I'm Back & Will Be Catching Up for a LONG Time!

I didn't fall off the face of the Earth, really.  I am back and I want to thank everyone for all the notes in the meantime.  Life has gotten in the way - yet again!  It will take me a VERY long time to get back into the swing of things are caught up so for the foreseeable future I'm sure to have a lot of mishmashy type posts.  Hope you don't mind!

One of the main reasons I have been avoiding a blog post is because we lost our dear Paco to his immune issues back in Early May.  He was just shy of his 7th birthday.  It all happened so fast and I'm not sure if I can fully explain everything that happened within the 12 hours of it actually happening.  Plus it was very graphic when it did happen because he was dealing with clotting issues.  Not only was he dealing with his ITP but he also had IHMA.  Up to this point he had dealt with 1 immune disease but that dreadful night he developed a 2nd one.  In addition, he was developing Cushing's again.  Because he was on a high dosage of long-term steroids he was losing muscle mass, too.  Since he was diagnosed at about 2 and a half we knew something like clotting could be in his future but NOTHING prepared us for what actually took place.

Eventho, I haven't been able to take down his pen area YET I was able to 'keep busy' and that seemed to help a little bit.  I know it sounds weird but I have to keep busy to deal with certain things.  It's not that I'm running away from my problems - it just helps me to focus on multiple things to help me heal in the meantime.   

I'm not sure if I blogged about this before my hiatus or not but back in March, I traveled to the Capitol Building.  It was my first time there.  It was a rainy day but I'm glad that I was part of it.  It was a Rally for Fair Districts and to stop Gerrymandering which is a HUGE problem in our state.  Over the past several months it's been a whirlwind and eventho we didn't get the results we had hoped we are still fighting for VOTING RIGHTS!

The county I live in doesn't have a large Refugee population but we neighbor a city that does.  Back in January and February our League of Women Voters invited the director of the Multicultural Resources Center to do a Refugee 101.  We wanted to do this because there is a lot of misinformation and incorrect assumption about how Refugees come to America and integrate into life in a new country.  The feedback was positive and a group of citizens decided to start hikes for Refugees locally since we are smack dab in the middle of the Allegheny National Forest and have other natural beauties in our area.  So...the middle of May we hosted our first of 2 hikes.  The first one was for Refugee Kids.  Ukraine, Syria, Somalia, Eritrea (a country bordering Somalia), and Nepal were the countries they fleed from.

A little over a month later we hosted another hike.  This time for a group of Senior Citizen Refugees.  Some of the participants were part of a sign language group, too.  Within this group were mostly people from Bhutan and Pakistan.

In the beginning of the Summer another outing we had was to Erie, PA, where we went to a Food Truck Festival in hopes to have one locally some day.  I was thrilled that there were vegan options!

Another thing that has been on my mind is a local tragedy.  K9 Choper - our local K9 Officer - passed away from his injuries during a training day.

During the end of June I was a committee member for the annual car and craft show at our fairgrounds and I was pleased to see more vendors that offered vegan friendly products.  One of them being these Vegan Lip Balms.

Of course we have been busy with work, too, an have had many live remotes lately including a few at local businesses and during fair week.  More on fair week in a future post but here is a neat snapshot from Employee Appreciation Day at a local business.

Another thing that has been keeping us busy has been trading in our vehicles on new ones!  Here is the new Fiat I traded my old one in for.  I LOVE it!

A few months ago I became a Zonta Member, too!  It's been fun so far and I'm looking forward to getting involved with more of the service and advocacy end of things.  Each summer they have a Summer Surprise and members don't know what it is until they get there.  This year we went to the Lucy-Desi Museum.  We had dinner in The Tropicana that they set up to look like the real TV set.  There were also recreations of the sets from I LOVE LUCY, too!  Since I'm in radio I found this tidbit extra interesting!

In other news...our local mall is going thru a major redesign and revamp.  They are turning it from a shopping mall to a strip/plaza type thing.  A co-worker has gotten me into indoor plants more the last year or more and she was upset when I told her that the indoor plants at the mall were going to be trashed.  We asked the project manager if we could take some and he said YES so we are trying to save some of them.  More on that in upcoming posts, too!

And before blogger gives up on me I think I will end this post right here.  But I will be regularly blogging again so please check back.  I really didn't scratch the surface of the stuff I have to share with you and I know I will be adding more to the list very soon!  Thanks again for staying with me the last couple months!  I appreciate you all!

Office Plant Update!

I know it has been a full week since my last post but I have had some really upsetting news as of late.  Perhaps one of these days I will share it but I'm not there yet.

In addition, I had some sort of weird flu bug from Saturday thru Monday.  At first, I thought it was a frozen flatbread pizza I had bought and not cooked right but after a couple of days and the way my body responded I knew it wasn't the pizza. 

Perhaps I was in denial or maybe it's because I'm NEVER sick.  I don't know...but it confused me.  I bet I haven't had the flu in at least 12 or 13 years (maybe more).  Plus, in 19 years of working at the place I currently work at - I have only taken a total of 4 sick days and 2 and a half of them were because of Sammy (our late dog) in 2009.

Anyhow, I thought I would do a post on my plants! 

It's been a LONG while since my last update.  The first photo above - is my treasured Ponytail Palm.  To see what it looked like when I first obtained it take a look at THIS POST from May of 2014.

In this 2nd photo, you will see a Praying Plant of some sort.  At dusk, it will rise upward like it's praying. 

This is one of the plants I recently transplanted.  Out of all of the ones I did attempt to transplant this one is the droopiest. 

These next two photos are of the same plant that I had a 'baby' or an 'offshoot' of and when I was transplanting the plants decided to try and break them up to be their own beings from here on out.  So far - so good!

You can see this one has the 'babies' that are traveling.

In the next photo, you will see how I separated them.

We re-use planters and mix old with new soil.  I use tea water, mostly, to water the plants, too!

Because we have obtained a lot of decorative tins and used box tops around the office, we now re-use these to place under the bottoms of the plants to catch any excess water.

I will never underappreciate the natural sunlight that shines thru my windows at work - I adore it!  Before I switched jobs here I was in the main office and nowhere near a window.

I'm not sure the exact name of these plants but I'm thinking they are some sort of spider plant.

I think this is some sort of spider plant, as well.  I've had this one for a while, too, but the first 6 months or more it just kept growing taller and floppy and nothing else, really. 

And then it happened!  Offshoots!  You can see two of them towards the floor.  I was thrilled!  I hope I start seeing more of these so I can try and re-plant the 'babies'.

This plant was so HUGE I wasn't sure where to put it so the last time I transplanted it (which was almost a year ago) I decided to place it on a chair.

If you know any of the names of these plants please let me know and I will surely update this post!

This one was a gift from my parents almost 4 years ago now.  They got it for me when I switched jobs.  Same company.  Different Job, that is. 

I thought it wasn't going to make it but once I started watering it with tea water it seemed to save it.  I've transplanted this at least 3 or 4 times already.  It keeps growing like crazy!

At one point it had a neat little white pouch of a bud and flower but that only lasted 3 days.

I noticed yesterday that this one has another plant growing in the same pot alongside of the BIG one so at some point I might try and start a new pot for the little one.

I don't care for the name of this plant.  It's not very P.C. so my co-workers and I decided to give it a new name instead.  Before taking this pic I had to untangle a lot of the vine.  This one seems to be doing extremely well, too, but, there isn't a real rhyme or reason to how or where it's growing.  Just every which way, really!

I LOVE the two-tone leaves on this.  Green and white on the one side and the underneath side is a rich purple color! 

I might have to find a hanging basket for this guy at some point. 

And speaking of having to find a hanging basketing for a plant - check out the next and last photo! 

Yup!  Here's an Ivy Vine Plant of some sort and it's growing and traveling and going a little nuts, too!

This started as a leaf from another plant that a co-worker gave me.  She actually gave me 3 leaves of her plant to try planting on my own.  After months the leaves weren't doing ANYTHING but after I removed the 2 weaker leaves the 3rd one started budding and traveling!

How cool is that!?  This is now about 5 feet tall (or long) - depending on how you look at it I guess.  And the only way I know it's about 5 feet in length is because I'm just over 5 feet tall (or short in my case). 

I don't see this one slowing down any time soon!  Do you have any house or office plants that are doing well at the moment?  I would love to see and/or hear about them!