And dare I say

Things have been going really well lately! Well, aside from my business class, which I hate with the passion of a thousand splendid suns (almost as much as I hate the book A Thousand Splendid Suns.). It's not even that it's difficult, there's just a lot of pointless and time-consuming paperwork.

But. Like I said, everything else is going great. The picture at the top here is one of my poinsettia plants from this semester, which I'm getting graded on the quality of. The bracts should be done turning color in about a week. I don't actually really like poinsettias, but I've been obsessively concerned about their well-being, and it shows - poinsettias are very sensitive to basically everything, and there is a noticeable quality difference between my section and the one behind it where the students aren't as anal about things. It's mostly about the leaves. Splash even a diluted fertilizer on the leaves, and they're going to turn into these dead crispy little pathetic bacon limbs within a week or so.

Another of my profs, the one who I had my production class with last semester, seems to have warmed up to me quite a bit. This semester I have a landscape plant identification class with him as well as a propagation class. We do a walkaround quiz of latin plant names every week and he started calling me "The Queen" because I've been doing really well and in both classes just generally being very friendly and complimenting me a lot. Also I have direct permission to pretty much use a particular section of the greenhouse for whatever the hell I want, so I've been starting some seeds and taking cuttings and what-have-you. Notable things include Kniphofia and Crocosmia, "Dragon Lady" holly, blue rug juniper, and a variety of different lettuces. I've been waiting for an opportune time to set up a Seven Sons plant and figure out how the hell you produce a Weeping Blue Atlas Cedar (my last attempt ended in me getting covered in cedar pollen.).

Sometimes I think about how I got where I am now and I want little more than a time machine, so that I can go punch my younger self. Younger me would've looked down on current me, and it would've been totally unjustified. And when I say "younger me," I don't mean just 15 year old Mayor of Jesusville me. Even two years ago, I would've looked down on someone who was the way I am now, doing what I'm doing. Rolling around in the dirt all day isn't dignified. Jobs which involve earth-moving and getting covered in mud, chainsawing down trees, being outdoors for reasons other than collecting water quality data, all those things were for the uneducated men in the world, you'd embarrass your entire family (and possibly even your entire gender) if you didn't study something seemingly complex and difficult to relate to.

Hah.