Back again with a couple more photos of new Hoyas.  This is one I got from Ted Green in September that took a LONG time to start producing roots.  I potted it up a couple days ago and the roots are barely started, but I'm afraid it will start to rot in the humidity dome.  This is H. dolichosparte ( a real mouthfull!) - I do love the succulent, incurved leaves, and for some reason, that one leaf has held on to it's sun-kissed coloring.  I'm hoping I can give it enough light for it to keep the coloring.

This other one is H. mindorensis ssp. superba.  I already grow mindorensis and it seems very different than this to me.  This one has harder and bigger leaves.  I think it will be a very hardy species.

I wanted to talk a little about Thelma's tree.  Thelma was (is) my mother-in-law.  She passed away (went back to source) in 1998 after suffering for a few years with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease - horrible stuff...)  A few years before that, she had given me this beautiful little Christmas tree she had made out of her old jewelry.  I can abolutely feel her essence in this little materpiece!  Every year, I get it out - some of our dreadful years, when I absolutely did not feel like celebrating the holidays at ALL, when we couldn't even afford a token gift for each other, I still got out Thelma's tree and nothing else.

So I got out the Thelma tree again for the season and as I do each year, I had to spend about 20 minutes carefully looking at the tree and pondering all the work that went into it.  At supper time, I was admiring it again and asked my husband if he remembered his mother working on this.  I learned something new!  Apparently, this was a multi-decade project as he remembers her working on it when he was a kid!  Take a look at this masterpiece:

It started with one of those styrofoam cones and you can tell it was a constantly changing and transforming piece.  These next photos are sideways, because I'm loading them up from my computer and, for some reason, even though I turn them in my computer, it won't show them that way here.  But at least you can see some of the detail of this little tree...

Thelma was a neat lady.  She was very religious, I mean genuinely so.  She was fun.  Se loved to sing and was very active until her diagnosis with ALS.  I believe she was 72 when she passed away in 1998.  She went into the hospital on Mark's birthday, December 20th, and held on until the next day when she died.  I always thought it was probably a concious thing on her part not to die on his birthday - that she was ready to let go, but just didn't want that memory for Mark on his birthday every year. 

So we're coming up to the 14th anniversary of her passing and it's so odd - she's actually been gone longer than I knew her now, and yet I feel like it was just a short time ago that we saw each other.  Maybe that's just me "feeling" her around us, I don't know.  I'm just glad I have my little tree that seems to remind me of her every year.  I hope she knows how much I love it, how much I miss her, and that I will make sure her favorite grand-niece gets it when I'm gone...