Today I didn't get much done but there was a nearly-two-hour Zoom faculty meeting midday, where we talked about how we could return with 'distancing' in the fall and discovered that the "square footage" of the classrooms we were given was not actually realistic (I described it later to my Best Frolleague as "they used the Imagine A Spherical Cow method of estimating room sizes")
It's....a little overwhelming and discouraging. It seems the folks in the fancy offices, some of them making four times what I do in a year, have even less idea than I do as to what to do.
So I spent the rest of the afternoon looking for more possible labs that could be done either "at a distance" or totally online. It feels wrong to me to do ecology labs that way, but....we don't know what's going to happen and I'd rather be prepared than caught flat footed.
So anyway. Here's a picture dump from my garden.
This will eventually be a Cherokee Purple, once it ripens. I have a few others on the vine but we've had a few really hot nights and so the recent flowers haven't set fruit. I read somewhere when nights stay over 78F or so fruit won't set....
This is the skullcap (one of the Scutellarias, I forget the species) I bought yesterday.
The garden looks a little puny right now (and needs some more weeding, that blackberry is nothing if not persistent in resprouting) but I hope that things will get bigger in the next few weeks.
Here's the butterfly milkweed. Again, it's small. I will need to mark all of these come fall so I don't mistakenly dig them up next spring.
And another (different variety, but I forget the varietal names on these) nasturtium. This, along with pineapple sage, are my favorite flowering plants to put in a garden. (And yes, you can also eat/make tea out of both, but I don't think I'd care for the flavor of either)
And from my front yard, here is the first flower on the Turk's cap (Malvaviscus arboreus var. Drummondii). I've had this plant since I lived here - it comes back every year and is heat and drought tolerant and seems not to get diseases. And butterflies and hummingbirds come to the flowers. So it's pretty much a winner of a plant and one I recommend to people - it's low-maintenance, and pretty, and like I said, seems to avoid disease. (Roses and all are very pretty but I am not really a fan of a plant you have to fuss over on the regular)
I have a lot more space there and at some point I need to run to Lowe's because my garage door is sticking again and I'm all out of "white lithium" (a spray lubricant that seems to help) and I might just look at what they have left in the way of plants....
One more thing. I've been reading through (well: I'm only halfway through the second book) the Chronicles of Prydain and I decided one day when browsing a stuffed-toy selling site (Stuffed Safari) that one of the toy Bigfoots (Bigfeet? What is the plural of Bigfoot?) kind of fit my mental image of Gurgi from the books - and Gurgi is my favorite character* - and one thing, when I was a kid? I always wanted stuffed toys of my favorite characters from books or cartoons or movies. (There are far more available now than then. I did have an Elliot the Dragon and a Snoopy but I had to press a couple other toy mice into service to be Miss Bianca and Bernard, though just a few years ago you could buy "real" Biancas and Bernards....and so I got a pair)
But anyway. I ordered him, but he was out of stock, so I had to wait.
(*I worried aloud on Twitter that he might die horribly in a later book, which would make me sad - or, I didn't say but thought - he might "break bad" somehow, though that seems less likely in a book like this. A friend who has read the whole series assured me that he is present in all the books, and also is "very heroic" so I presume he doesn't do a heel-turn at some point).
Anyway, he came today. Yes, his foot says Bigfoot but he will be Gurgi to me.
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