This plant has absolutely no idea what season it actually is.

Pictured: blissful ignorance

This and our other lipstick plant must be on some sort of synchronized blooming cycle, despite being of completely different ages and in separate rooms. Maybe it's the light? IT'S JANUARY IN SEATTLE. We don't HAVE any light. I have no idea, but it is certainly pretty. All those little dark flowers will send out fuchsia centers like the one on the bottom right, and it will be very colorful in our bathroom and guest room for a while.

Just one of my twenty seven plants. Yep. I'm a hoarder. Except instead of hoarding spoons or dead rats or something, I hoard plants. Going to Molbak's is like a religious experience.

Occasionally this provides some problems, such as having to try to move an approximately 6' tall hibiscus tree across town in a Honda Civic or figuring out what to do with a spider plant that somehow sprouted a baby that grew into a huge thing of its own and was starting to drill its roots into the wall. I'd get a giant pot and put those spider plants together with the little one from work all into it, but I don't know where I'd put said giant pot... So now we have a bathroom counter covered in an air plant in a bowl and the spider plant baby sitting in another bowl with water, where it seems really happy. There are of course plants on pretty much every available surface in the bathroom and some hanging from the ceiling because I ran out of room.

Thankfully, Patrick is most patient with all this. Probably because I moved the hanging vine thing in the hallway so it no longer whacks him in the head every time he walks through it.

Maybe someday we'll have this indoor conservatory that I've dreamed of. Glass windows, trees with clusters of blossoms hanging from them, bushes and vines everywhere, a stream flowing through it or a pond, depending on what I can manage and what won't rot the house's foundation. And as K suggested, perhaps white fairy lights here and there to illuminate it in the dark. In the day, maybe I could open up some windows to let butterflies and hummingbirds in. Or it'd be just gnats. You never know. Dreams don't usually turn out the way you've envisioned, although to be fair sometimes they turn out better (for Exhibit A, see: husband).