I’ve been working all day, but thought I would take a minute to stop and smell the roses.
Here’s my dinner-plate sized hibiscus bloom.
I love how it looks like the pink was hand-painted, but I promise it wasn’t.
Open thread.
by WaterGirl| 76 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Comments are closed.
zhena gogolia
Lovely.
Benw
That’s a pog hibiscus!
WaterGirl
@Benw: What does that mean?
sab
So a useful thing BJ jackals taught me this week is deadhead the Rose of Sharon blossoms. I love these plants, but around me they are extremely invasive weeds. Well that is because I have been leaving their flowers on for birds to eat and spread. None of this leaving them on for frozen artistic interest in winter. Come Spring they will sprout, in places you don’t want them.
WaterGirl
I just found out that my niece is moving, which probably doesn’t seem like a big deal, but she has hosted all our family gatherings for the last 15 years, at least. She will still host from her new house in Michigan, but her place was my only connection to the Chicago suburbs where I grew up.
I’m excited for them, but a little bit sad for me.
trollhattan
Used to have one of those and it never failed to amaze, how big those blooms were. Especially early in the season. Came from a specialty nursery and was victim of our remodel, have never found another.
trollhattan
The Dixie Fire in NE California, the one that may have consumed the Levenson family cabins, is the monster that won’t be tamed. Grew an estimated 17,000 acres overnight and is approaching a half-million acres total. Containment? 21%
Betty
@WaterGirl: Understandable, Water Girl. Most of my family has moved away from my hometown, and losiing those early connections leaves an empty place in my heart.
trollhattan
Well bless your hearts, you think?
Hope they consider the consideration they’re considering.
sab
@WaterGirl: We used to host all our family gatherings, and Covid stopped that. Younger stepson hosted something this summer, and what a relief. We are old and tired.
I don’t know when we will see my sister’s kids and families again, but after hosting everything for twenty years I have had enough. Nobody else seems to know how to do it. Cook and serve large quantities. Shouldn’t be hard.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: If you’re ever in Champaign, I can give you a piece of mine.
WaterGirl
@sab: I hosted my first big holiday when I was a young 20-something. My roommates and I hosted Thanksgiving for all our friends who weren’t going home for the holiday.
We had 20-30 people. My first turkey ever. I made a tiny batch of my mom’s stuffing ahead of time (first time for that, too) then basically multiple it by a big number to make enough for everyone.
My mom always stressed about making the holiday dinners. My approach is a lot looser than that, it’s supposed to be fun.
debbie
@trollhattan:
Down from 35%. So sad. ?
Sure Lurkalot
Holy humongous hibiscus! Simply beautiful and it does look painted.
In sad news, my 20 year old hibiscus, which never had such big blooms but was lovely, bit the dust this year. Everything else in the same bed is happy as all get out so I don’t know the cause of death. I’m not the main gardener so I probably looked at it wrong one day.
Anonymous At Work
@trollhattan: About A-effing-time. Just need NEA and that’s the last major hurdle for mandating teachers to get a vax (in states that allows such).
Dan B
Your Hibiscus is one we can’t get to bloom here in Seattle but that may be changing. We’ve got four Watermelon and two Cantalope type melons on a total of four plants. One melon is getting huge. Usually it’s a challenge to get any melons at all because of the cold June and early July plus very cool nights. Not this summer.
I do have a variegated Rose of Sharon with double pink flowers that started blooming a month earlier than typical.
Starfish
@trollhattan:
This is my favorite fire map from last year.
Sure Lurkalot
@WaterGirl: This was EXACTLY my first big holiday host too– Thanksgiving for the stay puts at college. I was lucky to have a co-host who was dinner party thrower central. But we didn’t do turkey…it was a seafood extravaganza because we were away from home and out of the box.
raven
I’m fixin to have Olympic/Euro/Oro Cup withdrawal. It’s been almost non-stop sports since I had my surgery so I guess a “pre-football” break will be good. A couple came to see Artemis today and they will most likely take her if she and her other two dogs get along.
WaterGirl
@Dan B: I bought my first “double” rose of sharon this year – a double pink one! It’s very small but very pretty.
WaterGirl
@raven: Wow, that’s fast! They just came to meet her, but Artemis will be at your house for awhile?
Yutsano
@Sure Lurkalot: I just realised I never did that in college. I think it’s mostly because I always went home for mine every year. I do have an excuse however. Thanksgiving is the big holiday in my immediate family. The only one I ever missed in the last 20 years is because I had just started with the IRS and I was still in training. Still made me a stuffed baby chicken* with green beans for the big day. Also called like three times.
*A Cornish game hen. I’m not THAT savage people!
trollhattan
@Dan B:
Next door to the Seattle house I grew up in is a frickin’ palm tree in the front yard. You’ll probably be planting citrus soon.
James E Powell
@raven:
I’m about to cancel my AT&T TV subscription. I only signed for the $70/month plan to watch the NBA playoffs, then kept it for the Olympics. There’s really nothing else on TV that I watch.
lifeinthebonusround
It’s hibiscus moscheutos, common names rose mallow/swamp-rose mallow.
Anonymous At Work
@James E Powell: The Olympics were on TV?
sab
@trollhattan: You grew up in Seattle. Wow. I thought southern CA from the get go. Just shows north or south, westerners are mostly just western.
sab
@Anonymous At Work: What’ s a TV?
Anonymous At Work
@sab: Touché
eclare
@trollhattan: One of my neighbors here in Memphis has palm trees! I could not believe it when they planted them. They wrap them when it gets cold, but credit where due they’ve kept the trees alive for years.
James E Powell
@Anonymous At Work:
Yes, somewhat. NBC & NBC Sports. I didn’t sign up for Peacock prime, so most of what I saw was on tape delay. The gold medal games were live. I mostly wanted to see the basketball teams & track events, but also watched some other stuff.
I cannot believe how good people can be at ping pong.
Another Scott
@eclare: There are at least a few yards in our Zone 7b NoVA neighborhood that have palm trees and elephant ears and similar things. Weird.
Cheers,
Scott.
gwangung
I loved Lesley Jones’ Olympic commentary.
sab
@WaterGirl: I bought a blueish rose of sharon last year. Planted the unfortunate thing in my driveway. Not much soil and iffy water.
I thought it hsd died, but this week there it was with it’s blue blossoms. Tough roses these plants are.
Not recommending poor watering. That is plant abuse.
eclare
@Another Scott: Looks really weird among all the oaks, maples, etc.
Ohio Mom
Poor Ohio Dad is playing chauffeur for his mom this afternoon. I say “poor” because he took her to a memorial service filled with people he doesn’t much like and usually tries his best to avoid.
Before he left, he checked with his mother’s BFF to see if she wanted to ride along and BFF answered that she wouldn’t consider going because of who would be there. That made Ohio Dad feel a little better.
Another Scott
Popehat thread.
Very evocative.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@sab: Imagine what it could do with enough water! :-)
TheOtherHank
@James E Powell: I changed my ATT tv subscription from some normal basic cable to local channels only and upped my ATT fiber speed from 100 Mbit to 1 Gbit and my bill went from $220 per month to $100. And as a bonus now Fox gets none of my money.
sab
@WaterGirl: It will not lack water again.
Renie
I live in New York in Zone 7 and grow Hibiscus. Every year they are beautiful. I have 2 pink ones and 1 red. Planning to buy a white one to grow next year. Everyone spots them right away in the yard and loves them!!
Greg Ferguson
More than gorgeous. I have never seen one like that before. ?❤?
sab
@gwangung: Somebody finally noticed that synchronized ( whatever they call it this time) is incredibly hard, even if they are just sticking pretty legs out of the water.
My husband won’t watch it. I thought “sexist pig” until I remember he cannot actually swim. He thinks any kind of trulling/floating is amazing. Stuff I could do at age 4. He thinks them in the water is frightening.
NotMax
Gallumphing around the interwebs, happened upon this vintage ad. Interesting because it’s from 1940!
Steeplejack (phone)
@Another Scott:
You should have included the payoff—that the “middle child” is going to college in two weeks. ?
Another Scott
ObOpenThread – AndroidPolice:
Good, good.
Cheers,
Scott.
satby
@Sure Lurkalot: No, they have a lifespan, and 20 years is about right for the end of it. Part of the reason they produce so much seed, I imagine.
trollhattan
@sab:
Other than that brief Iowa era I’ve managed to mostly live near I-5. It’s a little weird TBF.
Rob
@trollhattan: That’s alarming! It’s already the 2nd biggest fire ever in California, according to the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires).
sab
@sab: My husband cannot actually dependably swim. Ditto for my baby sister. My older sister and my only brother were good enough swimmers to be competitive. Not me. But I still can swim. Drop me in water and I will paddle. Toss me overboard and I will paddle. Put me on skis behind a boat and I will get up and have fun without fear of drowning.
Husband and sister don’t feel that way. Any exposure to water is terrifying.
This makes vacation plannimg difficult. I know his limitations. He is afraid of stuff that is completely safe, and gung-ho on stuff that would be terrifying if he only knew the risk
I hate having no water in my future, but I am vividly aware of the dangers of non-swimmers near water. I hate competetive swimming with a passion but I love paddling around.
First worls problems.
Tony Jay
@raven:
I know what you mean. I was feeling it too until I remembered that the Paralympics come after the Olympics, and I usually enjoy them more than the non-Para version.
Same events, mostly, but if anything even more hardcore. I hope they’re going ahead as planned.
satby
@Greg Ferguson: AKA hardy hibiscus or swamp hibiscus. I love them, but it’s too dry here for them ?
Another Scott
Zooks!!
Cheers,
Scott.
satby
@Another Scott: very good!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Rob: I went out on a Milky Way shoot near Santa Barbara last night and the smoke was getting down here.
debbie
@Another Scott:
❤️
Uncle Cosmo
@sab: FWIW I can’t swim either. My folks didn’t (hillbilly refugees), and though they took me to lessons at the local beach (10 minutes’ drive), pollution closed it soon after, and anyway the lessons didn’t take, because I don’t float. (My bone structure is so dense that I weigh about 30 lbs more than anyone would guess from looking at me; if I lie on my back in the water, the water closes in over my face. In any depth over my head I have to struggle constantly for my next breath – not my idea of fun.)
Another Scott
How AI could solve a 600 million piece puzzle
https://p.dw.com/p/3ycKk
(2:51 video)
Neat, and potentially important.
Cheers,
Scott.
satby
Well, I got disappointing news about my planned October European vacation this week. The hotel booking company that offered such good deals on unsold rooms went out of business. I bought travel insurance so I can get my money back, but rebooking will cost about double for the same hotel rooms. It’s possible that the travel insurance could pony up the difference rather than pay out for an entirely cancelled trip, so I’m waiting to hear if they’ll do that. Not to mention I was waiting to see if I had to cancel the entire trip because of covid anyway. First world problems to be sure.
UncleEbeneezer
“I love how it looks like the pink was hand-painted, but I promise it wasn’t.”
On that note, for anyone interested who has HBO, the show Full Bloom (which features the fabulous LA florist/inluencer and owner of Bloom & Plume coffee shop, Maurice Harris) has some cool challenges where the contestants paint their flowers strange colors to give them a completely new effect. It’s a really fun show. And lots of handy tips for your home garden/flowers.
PS- does anyone know why when I try to blockquote using the tool above the comment box, it always block quotes everything I wrote, even if I only select a portion? I’ve even tried typing in the html codes manually but it doesn’t help? (I’m using Safari)
Another Scott
@satby: :-(
My J and her twin have had a trip to Switzerland planned for a couple of years. They thinking maybe next year, maybe.
They are indeed first-world problems, but it’s an actual real problem for real people (including the hosts in the foreign lands). Sensible leadership could have ended this a year or more ago (or greatly reduced the problems), but Nooo…. Grr….
Hang in there and best of luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
Elizabelle
@satby: sorry to hear that, satby.
Miss Bianca
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Hell, we’ve got the smoke from the California fires hanging over the central mountains in CO like a pall. I almost called our Shakespeare in the Park for indoors instead of outdoors last night because of it.
Glad I didn’t, even if the smoke was annoying, because 97 people showed up and there’s no way we would have crammed that many folks into the theater for an indoor performance – we are holding it to 50-60 max.
Smoke to the left of me, COVID to the right – indoors wouldn’t have felt any safer to me than outdoors, under the circumstances.
satby
@Another Scott: I’ll keep my fingers crossed for J and her twin!
@Elizabelle: well, it’s been at risk of being cancelled since I first had the idea because of the pandemic; and I can’t even complain much about the money since it was part of my stimulus cash and I’m not likely to be losing it. But I love to travel, and as I get older and my sight worse, the window will be closing over the next decade.
Steeplejack (phone)
@UncleEbeneezer:
See if this helps: Copy the text below into a new comment in text mode and then post it.
Let’s see how that works.
Parfigliano
CaseyL
@Another Scott: Here in the PNW, some homes and public gardens have palm trees.
I asked about how well they could possibly do, and here’s what I was told: Palm trees can stay alive in our weather, but they won’t flower and they won’t reproduce.
That, apparently, is how you can tell if a plant is really happy: it flowers. (If it’s a flowering plant at all, that is.)
grandmaBear
@Another Scott: I don’t know how recent this hackathon was, but before I retired 5 years ago, our lab was working with USGS, JPL, UW, Cal and USC on this. To deal with the false positives you need to configure the nodes (phones in this case) as a network and apply some fancy mathematics (quickly, since you’re doing this in real time). Fun programming challenges.
Steeplejack
@Parfigliano:
Baby steps. ?
Testing . . .
Some more UncleEbenezer text outside the blockquote.
Amir Khalid
The hibiscus is Malaysia’s national flower. I’ve never seen a hibiscus here that was anywhere near that huge.
WaterGirl
@UncleEbeneezer: In your comment at #60, you would highlight the first line, and then select the double quotation marks.
Did you try doing that BEFORE you added anything else?
If you did, and that doesn’t work, then try pressing RETURN after the part you want to block quote, and THEN select what you want to quote.
I think that may be your problem. Let me know if that works?
Ruckus
@TheOtherHank:
Thank you for cutting faux out of $120/month……//
Ruckus
@UncleEbeneezer:
You have to have a return not to capture everything below or above the line/paragraph you are putting in the box.
You don’t have to type anything, either above or below but you do have to tell the software that something belongs above or below and you have to do this before you select the intended line/graph and form the box quote.
Another Scott
@grandmaBear: Neat.
Balloon-Juice – is there anything that it can’t do??
:-)
I remember being at a summer program at a college toward the end of high school (late ’70s) when some guy from AFRL gave a talk and said he was working on a project to translate documents using computers. They were starting with English and starting with defining the alphabet – which is harder than one might think given the nearly infinite variety of type faces, handwriting styles, poor reproductions, etc. The first letter they chose was “B” – some parts straight, some parts curved, etc. “How do we define a “B”, or “what is b-ness”?”…
It’s astounding what our phones can do now, but it’s always good to remember that there’s decades and decades of work that made their magic possible.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@raven: nwsl is still going. available on cbs & paramount+.
much less goonish than mls or euro conpetition.
Ken
@grandmaBear: XKCD got there in April 2010, sort of. His opinion of the detector app was in October 2019.