Pic Post

First, check out the sweet fog bank clinging to the hills south of our house on Saturday morning.

Secondly, we were cleaning up the room with no purpose (which seems to be an ongoing battle, as it is the junk room) and the garage yesterday afternoon and discovered this:

We have FIVE standalone fans, not to mention the four ceiling fans we have hung in the house. These standing fans are all remnants from when we didn’t have AC. But still. That is a lot of fan. I theorized I could start a wind farm.

The state of the lemon tree:

One lemon (its second) is almost ripe in the bottom left, and a new lemon (super tiny, top right) is starting to form. Also, it has lots of pretty flowers and smells nice. Win!

The state of the basil plant:

Looking pretty good right now. The taller branch in the back is the transplant from the previous iteration–the only stalk that survived. The lower ones are all new. Some of leaves died already, but I think I made it a little too crowded. It seems like it’s doing ok, and I see new leaves growing.

The state of one of the orchids we got from our housewarming:

Sad? I don’t know what to do with that dying stalk. I tried cutting it off, it didn’t like that. I even gave it orchid food.

The state of the (what I like to call) surprised pothos:

I don’t know, it looks like his leaves are standing up in surprise, like a cartoon.

The state of the pothos from my coworker:

The state of the poinsettia from Christmas:

Dude, do these things just not die? It’s amazing.

The state of the lily that Donna gave us:

Not flowering yet, but still going strong, much better than last August when it kept wilting. (Sorry for the lame, dark picture. Mike is still asleep, and the lily is in our bathroom–I read it likes to be moist.)

Sleeping In & TV

or the semblance thereof. I woke up at 7 this morning! 7! (although, my body thinks it’s 6). This is the only day of the year where I sleep my normal pattern and get to pretend I slept in. Hooray.

Man, I wish I could sleep in occasionally!

On the day before Daylight Savings, (in which I woke up at 5a) my initial goal was to try to find an iPad 2 after striking out at Target (employee grumbled that there was no sold out sign, how DARE she have to answer questions), Walmart (literally laughed at us–apparently it’s too small of a market for them to get any), Best Buy (nicest, actually offered that the next morning they were taking orders). My dad had gone to the Apple store at the Brea Mall and waited for an hour before realizing they had been sold out for quite a bit of time and no one had told the line. I had sort of vaguely hoped living in non-San Diego city proper, it might be a little bit easier to acquire it, in lieu of going to the Apple store in Fashion or UTC.

So we got bagels in the morning (surprisingly, Cole, the kid who works there who somehow memorized my name did not help us this morning) and wandered over to Best Buy to look at the Apple TV.

I hear you saying, Wait, Robyn, you just had a Google TV at your house a mere month ago. Why are you getting an Apple TV?

Well, loyal reader, a) I had a stupid incident in which I thought the Google TV wasn’t responding, but it turned out I was using the identical matching keyboard for the HTPC. I unplugged the Google TV anyways, and didn’t miss it. Google TV=delicious icing on the cable TV cake. It is not a standalone. (Oh, right and we were just borrowing it.)

This week, we canceled our cable (all the less reason for the GTV). Uverse had been slowly creeping up and up and up in price and I really, REALLY only watched 4 channels as my “brain idle” TV–1450 HGTV, 1452 FoodTV, 1454 DIY Network, 1456 CookingTV (yes, they were all in a row like that, it was very convenient). It seemed financially unwise to be paying $100+/month to watch those four channels and record broadcast shows.

Alright, so we have no cable now, but we have a computer already attached to the upstairs TV (a little Dell Zinio) and Mike has his really old PC downstairs in the studio. Those are covered, you can browse the web and stream and watch Netflix. The only TV in our house that was left connectionless was the small one in our bedroom. We do enjoy snuggling in bed and watching something. We dug around in the garage and found an old DVD player, and thought perhaps an Apple TV (since it streams Netflix now) would be a good box for that.

Where was I? Oh right, so we went to Best Buy, and played with their display iPad 2 (so speedy) and shunned the iPad 1 🙂 We finally got someone to show us where they had hidden the Apple TV (on a display table in the front right where we walked by /facepalm). OMG, it is so tiny and adorable. It is literally like 3″x3″. While we were out and about, we figured we should check at the AT&T store across the street, just to make sure they had no iPads. They also are too small to get any.

We returned to the house and set up the Apple TV, and there may have been a few minutes of squeeing wherein we controlled the iTunes library on the big TV, the Apple TV and the speakers upstairs that are hooked into an Airport Express FROM OUR iPHONES. The future is now. And then we spent a few minutes trying to figure out what was still playing and where was that coming from?

Then, later, we made ANOTHER trip to Best Buy to get a broadcast antenna for the big TV. And then watched Les Misérables 25th anniversary on PBS. Sadly, we don’t get ABC or CBS over the air. They broadcast from Mt. Soledad, and I suspect the hills get in the way.

So far, I haven’t really missed TV. However, I have several books in the queue waiting to be read, and I haven’t been plowing through The Wise Man’s Fear at the breakneck speed I expected. I’m trying to savor it, a bit. We shall see.