Belle Isle Conservatory, Detroit: Part 2

 I think this is some kind of lady slipper. It was very pretty close up.

This is the top of the main part of the building and the palms that grow all the way to ceiling. I was looking almost straight up when I took the picture. 

This is a Japanese Maple tree. I had only seen these as bonsai before and not full sized. 

This picture and the next several are all different kinds of orchids. There was a decent orchid collection here.

Except this, this is a spider lily. More orchids below. 

This is the outdoor water lily garden. There were some big carp and koi in the pond. 

This is a Madagascar palm! It looks really cool. I just found out I can get a baby version of this at my local nursery so I might have to pick one up!

The Old Man cactus. I have a much smaller one. I hope someday he gets that big. 

 This is some kind of palm or cycad. It was enormous. Again, I'm looking straight up.

More palms against the glass dome. 

 This is a spiral palm. I think they are really cool but I haven't been able to find one to buy.

 More palms. 

This is a purple clematis. It was outside near the water lily area. I like clematis but I don't have room for them. I need a yard. 

This is a little park area outside of the formal gardens. I just thought it looked pretty. It would be a nice place to spend a good afternoon. 

Shrimp Plant. I don't know anything about it but the flowers do look like shrimp.

String of buttons! It's a succulent. I want one of these too. 

Belle Isle Conservatory, Detroit: Part 1

When I was home in Michigan, I visited the Scripps Conservatory on Belle Isle in Detroit. I had never been there before and really enjoyed spending some time in one of Detroit's prettiest spots. It's free and I would highly recommend it. 

 Aerial roots from a giant palm tree. I think it was a cypress palm but I'm not positive.

Aloe juvenna. It seems to be more of a climbing aloe than the typical aloe that sits and grows pups.

 Some kind of barrel cactus. That's my dad poking it. Unsurprisingly it was sharp.

 This is the view from the front of the conservatory. They have a formal garden out there where people would have had fancy teas and played croquet back in the day.

 This is the conservatory from the formal garden. It's pretty old and is built in the victorian glass house style.

 This stone is right in front of the conservatory entrance and proves that I was actually in Detroit while seeing all this pretty stuff!

 This cactus was blooming! I think it's a Rebutia but I'm not positive.

 This picture and the next two are all bromeliads. Some of them were blooming but a lot of them were done for the season.

 As you can see in the picture, this is a Buddhist pine. I'm not sure why it's Buddhist.

 This is a cactus and succulent garden. I can identify some echeverias and prickly pear cacti, but the rest are mysteries if they weren't labelled.

 A pretty garden arrangement, including impatiens, coleus, and caladium.

 This is the fountain in the formal garden. It was sculpted by the same man who did the Spirit of Detroit statue.

 Euphorbia milli-the crown of thorns. Very cool succulent with pretty flowers.

 This is some kind of blooming Epiphyllum. I'm not sure which kind.

 They have a small room that's a fern garden. It looks like the Jurassic period in there.

 Seriously, I kind of expected dinosaurs to pop out of all of these ferns and cycads. It was a cool room!

 I forget what these are called, but the flowers are pink and fluffy. I think it's adorable.

 Haworthia tortuosa. I thought it was a particularly neat succulent.

 I forget what this is called. It's some kind of palm, it might be that cypress palm. But it looks like something out of a horror movie!

 Close up of Hoya flowers. I'm not sure which variety of Hoya, but they are very pretty. I wish I could get mine to bloom someday.

Here's the Hoya plant that those flower clusters are attached to. It's huge! Mine is a baby compared to this one. I have more to post but I'll make separate posts since I have a fair amount of pictures.

Catching Up

Hi everyone who reads this, sorry I've been away for a month. My old netbook was starting to take a dump on me, and my tablet isn't really good for lots of typing. And I've been too busy to sit down at my desktop and do nothing but blog. I've just gotten a new netbook though, so I'm back in business. It's an ASUS 1015e with windows 8. Windows 8 is kind of weird but the netbook is pretty cool.
It's been a very weird past month. Our lab manager announced two weeks before I went on vacation that he had gotten another job and was leaving. That leaves me as the only person working on the biorenewable chemicals projects. It also means that I had to take over the summer REU student and that I've become the de facto lab manager even though that's not really my job. Obviously this has made my stress and workload skyrocket. So far I'm doing alright managing everything, but I am definitely more mentally exhausted at the end of every day. I'm trying to go to bed earlier since I'm going into work at 8:30 now instead of 9-9:15ish. That is kind of working but I'm a night owl so it's hard to go to bed early sometimes. One of my labmates did get a Keurig coffeemaker from his mum and brought it into lab, so at least I can have a steady stream of coffee if I want it. That's pretty awesome.
At the end of June I went back to Michigan for a short vacation. I also visited my brother in Wisconsin. I'll make a separate post or two later with a bunch of photos. It was fun. I enjoyed being back home. I got to meet my parents' puppy Macduff. He's a collie and super adorable. We've never had a puppy before so it was neat to meet him. We also went to Belle Isle and visited their conservatory and the Michigan nature museum. They were both very cool and I'd never been to either even though they're both in downtown Detroit. It was nice to go somewhere new and to enjoy one of the nice parts of Detroit. Then on July 4th we set off fireworks. We only do the fountains that stay on the ground. I like doing those because nothing but sparklers are legal in Iowa, which is in my opinion pretty lame. Then my dad and I drove to Madison, WI where my brother lives. We hung out for a couple of days there. We went golfing at one of the municipal courses which was a lot of fun! I got a little sunburned but it was worth it. I wish I had someone to go golfing with in Iowa. I'm too self-conscious to go alone because I'm not very good. We also took a tour around Epic, where my brother works. It was a neat place. If I was a computer whiz it would be a decent place to work. Then it was back to Ames for me.
While work has been stressful, my garden has still been a source of relaxation. My tomatoes are growing; I'm hoping that they'll reach full size and start ripening soon. I'm really looking forward to fresh tomatoes. The basil and parsley are producing really well. I've put the chamomile outside to see if it prefers the warmer weather. I need it to flower because that's what you use for tea! I also started some lettuce seeds to grow inside. Some of the seeds have already sprouted! I'm really excited for lettuce too. I eat lettuce and tomato the most so if I could grow my own that would be awesome. Next year I might try green beans and strawberries too.

Christmas

So that stupid snow storm totally delayed me by a day so I didn't get to leave Ames until December 22. Once I left, everything was fine, but it was incredibly lame to lose a day because Ames can't freaking plow their roads properly. But I got home and it was all okay in the end. I got to spend Christmas with my parents, see my grandparents, and meet my nephew Jebriel for the first time! Christmas morning was with my parents and their kitties. Then on Christmas afternoon we went to my grandparents' house and had dinner. My aunt Dani and my cousin Jessica were able to come too, which was cool. My parents and I went to the Detroit Art Institute to see their special Faberge exhibit. It was really neat to see that stuff up close, including six of the surviving fancy eggs. Then we went to the best used book store ever-John K King bookstore in Detroit. It's four stories and full of used and rare books. I found a first edition Ray Bradbury novel that was signed! And it only cost twenty bucks! I was so excited. That night we went out to eat with Granny and her new boyfriend. He's nice and that was cool, but it is still weird to think of my granny as having a boyfriend. The next day I was able to go see my best friend Jasmine and I met Jebriel for the first time. He wasn't home last year when I came home to visit.
It was a really good visit and I just wish I could have stayed longer. I hated having to leave. I always hate having to leave because I never know when I'll be able to come back. Since this year I don't have to move in the summer, I should be able to come home for a summer vacation. Then it won't be a whole year in between visits.

Thanksgiving Recap

Okay, time for the Thanksgiving recap! Last Saturday I drove home after dropping Memo off at the vet. He's being boarded there whenever I go on vacation. So I dropped him off and he was mad at me because I made him go in the magic box (his kitty crate). Then I drove all the way home. The weather was pretty nice although it was really windy. On Sunday I helped my parents teach their Sunday school class. It's a middle school class and they talk about a lot of science and stuff, so I led them all through a cow eye dissection. It went really well and they were all really excited about it! A couple of the kids were really curious about what I do as a real scientist and I was glad that I could answer their questions and hopefully keep them excited about science. On Monday my mum and I went shopping which was fun because shopping alone is kind of boring. Then my brother came home on Tuesday. He was grumpy because he had to have a medical test done and it involved itchy electrodes. But on Tuesday night I went with my dad to fencing club again! I really miss the Schoolcraft club so it was awesome to see some of them again. Wednesday night we all went to Outback Steakhouse with my granny. We discussed some of my more bizarre genealogy results and she said she might ask her older sister what she remembered from growing up so that I can figure out what was true and what's not. On Thursday we went to Grandma and Grandpa's house (they're my dad's parents) for Thanksgiving dinner. My aunt and cousins were there too. It's always a lot of fun when we go over there, and we got my Grandma on facebook for the first time. Then today I drove home :( It's crazy, especially because I'm going back in three weeks, but I was really sad to leave. It just solidifies in my mind that when I graduate from Iowa I'll probably go back home to Michigan for my post-doc. I really do want to live closer to my family.

I went fishing

I went fishing for northern pike Up North, and I caught no fish. I did, however, catch this:

Yep, that's a bald eagle sitting on the top of that tree. I've seen bald eagles in the wild before, but never has one stayed put long enough for me to take a picture. This dude hung out for almost an hour, and he was talking to another eagle that was somewhere in the woods. It was epic.

Presque Isle

Presque Isle is a little island just off of Marquette in Lake Superior. Every time I go Up North, I go to Presque Isle because there are some totally sweet rock formations you can go walk on and it's a lot of fun. It's extra cool for me because I've been able to spend the past 20 years watching the beginnings of biological succession occur and I'm a dork so I think it's awesome. This is also one of the best places to look at Lake Superior. It's hard to explain what the lake is to me. It's an integral part of my life and holds a special place in my heart. It's really hard to explain how it feels to be out on these rocks and there's no one but you and the lake, but it's awesome.

 The day I went up there it was cloudy and only 59 degrees. It was so nice. I really don't like super hot weather so it was perfect for walking around. It was also really windy so the lake was all crazy.

 I saw these little purple flowers growing in the rocks. I've never seen them before and they're cute. Succession in action! Someday the rocks will all be dirt and there will be trees growing here.

 Lake Superior gets really deep really fast. There's no sand here at all and the bottom of the lake is solid rock. It literally drops off from standing on these rocks to about 20 feet deep right away.

 There was enough wind that the lake had some pretty powerful waves coming in to shore. It took me about ten tries to get this picture right as the wave is crashing over itself.

 There's a lot of copper and iron in the cliffs, which is why mining was such a big industry in the Upper Peninsula. The orange colour is the iron.

 Another picture showing how unsettled the lake was. I like this one because I inadvertently caught the spray from a wave in it.

I'm standing on top of the cliff here and looking down at the water. I'm probably thirty or forty feet up in the air. After you hit the water it's about sixty feet deep there. Absolutely crazy. I don't recommend jumping off; there's a powerful undertow right there in the water. There's always a couple of stupid people who jump off for fun and die every year. Respect the lake, seriously.
That's my pictures of Presque Isle this year. I really enjoyed going back and being able to stand there again, just me and the endless water.