Catchy Name Needed

Presented without comment: A girl - young, but not a kid, maybe 18 or so - asked me in the store today where to find the onions. "Um, I imagine up front with the vegetables," I said (thinking that it's possible she might be talking about minced onions or something like that). "Oh ok - I've been all over the store," she said, and turned around and went toward the produce section.

(Note that I WOULD comment, but I can't really think of anything funny and/or clever, or even just particularly interesting, to say about it. So I'll let it stand on its own.)

But now I am looking at Wikipedia trying to decide if onions are actually a vegetable or not. I think not, but I don't see that that (long) article says so one way or the other. (Although it does mention "vegetables" at one point rather than "other vegetables" so I suppose that's a clue.) Genus Allium, I knew that part, and allium is a flowering plant, so I guess... not a vegetable? Feel free to weigh in!

Aaand... in that way that tends to happen with Wikipedia, I went from the onion article to the one about Asparagales. That's an order name I haven't heard before; I think back a few years ago when I got on my big plant-cultivating kick, they were still putting onions in Liliales. So that's interesting - to me at least!

By "the store" I mean Wal-Mart, as it happens - not where I usually buy my groceries or where I shop often at all, these days. But I needed paper and that was the closest place I could think of that was likely to sell it to me at a not-utterly-ridiculous price. And come to think of it, given that, I hope the poor girl didn't mean "all over the store" literally - I was just imagining her looking in, y'know, the bread aisle or something, not hardware. That would be very sad.

(Yeah, ok, so that may be a comment after all. Hush.)


(And come to think of it, why have I never considered the topic of onions/vegetables before? Whether tomatoes are a vegetable comes up all the time (no) - so why does nobody ever mention onions?)

Although I talked so much about how pretty New Braunfels was, we didn't take a single picture. The pictures are all from the 2nd day, when we drove up to Austin by the back roads.



(I have some more pictures but I thought this was enough for one post. Baseball pictures to come.)

The begonia that I brought home from Mom's house is blooming, no less. I don't know if it'll survive the winter - but actually, I suppose it must've survived last winter since it's been longer than that since anyone did anything but water the plants over there.

I divided the plants I had between the front porch (very shady) and the back patio (partial shade) more or less at random, but everything is hanging in there so far. I wasn't sure how anything would do. The porch in the old apartment got a lot more sun. We've had pretty good weather lately so I'm sure that helps.

I felt very tired and blah today and I decided we should just stay home. I have already had a meeting with the lawyer this week so I felt like I had already done my duty as an executrix for the week, anyway. I gave the lawyer the new papers that I found on the house and they should be able to finally file the inventory now. And other than that, we are mostly just waiting on the house to sell, which hopefully will happen in the spring. We should be able to get started with the renovating after the holidays, I think.

Rob & I have been going out to eat on Saturdays all year, on the way up to Mom's - actually, that's an older custom than that, since Mom and I went out to lunch on Saturdays for years and years, and kept doing it right up until she was hospitalized and couldn't go any more. So we went out to lunch today, too, even though we weren't going anywhere else. The habit seems to be kind of ingrained now. Eventually we won't have to go to Mom's on Saturdays any more, but I bet we keep going out to lunch! Not a bad habit to have, really.

I was thinking about how this year was different from the past several years. We haven't had a Christmas where a family member wasn't seriously ill in a long time - the last three years it was Mom - I guess it was coincidence that she always got sicker this time of year, but she definitely did; and somewhere in there my great-aunt Rae was very ill at Christmas also, I guess that was two years ago; and there was another year that that my mom was having chemo in December for her first round of cancer, before that, in 2001 (I remember saying, "Oh, this has just been a crap year all around" - little did I know); and a couple of years before that my uncle Ted was in the hospital at Christmas and he died right afterwards. Actually I think my dad had chemo in December a few years ago for his prostate, too, but that was after Mom had already gotten sick, and poor Daddy and his prostate got really short shrift. (I barely blinked when he told me. I was like, "Cancer? Oh ok... but the prognosis is good? OK, good, you'll be fine, then. Bye!") So I don't quite know what to do with a "normal" Christmas.

So in the interest of normalcy, we put up tree #2 today - this is less impressive than it sounds since they are both really small trees. The second tree is the all-white one, and I put a bunch of my mom's stuff on it. It's gold, silver and pink, and it looks really pretty. It's completely different-looking than the other tree, which (as you may recall) is a green tree with multi-color lights and decorations. I will have to try to get a picture of the second tree but I don't have a good track record on getting tree pictures that do them justice. With the lights and everything, it makes it hard.

I feel like there should be some lesson to all of this but I don't know what it is. My life is just in transition, that's all. I should probably get used to it.





www.holidailies.org

This is mostly forcolumbina- I'm putting in the full text because I'm not sure it's posted anywhere you can get to without a password. (I understand part of what it's saying....)

GENETICS: Color Convergence in Columbines

Laura M. Zahn

Anthocyanins are pigment molecules commonly found in red, blue, and purple flowers. Columbine flowers are imbued with anthocyanins, and this plant is known to have undergone a recent and rapid divergence, most likely as a result of strong selection by pollinators for floral traits such as color.

Using a phylogenetic framework, Whittall et al. have investigated the convergent loss--that is, the loss of the same trait across multiple evolutionary lineages--of anthocyanin biosynthesis in columbines, which has resulted in flowers that are yellow or white. They found six independent losses (four fixed and two polymorphic) and no gains of floral anthocyanins. Quantitating the anthocyanin precursors in three species without anthocyanin loss and eight species with loss demonstrated that the loss of anthocyanin correlated with a broad convergence in the reduced expression of genes that occur in the later stages of the biosynthetic pathway. Additionally, two of these genes are regulated by a single gene and demonstrated a correlated reduction of expression in five lineages, suggesting that the mutation causing anthocyanin loss is a regulatory component and not a structural one (enzyme). These data show that there is an evolutionary constraint on some of the genes in a nthocyanin biosynthesis, most likely because upstream intermediates are also useful in protecting plants against UV damage, insects, and pathogens. -- LMZ

Mol. Ecol. 15, 4645 (2006).

Birthday lunch with assorted parents, step-parents, etc., today. I ate so much chicken-fried steak it nearly made me sick, and then they brought out cheesecake. Jesus. But I got almost enough money to pay for my new camera, altogether.

I worked on the patio for a little bit before dark. I finally planted my caladium bulbs, and I repotted my evolvulus (is that how you spell it?) - which is good, because it turned out to be terribly root-bound.

Anybody else watching this Locusts movie on CBS? It's sort of an all-star cast of has-beens - Lucy Lawless, John Heard and Mike Farrell. To be fair, they're all has-beens that I like, but still, it's sort of amusing. (SPOILER, in case anybody cares: John Heard was the Misguided Scientist who started the whole thing, but eventually died a noble death trying to right his wrong. What a shock. And they defeated the locusts using sort of a giant bug-zapper, which was funny.)

President Bush is coming to UTMB. Woo hoo. (Like they'd let me anywhere near that if I wanted to be.)

I wrote this at 1am last night - for some reason I had a sudden urge to update, although my dialup threw me off and I didn't post it then. So here was my day yesterday. (Is it necessary to say that all the times are approximate?)

9:15am - Wake up. Decide I don't need to get up yet and roll over.
9:45 - Wake up again, but now I'm running late. Get up and put clothes & makeup on. Make Rob go to office and check for packages in case Mom's package is there. (It's not.)
10:15 - Leave for baseball game. Listen to UT-OU game on radio.
11:15 - In general vicinity of stadium. Cuss because normal (free) parking space is full. Drive around looking for parking that's not $10. Park in garage which is miraculously charging only the normal price of $5.
11:30 - Fight crowds flocking into baseball stadium. Stand in line so that guard can glance into purse (ostensibly looking for bombs, really looking for food, as far as I can tell). Go up to lower-nosebleed seats. View is actually ok. Guy sitting next to me is taking up more than his allotted seat, though.
12:10pm - Pick at Rob's BBQ baked potato as game starts. Decide I'm not hungry.
12:30ish - Carlos Beltran hits homer to put Astros up 2-0. Yell and scream a lot.
1:00 - Braves tie score. I feel sick.
1:30 - Astros score 3 more runs. Jump up and down a lot. Suddenly I feel much better.
1:30-2:30 Astros score more runs. Score now 8-2. (UT-OU score occasionally posted on Diamondvision shows UT losing by increasing amounts.)
2:30 Andruw Jones hits 3-run homer to make it 8-5. Now I am very nervous.
3:15 Brad Lidge strikes out the last batter. Astros win. Much screaming ensues. Suddenly very hungry.
4:15-4:45 Go to Wal-mart; go in through garden center and find pansies (finally!) and then find - the actual reason for this visit - cards for the birthday people and a gift certificate for the one who is not my mother. Dissuade Rob (at least temporarily) from buying another rifle.
5:00 Meet for birthday celebration at italian restaurant. Explain to my mother why her gift has not arrived. Try to pretend we didn't buy the cards 15 minutes earlier. Eat very very well.
6:30 Go to my mother's house. Admire new quilt that she made this week (while sick). Watch Yankees come back and tie game against the Twins, dammit.
7:30 Go to cool new grocery store. Spend too much money.
9:00 Get home. Water plants. Help Rob clean up bottle of pasta sauce he dropped on floor.
9:30 Watch "Lima Time" aka the Dodgers-Cardinals game. Log onto computer.
10:00 - Go into chat. Stay for approximately 2-1/2 hours.
12:30am - Leave to go to bed but play computer games instead.

So far, so good. I sort of cheated and took two Benadryl last night, which is usually enough to knock me flat, and I slept alright (I woke up a couple of times but went back to sleep), and I feel much better today. We'll see if it lasts.

I am going to get Mom to go somewhere with me to buy plants. I have developed this need for pansies. That's my big plan for today.