I’m in charge of fauna in our household. Bill handles the flora. He’s the landscaper and gardener who has been nurturing seedlings for peppers, cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, etc., for more than a month now.
But in December 2022, someone gave me a flowering phalaenopsis orchid, and it was so pretty I decided to see if I could not only keep it alive but maybe get it to flower again. A year and change later, success!
After the initial blooms dropped off, I repotted it. It got a spike before the holidays, then acquired buds that stubbornly refused to open. According to Google, it may have been because I was protecting it from the cold a little too well. It lives on the porch, but I was whisking it indoors when the temps dropped below 60 F.
Apparently exposing it to temps in the 50s triggers blooms. I left it out one night and voila! I probably should have saved this for a garden chat, but I was so excited I had to share.
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Now for the bums portion of the post. I thought Donald Trump had a planet-sized ego, and he does, but Joe Manchin’s self-regard is similarly scaled, and I’m not sure he has Trump’s excuse of being a deranged narcissist with a compulsion to cultivate external validation lest he confront the existential truth of his own utter worthlessness. Or maybe he does, I dunno:
CNN — Sen. Joe Manchin says he “absolutely” can see himself as president…
You don’t say…
In public, during stops in states such as New Hampshire, South Carolina and Georgia, Manchin says he believes there’s a role for him as a national icon in the “fiscally responsible and socially compassionate” middle, comparable with the role Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders plays for the progressive left…
We already have “a national icon in the ‘fiscally responsible and socially compassionate’ middle” — he lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. He is reducing the debt that exploded under Trump and doing what he can to protect people’s rights in states run by members of the fascist cult party.
Manchin is hoping to get a meeting with Biden to urge the president to change the way he’s campaigning – for example, to focus more on how inflation declined after the more fiscally constrained Inflation Reduction Act that he forced Biden to retrench; or to talk less about climate change and more about energy security…
So Joe Biden — who was a U.S. senator for as long as he wanted the job because he kept getting reelected, who was twice elected VP and who beat an incumbent president to earn the top job — is supposed to listen to Paw-Paw BlackLung, who is retiring now because his home state’s governor, a folksy buffoon whose primary asset is Babydog, was definitely going to bounce Manchin out of his senate seat?
As Biden tries to assert the success of his presidency, Manchin says he shaped “everything” in the president’s agenda. In an interview with CNN as he drove in New Hampshire, Manchin said the country would have been worse off if he hadn’t used the 50-50 Senate to force Biden to do things his way, arguing, “The way it was presented and the way it ended up are two different things.”
Good lord, what an egotistical prick. It sucks that someone from the fascist cult party will replace him, but I look forward to the day when no one gives a shit what Joe Manchin thinks anymore. I hope he wilts like a neglected orchid when denied the attention he so desperately craves.
Open thread.
