Alive!

I'm still trying to assess the damage of the three and a half weeks of negligence I inflicted on my beloved houseplants while I was home over the holidays.

There has been carnage. Of course the little Easter Lily in the bathroom died along with one of my pink and green herbaceous plants and the cuttings I was trying to root. The orchid seems to have given up, several of the Alocasias are on their last legs. And perhaps the most tragic has been the passing of my beloved cardboard sago palm and Nikau palm. RIP.

The Ficus benjamina was of course visibly upset and threw down almost all his leaves, but has gotten out his aggression and has put out a respectable number of new leaves. I saved the Wandering Jews by making cuttings, which are growing happily in their water baths.

I've been holding out on the Ficus lyrata, though, the Fiddleleaf fig. His enormous violin shaped leaves were too heavy for his flaccid petioles, and he dropped them all one after another until he had just a few stems jutting up from his pot. Normally, I'd have taken a plant like that for dead, but being a ficus I thought just maybe he had a little something up his sleeve. Or, down in his root. So, I kept watering his empty pot and lo and behold two itty bitty baby leaves have been unveiled from his growing tips! He is alive!

No reason

Plan B

If all else fails and whatever life I'm working on now doesn't work out, I will move to the hills of Santa Fe. I will find the German wizard from the farmers market and ask him to make me his apprentice. I will learn the fine art of artisan bread baking. Or I might seek out a creamery in a far off cloister that reminds me of Mont St. Michel and I will make cheese. I will bake breads and fashion cheeses and eke out a quiet but delicious life in the narrow streets of Paris.

Hearts

I was reminded today, sprawled on my blanket in the warm February sun out of doors, that these really are good times.

I'm a lucky girl to be able to make music and read and picnic out in the park on such a regular basis. To work so hard and feel like I'm not working at all. To run in with so many fantastic people.

Even valentine's day turned out lovely after all with a trip out to the farmer's market for carrots and up to the store for cottage cheese which would be fried into apple pancakes. Followed by banjo and fiction reading in the park. For it to be so warm and sunny these past few days, to be able to wear dresses and skirts, letting the sky touch my bare legs. Delicious. And then dinner at the co-op with Sarah and Jenna. Even the disappearance of two buses and the breaking down of a third and the long unintended walk through dark Berkeley streets on my way over was lovely.

I guess I really do love what little life I've made here. And it's good to remember that so clearly now and again.

My bloody valentine

I have just returned, triumphant, from the Red Cross. Advances in technology provided for me a little hand warmer in preparation of the telling needle prick, but I don't think I needed it. The few drops of blood from my would-be wedding ring finger came in at 14.2 on the hemoglobin machine. Success.

The woman in the donation room knew a professional when she saw one. I disobeyed her request to look the other way when she slipped the needle in the old vein and filled the pint sack in under five minutes. A record, she says. Any faster and she might have hit an artery.

I have neglected to make valentines cards, and I don't imagine there will be any wine or ballet or record playing this year. No Bobby Vee singing from the other room as I take my shower. But I suppose I still wanted a valentine, so I've given my blood to a stranger. Happy Valentine's Day, whoever you may be.

The nocturnal spirits

I've been having nothing but bad dreams for as long as I can remember now. Years, maybe. But last night it culminated with my mother having a stroke in my arms. I came down the steps to see her teetering, unable to find her balance. And then her words were slurred. She said it was a migraine when I caught her fall. She looked confused and felt soft as I held her. I felt calm knowing this must be the worst possible thing and felt my pockets for my cell phone to dial in the emergency, but it wasn't there.

I didn't wait to find out what happened. I woke up and called my mother instead. Still there, thank god. And healthy as you could hope.

Maybe I need a witch doctor to translate my black unconscious, to tell me what I need to metabolize or come to terms with that is haunting me at night, to tell me what it knows that I am missing.

Maybe I need a dream catcher.

An entree to the pantheon

I wandered through the Botanical Garden for hours today, hours in which it did not rain, though meteorological sources claimed 90% certainty it would. The February air nipped at my fingers as I collected leaves for this project and that, but what was quite remarkable were the squirrels. The squirrels were following me around as if they knew me, following me for lengths of football fields and calling their brethren out from the shrubbery to join, as if we were in a circus, and I was their ringleader. Garden patrons commented in passing about the squirrel parade. At one point there must have been thirty of them teeming in the walkway, racing my direction. Thirty squirrels looking to me knowingly as if I was their queen, their god. I thought there must be some magic in it. I tried to think of a number I could dial on my cell phone that would ring and be answered by some familiar human voice to which I could relate the mystery of that moment, to make it somehow both more magical and more real. But my godliness seemed to fade as I struggled to determine the right number, and the squirrels, sensing it, disappeared among the leaves.

Were you aware of it? vol. 26: Roots, or why we're glad plants stand still

Roots [...] are organs that enable plants to mine the soil for essential nutrients. The intimate contact with the soil mass that roots require for normal function is the reason for plants being sessile during most life stages. Functions such as photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation do not preclude freedom of motion, but the primary acquisition of mineral nutrients from soil does. We and other terrestrial animals have gained our freedom of movement through evolutionary developments that emancipated us from the need to acquire mineral nutrients directly from our environment. This liberation from a sedentary existence in turn led to the evolution of sense organs and coordinated body movements--hence the need for a central nervous system and the evolution of the brain. The triumphs and tragedies of our intellect and our emotions can ultimately be traced to our reliance for mineral nutrients on the fixed, silent plants rooted in the soil.

[...] if intelligent life on solid land is ever discovered elsewhere in the universe, there, as here the world of life will consist of two "kingdoms": plant and animal. Only sessile plants can absorb from a solid substrate the many mineral elements needed for the machinery of life, and only organisms depending on those pants can evolve mobility, sense organs, and the further steps already referred to, culminating in the evolution of sentient beings.

~ Emmanuel Epstein and Arnold J. Bloom, Mineral Nutrition of Plants: Principles and Perspectives, p. 25

Swoon

I think I just met the love of my life. It's something in the way he looks at me with his most incredible green eyes, wanting me. I just want to bury my face in his chest. I want his hulking self slinking about my apartment.

And when people ask what I did on Saturday night, I could say Benjamin and I curled up in bed to read. Because he would have to be named Benjamin. Benjamin, like the science teacher. He even looks like a Benjamin.

I am so tempted to go back tomorrow and bring him home with me. I am sure he is exactly what I need. If only there weren't the delicate matter of the other two cats that already live at my parents' house. Sigh.

Science geek out!

Late blight of potato, in which leaves turn black and tubers turn to mush

So I met the girl I'll be working with at the USDA yesterday to hear about the project she has in mind for me and holy toledo I am to be inventing potatoes! I am to be on the cutting edge of plant molecular biology! I am to work on actual things that (assuming I am successful) would actually be useful in the actual world!

Firstly, genetic modification has a bad rap. I know. People are not crazy about human-invented (xenogenic) genes escaping into nature and doing we don't know what yet, and people are not excited about human-gods sticking firefly genes (transgenic) in tobacco plants. Or adding resistance to antibiotics into anything if it means antibiotics are less likely to be effective when we really need them.

We are relatively ok with the sort of interspecies hybridization that brought us pluots or mutation breeding whereby we nuke seeds and see what happens. And crazy stuff can happen with mutation natural or otherwise. The less fun part of natural breeding is the kind of monominded selection for specific phenotypic traits that brings us firm but tasteless tomatoes. Or in more serious cases amps up allergens and other natural toxins.

But! We can do all the good stuff without the bad stuff!

It just so happens that a wild variety of potato is particularly resistant to Phytophthera infestans, the fungus-like beast that took down Ireland when it caused the potato famine, and we can borrow its gene for other sexually compatible potatoes. We can double check to make sure the bacterial plasmid's antibiotic resistance gene didn't make it into the plant DNA, and although the plasmid DNA of the bacterial vector generally used for this sort of thing has border sequences telling the plant where to snip built in, we can swap those for plant versions so that what's left in your potato is 100% natural potato DNA, something that could have been created by nature itself given enough time.

The lab I'll be working in has already done a sort of proof of concept with one breed of potato, and five years on, they're still good at fighting late blight (caused by P. infestans) , which means they don't seem to be exerting the sort of selective pressure that breeds super-strains of pathogens. (Typically this will occur in two or three years). And yours truly shall be trying doing my darndest to duplicate this success in more commercially appealing varieties of potato. If it works, it will be huge. HUGE.

Hello, grad school!