Cecilia Dart Thornton #2
She is driving me nuts. I can’t stand her style at all – way too purple for me, I’m just not that visual – and I don’t like not knowing what words mean, and besides I think she is just being gratuitous in using them. However, I am half-way through the third book because the story is just interesting enough to keep me going. I am very much looking forward to finishing them and getting back to something a little less tortured.
Flowers and stuff
Don’t recall whether I mentioned that the hyacinths flowered – 2 out of 3, anyway. That was very exciting, and they smelled fantastic; they’re dead now. Yesterday morning I discovered that I had a miniature daff flowering, and at least one other is on the verge… AND one of the other bulbs also has a flower! Not sure if it’s a Bell or a Moonlight Thing; must check the packets to compare.
In other news, I dug up a struggling azalea today, and I hope it appreciates the efforts I went to in doing that and actually survives; no idea if I got enough root mass, but it was not very happy at all behind the hedge. Neither is the other one, but I haven’t got any more potting mix so it will have to wait. So will the tiger lily seeds which Kate gave me the other day, which was very exciting to come home to – a bromeliad as well, and a fuchsia cutting!! It was such a lovely thing to come home from school to.
Other things are going well. Mum massacred the roses, but they needed it; they are already growing back. New zygo is flowering – old zygo has been a mass of flowers for a few weeks now – coriander is still growing! All very good.
Things Fishy
I only realised last night when I was showing off the fish tank to some friends that there is basically no algae left in the tank – no bad, nasty, take-over-the-tank algae anyway, which is really all I was worried about. So this is highly exciting but makes me realise that I have been neglecting my fish a little. However, on my way home also yesterday, I went via Coburg. I bought some more of the feathery plant – Condamine or something? – because there was nothing of it left in our tank. I also bought a bristlenose catfish… and two little silver angels… It took J quite a long time to notice them in the qt, because they are the same colour as the mollies. They cost me $14 (all up); I could have got them for $3.95 each, but the tank that had that price on them only had fish that looked red around the gills and even some around the base of the fins, so I thought it best to go for the more expensive and more of a chance of surivival.
I have spent a large part of today watching Ajax (a large part of my fish-tank-watching time, anyway, which is not necessarily a large part of the actual day) …which reminds me, I noticed a stowaway on the new plants yesterday but by the time I got to pulling it out of the water, he had transferred himself to a different plant. So I was quite worried about a snail plague (which J thought might mean buying clown loaches). However, this morning when I was doing some planting and pruning, I found the stowaway snail! I have put him in the qt, in memory of the other, rather more bewildering pop-up snail who got washed out when we moved house. Anyway, Ajax: he has been remarkably active today and very fun to watch. Even J agreed.
Randomly Yours, Alex 