I am currently on vacation in Myrtle Beach, SC with my entire family (mother, brothers and sister, niece etc) a total of fourteen people.  I have many stories to tell and will have many more by the time I get back.  In the meantime here is a panorama photo that I took off the balcony of our condo here at The Breakers.  I took five photographs and stitched them together via Photoshop.

Click picture to enlarge.

I'm a little surprised by the response I've received about my Lithops.  The past few days I've received dozens of emails.  I plan (when I get time) to do a series of posts on my lithops from seed to adulthood.  In the meantime here is a beauty, Lithops Meyeri.  A new plant is emerging from the center and the old leaves will wither as the new plant absorbs the old leaves water.

My last post on Lithops garnered a great deal of email and interest.  I plan to post more on them as time allows but in the meantime here are a few great websites to check out:

Click on banners to view:

Lithops; An Introduction

This is a great place to start for basic information.

Lithops Homepage

This site is the most comprehensive when it comes to history, morphology and general information.

Lithops Info

This site has a great deal of information and a wonderful database of photographs of many species of Lithops.

Check out these sites and be prepared to become enamored with these wonderful succulents.

When it comes to succulents there is nothing that excites me like Lithops.

Lithops are known as Living Stones and their leaves have adapted to the desert climate by thickening and look very much like the soil and stones around them. 

In the wild they would be buried in the soil / sand with only their tops exposed.  They would be hard to spot by an animal.

I believe this variety is Lithops karasmontana.  Many of the species are similar and hard (for me) to identify.

The hardest part of raising lithops is overwatering.  You need to what would seem like underwatering and then in the winter barely give them any.

Most Lithops produce a flower that is daisy-like and is usually white or yellow.

This species is found in Namibia.  I'd love to go to Africa and see them in the wild.

A few years ago my buddy Tom and I went to The Philadelphia Folk Festival where we saw icons of the folk movement like Tom Paxton, Tom Rush, Janis Ian and Utah Phillips.  My hero, Roy Book Binder was also there where I took in a great workshop.  I wrote about it HERE .

One night as we were standing in line to see a show a woman asked me if they sold Water Ice?  I asked her if she meant ice water but she said, "No, water ice."  I had never heard of it and found out it is a local delicacy.  Here is a place that sells it.

I've noticed that pop is called different things around the country.  When I was in Kentucky they called all pop Coke?  Then I found this site that explains it all. This kind of stuff fascinates me.

A couple of years ago one of my customers gave me a cutting of a Ghost Plant (Graptopetalum paraguayense) that has grown into a real beauty.

The Ghost Plant is native to Mexico and is also known as the Mother of Pearl Plant.

The plant has gray rosettes with a purplish undertone.  It's a member of the crassulaceae family that includes the popular Jade Plant.

This plant is incredibly hardy and wants to be left alone.  If handled too much the leaves will drop off.  This isn't that bad of a thing as the leaves are easily propagated by just laying them on damp potting soil and you'll have a new Ghost Plant in no time.

I expect it to bloom this summer with small white flowers.

Last weekend my daughter and I watched the movie Juno.  It stars Ellen Page as a sixteen year old girl who gets pregnant and gives the baby away for adoption.  My daughter saw it as a comedy and I (as the father of a sixteen year old) saw it as a horror movie.

The movie was pretty good and I really liked Ellen Page.  I noticed her awhile back in the movie Hard Candy, where she lures a child molester into her web.  That was a seriously tough movie to watch.

The thing I walked away from Juno was the music.  The soundtrack played The Kinks, A Well Respected Man, Buddy Holly's (Ummm, Oh Yeah) Dearest and a few tunes by Kimbra Dawson and The Moldy Peaches.

The songs on the soundtrack are simple and childlike and I really enjoyed them.  Here is one by The Moldy Peaches, Anyone Else But You. 

 In the same vein I was listening to a folk music station, WKSU out of Kent, Ohio and I came across a band named The Weepies.  Once again simple childlike tunes that are really good.  Check out their song, Nobody Knows Me At All.

My daughter has been hanging out in Oberlin lately and has a new group of friends.  Last week she told me whenever she is with her new friends someone will wave their arms and say, "There's a party in my tummy" and the others say, "So Yummy, So Yummy"  I thought perhaps it was time for drug testing but my daughter sent me a youtube video that explains it all. 

Last Sunday a driver that I used to work with back in the Elyria Center died of cancer.  We weren't good friends but spoke often.  The second time I was fired from my job (first time as a full-time employee), he was one of the guys who took me out and got me incredibly drunk.  I liked him but didn't hang out with that group.   I worked hard to get off work early and made it to the funeral home to see him and his family.  There was a good showing of his fellow workers.  He had retired six years ago and died at sixty-four, that seems pretty standard.

When our pension fund got into trouble, meetings were held all of us old guys would come to the hall and listen to some guy in a suit wearing an expensive watch.  He would use spreadsheets and charts to show us the pension woes.  At one meeting he said that the biggest problem is that retirees used to live three to five years but now were living six to eight years.  Later I spoke to the man and recommended passing out bacon, cigarettes and hemlock at the meetings.  He explained that we were all in the same boat.  Perhaps, but it was obvious the workers were in steerage class.

A few days ago I was delivering to the Mackert family.  Back in the day they owned Mackert Dairy.  For the past thirty years I've enjoyed they kindness and stories of the old days.  My father delivered milk for them after he came back from World War II.  His brother Robert worked there in 1950.

While delivering there Gladys told me she found something.  She went into her study and brought out a photograph of my uncle Bob taken in 1950.   There was an odd moment looking at the photograph.  The last time I saw my uncle he was sitting on the edge of my bed.  I was ten years old and my father had died a few hours before. I was inconsolable.  He sat with me and quietly told me about my father.  Then he took his time and told me that we'd be okay.  I remember wishing at the time that he was my father and feeling guilty about it.

It's hard to believe that this picture was taken fifty-eight years ago.  Bob died in 1970 at 41 from the same colon cancer that killed his father, later his son and even later would attack my two brothers.

The past year I've been to too many funerals.  Funerals force reflection and with my job I have a lot of time for that.

Last night I had a package for an area I've never delivered before in Avon.  I went there and as I was standing at the front door I noticed an odd buzzing around my head.  It was so fast that it was hard to keep up with.  Finally I saw the hummingbird and it's body stood still as it's wings were a blur.  For a few seconds it just hung in the air but it seemed to go on forever.

Life is a series of moments, we give them meaning.  The Mackerts, the dairy, my father, my uncle and the hummingbird, they all are part of my life.  I have a lot to think about.

In light of my last posts on The Great Sunflower Project and plants in general, I thought I'd post a joke I heard years ago about wasps.

The world’s foremost authority on wasps is walking down the street when he sees a LP record in the window of a record shop: “Wasp sounds from around the world”. Intrigued, he goes into the shop and asks if he can listen to it.

“Certainly,” says the shop assistant and pops it onto his turntable. After listening to the first track for a while, the world’s foremost authority on wasps is a bit confused.  I don’t recognize any of these sounds, and I’m the world’s foremost authority on wasps! Can you play the next track please?”

The assistant obliges and skips the needle onto the next track. After awhile, the world’s foremost authority on wasps is still confused.“No, I still don’t recognize any of these wasps. Can you try the next track?”

The assistant skips the needle on, and the world’s foremost authority on wasps listens for a little while longer before shaking his head. “It’s no good. I just don’t recognize any of these wasps”

The assistant peers at the label of the record and says “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I had it on the bee side.”