It's March at last!

March is here!  The Robins are back, the geese have all returned.  It's warm as all get-out.  We've been breaking temp records right and left!  

It's getting difficult to keep up with all my plants, which is why I'm gaining enthusiasm for "cutting the population".  I have so many nice-growing ones, I just don't need to be burdened by the difficult ones.  So some "speak" about the good ones...

H. krohniana has been hanging in the east window in the dining room all winter.  It has produced some extraordinarily large leaves.  The large ones aren't nearly as textured or as succulent as the small ones, and they are very shiny.  If it was all a single vine, I'd wonder if it was a different species stuck in there with it!  I guess it just proves that leaves can be quite variable and you really can't prove species purely based on leaves.

 That tiny leaf above the two large ones is on the same vine.  Oh, and notice the peduncle budding at the bottom of the photo?  Here's one that's a little further along...

I'm looking forward to that deliciously fragrant smell.  I miss not having a lacunosa - of course, some think that krohniana is a form of lacunosa.  They could be right - they smell the same!

I heard from the publisher of Hobby Greenhouse magazine that my article about Hoyas will be published in the next issue.  (It comes out 4 times a year...)  I submitted it late last summer, and they liked it, though they said it would probably be a couple issues before there was room for it.  But I'm excited to have it published and I look forward to sharing it with my Hoya Peeps on GW!

I don't think I've blogged since my computer woes started...  About 3 or 4 weeks ago, I got an e-mail from UPS that stated that they had attempted to deliver something and it had a "package status" link, which I clicked on.  My bad... I should have known better.  But I get packages ALL the time from UPS, and it really didn't occur to me that this was bogus... UNTIL it installed a zip file that I could neither open nor delete.  Uh-oh...  Nothing bad seemed to happen, so I decided to deal with it later.  Well, it was one of those things they call "ransomware".  The first time you open a document, it encrypts ALL your documents.  And I mean ALL.  18 years of documents, inaccessible.  Oh, and my thumb drive with all my backup files was connected to the computer so all THOSE files were encrypted as well.  I was totally panicked!  I took the computer over to the GEEK squad and he booted it up and said, "Nothing you can do but set the computer back to day 1."  I came home and started pulling off files with photos, music, etc. to move over after I reset it, but those started getting infected, so I ditched that effort and set it back.  Spent about 10 hours getting programs back on and up and running.  A couple days later, I go to get on and it won't get past the wallpaper screen.  It tries, but it won't load the screen that asks for your PIN.  Back to the GEEKS, paid them $200 for a year's worth of service, and they said the reset was corrupted somewhere along the line, and they had to reset it back, AGAIN!  So start over, the 10 hours to get all the programs back on and set up and running...  Guess what?  Now I have no Excel.  I have a version of MS Office that does not include Excel. It must have come on the computer pre-loaded and now I don't have it anymore.  I am NOT a happy camper!  I do not want to buy a newer version of Office, but I suppose I will eventually...

On a positive note, I found a thumb drive that I apparently backed everything up on at the end of 2015.  So I got back a lot of my old files.  There were newer ones I lost, but it's not the end of the world.  I found I had all but 2016 RCCSS newsletters, and I got the 2016s from a couple of the members, so I have all those archives back.  And I put them in the cloud so that I won't ever lose them again!  But I have to recompile my plant database.  What a hassle...

Well, I'm off to my club meeting.  More another day...