Despite the fact that we are now a couple of weeks into Spring, this is the sight that I was welcomed to this morning as I was driving into work. With the temperature hovering right around 32 degrees F and a nice wet weather front moving through, we are going to be getting a mix of rain, snow, and ice most of the day I guess.
At least so far we are faring better than the folks up North and I am thankful for that. The town of Gaylord which sits just about an hour and 45 minutes North of our home was recently hammered with a pretty significant tornado a few years ago. Then this past weekend they got hammered again with a massive ice storm.
If you want to watch some of the videos people have posted on YouTube, you can find them here.
It's pretty insane the amount of damage. It actually hit the whole area, but I know people in the city of Gaylord have been issued a shelter in place warning because the conditions have been so horrible. The five mile long Mackinac Bridge was shut down yesterday because they were worried about the massive chunks of ice breaking off and falling on vehicles.
The past few days as I have been traveling to work I have passed convoy after convoy of electrical contractors heading North to help get power restored as quickly as possible. I've seen some areas where all new power poles are going to need to be installed because the old ones snapped right off from the weight of the ice on the lines. It's pretty crazy!
It would seem Mother Nature is making fools of us all.
Sometime around the holidays @mrsbozz was given this aloe plant from a friend at work. I was a bit nervous when she brought it home. You see, my wife and I don't have a great track record with keeping plants alive. Sure, I have grown tomatoes and some other vegetables outside in our garden, but even then it was a pretty difficult and time consuming task. Where other folks have a natural green thumb, I tend to have a black thumb and growing things just isn't something that comes easily for me.
For example. I had a batch of lucky bamboo that my friend got me many years ago. I kept it alive for some time, but I was sad to see that each month another one of the stalks would turn yellow and slowly fade away. Before long I was left with nothing. From what I have heard, it's pretty difficult to kill bamboo, so I guess I am just gifted.
I think our biggest issue is not knowing how much to water plants. We live in a world of extremes when it comes to plants and @mrsbozz and I either over water plant or under water plants. I wish there were hard and fast rules about plants to make it easier for dummies like us. 1 ounce of water once a week or something like that.
Is that too much to ask?
As you can see, things were starting to go a bit bad for our plant. We had a little bit of a shoot coming up in the middle, but that limb on the far right was withering and dying. That is the same thing that happened to my aloe plant when I was living alone. Before long I had a pot full of nothing and a renewed confidence that I suck at gardening.
I did some research online and again without a clear and concise roadmap of how much water to give the thing and when, I decided that maybe sitting in the windowsill it was getting too much afternoon sun. I let @mrsbozz know I was going to move it to the table. Worst case it just kept dying, best case it found some renewed life.
It turns out, that seems to have done the trick. We are still being pretty careful about when we water it and how much we give it, but the slowly browning vegetation has been stopped and it actually seems to be thriving a bit now.
Maybe I don't suck at this afterall.
I can't help but think how proud @bdmillergallery would be of me that I was able to do a 180 with this plant for a change. I have little doubt that eventually we are going to need to look into moving it to a bigger pot. That's the hope anyway. I glance at this plant every day as I walk by. I can't help but think that eventually the other shoe is going to drop and it is going to start turning brown again.
It's just my luck with plants you know.
Hopefully that isn't the case and I can see this thing turn into a pretty awesome and amazing aloe plant that I am still taking care of when I am 80 years old.
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