Earlier this year, I came across a bag of bulbs in Wilko's (non UK people: read "discount hardware/homeware/bits and pieces chain of stores not known for their high quality but quite good for cheap basics") that claimed to be Babiana stricta. This delighted me: I was planning to plant up some South African themed containers in our gorgeous new garden*, and Babianas have a special place in my heart after I became intimately aquainted with them doing "fieldwork" there in 2007. So I bought them. And added them to containers and to my South African windowboxes (also containing Zaluzianskya, which I adore and smells DIVINE, and cheerful little Osteospermum, which need a bit of TLC as I bought them cheap as they were going over a bit, but seem to be happy enough). Babianas, for the record, are sort of iris-type things loosely related to Gladiolus and the like. They're monocots, so have sort of grassy-type thin leaves, not wide broadleaves, and most stuff (like petals, anthers) should happen in multiples of three.

So they started to sprout. The later ones are coming up looking much as I'd expect from previous experience with the genus, so that's fine. They're growing slowly, but getting there.

But the first few to sprout look quite different. They have leaves that I've never seen on a monocot, with seven little leaflets. The flowers look to me more like Oxalis than anything else, but the leaves aren't quite right for Oxalis. Altogether I'm a bit stumped. So, LJ, would you like to take a look at some photos of my mystery not-Babianas and tell me what on earth you think I'm growing?

( Not a Babiana! )

Answers on a postcard please! I'm just curious as to what Wilko are selling to unsuspecting Babiana-fanciers!

*Camera being a bum at the moment, most pictures coming out not in focus, need new camera really but am cheap).

Growing up, whenever we had cauliflower my mother would boil the leafy outside bits as well as the white flowery middle bits, and we'd eat it all. However, I've never met anyone outside our family who considers the leafy parts to be edible. My Indian and American flatmates admitted they'd never even thought of eating them. CRI will eat a few if they're mixed in with ordinary white cauliflower bits but wouldn't normally bother to prepare them. I find them really tasty and as far as I'm concerned, it's the vegetarian equivalent of nose-to-tail cooking! Am I the only person in the world?

Poll #1838715 The green bits of cauliflower
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 33

Do you eat the green cabbagey leafy bits on the outside of cauliflower?

I am in the lab and have time to kill before going to a friend's house for beer/movies/dinner, so am filling the time by announcing my continuing existence.

House is amazing, CRI is amazing; we seem to have fallen into an easy rhythm, chores seem to split themselves fairly equitably, we have plans to work on our new garden tomorrow (we bought plants! I ordered South African seeds on a whim!) and he is learning to cook (he could already handle basics, but lacks confidence, but seems to have risen to the challenge of feeding me after Zumba admirably). I have handed back the keys to my old flat, so that's basically out of my life forever (aside from the fact that the postal redirection doesn't kick in till Friday so I have to see if I can get back there next week to check for any post that's turned up for me). No more noisy pubs! No more screeching yobbos at 2am! No more random smoke alarms whenever upstairs neighbours decide to smoke/cook bacon. Changing addresses and closing and opening utilities accounts has used an obscene number of my phone-spoons but it's been largely OK and all the important stuff has now been done.

The commute is very un-stressful - the bus is never too crowded to get a seat and the route is smooth enough that I can read throughout most of it, and now I have a discounted bus pass it works out pretty cheap. It takes about 45 minutes door-to-door, depending on exactly when I get to the intermediary bus station and what's sitting there at the time, so I can leave at 8:15am or so and that works pretty well. The downside is that I am no longer walking that previous 15 miles a week, so I probably need to find ways to up my physical activity in other areas...

Work is going well - I am making friends with Malagasy researchers, doing some interesting stuff with beeeeees, finding out some intriguing stuff with beetles, and have a couple of papers at various stages of preparation, submission and review.

Altogether, I am pretty content. Our internet should be transferred by Thursday next week, so then I'll be back online properly. Something about the house seems to stop all kinds of waves reaching it properly (!!) - mobile reception is a little patchy, the TV signal is pretty appalling, especially when we rig up the Freeview box (can hardly get the ITV/Ch4 multiplex at all, especially if the weather is dodgy), and my mobile dongle is giving me a download speed of a spectacular 0.02mbps. But still, life is sweet.

Meanwhile, I am reading Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt and highly recommend it - the characters are interesting and I like them, and the playing out of an alternate history over centuries has been handled very well, with good pace and intriguing little glimpses of how things might have been. Currently about halfway through and really enjoying it.

Today I am moving house!!

The new house is a small terraced house in a row that was built in 1854. It's basically a two-up-two-down with a kitchen/bathroom extension off the back, like a lot of Victorian terraces are these days. The master bedroom is not huge but not tiny. The second bedroom is a decent size for a second bedroom. The kitchen is quite small but the space is well-used, with lots of storage space and workspace and a large cooker/range thing (needs a bit of a clean but not too bad). The dining room is small but as we don't have a dining table yet that's not really an issue! The living room is a fairly good size and still has the original hearth and chimney breast, though the fire has been swapped for gas. The master bedroom still has the original grate and fireplace, very lovely.

The garden is cute but full of strange statues of Jesii and fairies and teddies and stuff, all a bit odd, and about a gazillion bird feeders. Haven't looked at it properly in daylight though. There is a shed but its roof is about my head height.

It's been kept quite true to the original (though it has white-painted anaglypta rather than proper plaster/whitewash walls or whatever they used then) with roof beams and wood panels and whatnot. We've identified enough windowsill space for most of our plants.

The washing machine arrives Tuesday, as I've taken the day off to do adminny things.

I think tomorrow I might need to go for some walks to investigate the immediate area!

http://s3.amazonaws.com/files.posterous.com/alefinder/MjiD0XKxPMPU0Ej2L5mfLmlEtrGP5rjBLXbRhEWJI0azLDBONorZrP3oIDa3/Photo1.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJFZAE65UYRT34AOQ&Expires=1327704463&Signature=xOVSxtOYvKXc2a5HMvxwciCOC%2B8%3D

I like this beer. It is a good beer and tastes nice.

Even when you ask for lemonade qand people bring you back this.

I am happy and thingsa are good. In general there is a lot of good stuff.

I am quite hungry but i have some cock a leekie soup in a tube so I guess that's ok

that's tub not tube

ooops

Typos are more complicated

Sorry. I am at home committing no oublic order offences. Just for the record. Everyone is happy. OK?

OK, folks... For some reason, on my main computer, I can't post comments to people's LJ entries in Firefox using their new comment interface. It worked fine on Firefox on my old computer just the other day, so I'm fairly sure that I should be able to make it work in Firefox here...somehow.

Anyone care to speculate what's causing this? My guess is that there is some sort of add-on interference, but I don't know which one and I may be entirely wrong, so thought I'd ask LJ before turning them all off and seeing what happens. (I have the usual add-ons dealing with Quicktime, Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc. and also some for managing tabs, some for customising appearance - although I just disabled the Greasemonkey script I had been using and the comments still don't work - and AVG safesearch and Adblock of course.)

I updated my Firefox and that didn't fix it either.

Suggestions welcome. I suppose if I was more energyful I could trawl through all the latest bumph about the comments changes but I didn't see anything obvious in the news announcements.

ETA: Thanks nybiara, fixed! Seems that the Greasemonkey Disconnect script doesn't play nicely with LJ's new comments.

I've also heard the new comment style doesn't work well for people with screenreaders? This is rather fail of them and makes me unhappy. I hope they sort that soon.

A few weeks ago, the leaves fell off the trees on the way to work. I noticed on the way in one morning that a guy ahead of me was staring fixedly at the top of one of the trees. I saw what looked like an old yellow towel snarled in the branches.

When I got closer, I realised it wasn't an old towel - it was a nest of wild honeybees! ("Wild" meaning probably a swarm from a managed hive that set up shop in that tree earlier in summer.)

( Bee pics! )

Since I took these pictures, the temperature has dropped somewhat and we've had some fairly high winds, so there are not as many outside bees any more. But I've still seen one or two crawling across the surface, so I assume the queen's still there!

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That's more or less all for now. I STILL owe LJ pics, writeups and allsorts, but I am lazy, busy and disorganised, so...

Have been super-altruistic this year and managed to locate Christmas presents for both brother and dad (I suck at Xmas pressies, and am not really that interested in them normally, so mostly just give the whole thing a miss, but for some reason this year I felt the urge to get people stuff).

One of my favourite plants has decided to kick the bucket. (It's an aloe, used to be pretty tough actually, survived all sorts of abuse, but it's just decided to go rotten at the base and there doesn't seem to be much to be done for it.) So will probably buy myself a new plant in the new year. Suggestions welcome - has to be almost impossible to kill, shade-tolerant and cheap! (Yes, I already have multiple spider plants. And have somehow managed to keep a sundew alive and relatively healthy for over a year now.)

This is a really cute Aussie advert that made me cry and smile. Good work.

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I owe LJ tons of updates, like one about my holiday in Plymouth with CRI last week which was mega-nice, and general work-moaning and other stuff. But I am lazy so they will have to wait.

There is a town crier going up and down the high street outside yelling about something. I can hear the bell but haven't deciphered the words yet. It is definitely a crier and not a local drunk, though. Different sort of yelling.

How do you all feel about picking up a bag of some sort of foodstuff whilst shopping in a supermarket/large grocery store and opening it before you pay, wandering around the shop eating the contents?

I ask because it's something I see other people do sometimes, but I just couldn't ever imagine myself doing it. My brain says, "You haven't paid for it yet. It's not yours. You have no right to eat it."

Does anyone know how shops feel about this? I'd have thought they'd generally disapprove since they have no guarantee the eater won't change their mind before the checkout and just abandon an open, half-eaten packet in the soft drinks aisle or something.

Is this something you do/have done? Do you think it's OK, or not really?