours stone walls given half a chance. :-/

[redwolf]

Love your immortal spider plants.

I tend to kill plants, but still have my Nan's Cliveas. This is more to them being unkillable than any skill on my part.

I don't name plants, but I do tend to refer to a potted fig as a semi-animate object. It's a Morton Bay Fig or possibly a Port Jackson. Either way, not exactly a suitable pot plant and one that's current around 3m tall. I'd really love to plant it somewhere, but I'd like to keep my house.

A couple of weeks ago I had to repot the beast after it got a bit stroppy in the wind. It had long broken the bounds of its pot, but this time had smashed a watering can and picked up a hose reel. It had also grown through the base of the pot and had roots a good 3cm thick growing through the pavers, which did explain why it was still upright in 70kmh winds. It was displeased with the repotting, but seems to have survived the experience.

I should probably look at transferring my affections to something a little more appropriate like your spider plants.

[edenfalling]

The plants I have most reliably found to be unkillable are spider plants, jade plants, and snake plants. I also have reasonable luck with umbrella plants, which are another fairly hardy houseplant.

It is damn hard to kill spider plants, jade plants, and snake plants. You have to actively work at it. As long as you give them sunlight and water them every few weeks, they get by; if you also remember to fertilize them a couple times a year, they thrive.

*googles Morton Bay fig* Yeah, uh, that doesn't really look like a houseplant, unless you're talking bonsai. Good luck cohabiting with yours! (My family has had mixed luck with trees in pots... or rather, decorative Japanese maples in barrels. My mom acquired two over the years from a colleague, one of which got lugged from one town to another when I was very young, and then planted in the front yard of my childhood home. It thrived for about fifteen years before succumbing to a fungus infestation it caught during a too-mild winter. The other, acquired a few years later, is still alive in my parents' side yard "garden" patch, encroaching somewhat on an aged dogwood. Both outgrew their barrels by the time they were three or four years old.)

[redwolf]

So that's what spider plants are. I think I may just clump them under my umbrella term of grassy plants. It's reasonably good at not killing grassy plants. Well, more likely, they're tough enough to survive my gardening ineptitude.

I think my fig is the Moreton Bay, mostly because the roots have been buttressing for years.

Not surprised your Mum's Japanese Maple made a bid for freedom and is stalking another tree, they get huge. Beautiful foliage though. They're a tree that's pretty much my idea of the iconic maple.

[cat-i-th-adage.livejournal.com]

For those who are curious, yes, I do name all my houseplants.

I name my rosebushes - Midge, Margaret, Abaddon, and Robert (after the dead cat it's planted over). Abaddon is very appropriately named: it has monstrous thorns and has to be forcibly prevented from taking over the other roses' airspace.

So far the only in-door houseplant with a name is a very young kowhai tree called Little Cthulhu, though I may be christening another tree-seedling Mr Flopsy soon, after it's idiosyncratic trunk...

[edenfalling]

My current plants are the abovementioned six spider plants, Eden (snake plant), Bubbles (jade plant), Ame (umbrella plant), Genet (scraggly and kind of pissed-off Norfolk Island pine), Gilead (cactus of indeterminate species, a bit like a miniature aloe with spiky horizontal ridges on its tentacle-leaves), Ahasuerus (wandering jew spiderwort), Palmyra (palm-like plant of indeterminate species), and Arimathea (broadleaf plant, species unknown, rescued from my sister who'd accidentally almost killed it). Which is... fourteen houseplants. Fifteen, if I count my jalapeño pepper, which has not yet died, but most likely will within a month -- peppers are annuals rather than perennials, alas! -- but I try not to count lost causes. *wry*

...

I need some new plants. I lost a few over the past few years and never got around to replacing them, and I like my apartment best when it is filled with greenery. :-)