This cube-shaped cactus has been on my wishlist for years! I was thrilled to see it for sale at Miles2Go.com. The name is a mouthful: Astrophytum myriostigma var. quadricostatum. The typical form of A. myriostigma has 5 ribs, but this variation has only 4 (at least for now; over time it’s likely that it may grow more). I’m thoroughly enjoying the unusual shape and the bright yellow blossoms perched on top!
Rebutias are often recommended as good plants for beginners, probably because they flower profusely, offset easily, and are easy to handle because they have such soft spines! I’ve had some trouble with them, though. Perhaps because of our humid environment, particularly warm, humid nights. These high mountain dwelling cacti like cool dry air at night, which I unfortunately can’t provide in the heat of an eastern summer. Still, I’m going to keep trying because I just love them!
Rich and I bought this lovely Gymnocalycium pflanzii five or six years ago. It was a Lowe’s rescue purchase, so I had little hope for him from the start. But he has kept his neatly symmetrical shape while surviving a variety of conditions from chilly and dark in our kitchen to full sun in the warmth of our sunroom. No matter the environment, the only variation I noticed was in the color of his skin, going from dark green when kept in lower light to a rich purple-green in full sun.
The final piece of the Campus Buildings application was building a simple map to display the locations of the buildings on campus. The simplest way to do this, given that we are already using a Google Spreadsheet to collect the data, was to set up a Google Fusion Table. Fusion Tables are still beta/experimental, but I’ve used them for a few small projects and they work well for data visualization, given how easy they are to set up.
As I do every morning, today I glanced at the local newspaper’s website. Cool, the Sunday local history piece was about ghost towns. It begins:
Despite today’s gloom, another cactus is in bloom! I thought they were done for the year, but last week’s “heat wave” produced a whole new flush of buds.
Quick post for tonight. Our digital services librarian asked me to change the default error message that appears when an unauthorized user tries to access one of our collections that is available only on campus. CONTENTdm’s default message looks like this:
A few months ago I was looking over one of my old editions of the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference Catskill Trails map set, and I noticed something labeled as a “Survey Monument” on the North-South Lake map (#40). Neither Rich nor I have ever seen this monument in person. We haven’t heard anything about it. The survey monument does not appear on any USGS topo maps of the area, nor is it listed among USGS or NGS datasheets.
This is the first of two books I’ve recently acquired from the series “The Next Station Will Be … “. The other was Volume 5, covering the New York, Susquehanna & Western railroad and its Wilkes-Barre & Eastern extension.
Contents of the book "The Next Station Will Be … Volume 5: New York, Susquehanna, & Western and the Wilkes-Barre & Eastern."
