Kersprouten [food]

I have finally realized that alfalfa sprouts are the lettuce of the wintertime. I've tried growing them before, mostly in Arizona, but was never particularly pleased with the result, maybe because ambient temperatures there are just slightly too high? There may also be too many bad fungal spores in the air there. Who knows.

Regardless, several weeks ago I figured I should give them another try, so I bought a bunch of alfalfa seeds. For whatever reason, this year's setup seems to be more workable than whatever I was doing in the past.



I was actually hoping to post photos of another plant, but the week really got away from me this week. On Wednesday, a new set of geckos and anoles arrived, so much of whatever "free" time I had was devoted to getting them comfortable. It's really important that each reptile have at least one plant in its tank, because the plants help maintain higher local humidity. But because our reptile collection wound up downsized at the end of last spring and summer, I wound up low on spare plants to put in the tanks. I had noticed, however, that the local grocery co-op had a good supply of philodendrons for sale the last time I was in to grocery shop, so on Thursday morning I hied me over to the grocery store on my way in to work to see what I could get.

Well, not only did they have the philodendrons, they also had some beautiful Lithiops, and purple passion plants! I've been on the lookout for purple passion plants, as for whatever reason I have fond childhood memories of a purple passion plant my mother had, and I also think they are a fitting Goth Garden candidate.

So that's now stationed in my office and I am mighty pleased.

Meanwhile, at home, the sharry baby chocolate orchid is still happily blooming. A nice contrast to the white of the snow outside.

Pedestrian

So the snowpocalypse nor'easter delivered unto us around 2 inches of snow.

Stuff looked precarious enough this morning that I decided I should probably walk over to the credit union instead of trying to bike there. It's about 3 miles away. Looking at my list of hoped-for errands, I figured it would be a more worthwhile trip if I also walked over to the grocery co-op for groceries.

After that 6-mile jaunt, about half of it laden with groceries, I'm tired.

The nice thing about walking around is noticing things I don't have the wherewithal to notice while bicycling. There's a new coffeeshop on Madison Ave, Iron Coffee, that looks quite nice. It's in the strip of businesses near Quail Street, so only ~5 blocks from here. There's also a new coffeeshop in the place on Quail Street that used to be a lovely, slouchy coffeeshop spot. The internet mapping service says the other new coffeeshop is "temporarily closed," so I guess we'll see about that.

The movie theater up the street on Madison Ave also looks like a good time, and is next door to a place called Bard & Baker, which is a bakery/coffeeshop/board game place.

I'm not ready to sit in enclosed spaces with other people without a mask on, yet, but I'm hoping that does become possible again at some point. Maybe by then I won't be getting home from work after 7 pm every night. Yeah, right.