I so should buy a cooler.

Dooooo it! There are occasionally things that I'm like "I should get a..." and then don't forever, and then when I finally do am like "OMG why did I not do this sooner?!" (example: iphone car charger)

I spoke with my mom yesterday. She lives about 40 minutes drive inland from Atlantic City, so she's safe, other than the possibility of high winds and lots of rain. She took down her ceramic and glass bird feeders and put her patio chairs into the garage, but everything else is staying put.

Dooooo it!

Right? This is the price of being a ditherer.

Oh, also, banana plants and pineapple plants galore. My grandmother's pineapples were legen...wait for it...dary.

There was a massive banana plant in my folks' yard, that the SO assumed had been there forever. No, it was in a pot when my folks moved in, and they stuck it in the ground. Huge. Many bananas. I kept trying to give away bananas while I was there but of course nobody wanted any because everybody had them.

Also, I have the feeders in for cleaning, and both the finches and the hummingbirds are completely bereft. They're hopping along the chain link fence looking for it to rematerialize.

I realize I anthropomorphize more than I should, but I swear yesterday the female finch was showing her mate how to get the nectar. She had just been at the (open, but designed to be for larger birds than her) oriole feeder. He came along and was sitting on the fence watching her. She hopped off the feeder, came toward him, and then dipped her head down on the fence so she was almost upside-down, like she has to in the feeder. He hopped along the fence, thought about it, and then tried.

I just googled pineapple plant. That is the craziest fucking thing I've ever seen.

DE is not wrong. I had no earthly idea until I myself googled it.

The pineapple plant is ridiculous because it looks like a pineapple sitting on top of a plant! It's hilarious.

it is like it is photoshopped.

oh, and the banana wikipedia page put me through changes. I was not prepared for the bigass purple banana, or the green banana with seeds as large as pomegranate seeds.

WTF fruit.

WTF fruit.

INDEED.

I was watching a PBS rerun of a Michael Pollan show called "The Botany of Desire" yesterday. The whole show was fascinating (loved the history lesson on the orchid mania in 17th century Holland), and the part about apples was really interesting; it dealt with how for most of recorded time, apples were used for hard cider. It was only with the development of large orchard farms using grafted plants for sweeter fruit that edible apples became popular. Problem is that the grafting technique leads to a monoculture and all of the problems therein--pests, fungi, etc.--and the necessary spraying of chemicals to combat said problems.