Dinner on a Train

This was one of my household projects yesterday -- repotting my Rhipsalis, or bird's-foot cactus. This poor neglected plant lives in the front window of our flat next to my grandmother's old Roseville vases. It's kind of a family heirloom itself, having been grown from a cutting taken from a cactus I had back in Florida that was decades old. (It was originally given to me when I was a child by a woman who took care of me after school. She was a plant maven herself and passed on that love to me.)

Anyway, I water it once a week but that's about the only care it's received in years, and it's been looking a little yellowy lately. It also didn't bloom this spring. I discovered it was badly rootbound and bone-dry, so I put it in a new and larger pot with some fresh compost. Hopefully it will be happier.

And look! My datura, or jimsonweed, seeds are coming up! You might remember last year I bought a packet of seeds, and only one sprouted. That plant grew and produced seeds of its own, and I dutifully gathered them not knowing whether they'd even be fertile. I planted them a week or ten days ago and now I count seven seedlings so far. What am I going to do with all these daturas?!

Maybe the ones I bought originally just weren't very fresh. Hard to say!

I feel like I have to at least mention yesterday's momentous news about Roe, but I'm not going to talk about it much. You know how I feel. All I'll say is the decision just sickens me. I also don't think it's going to satisfy the religious extremists, who are now going to make the blue, pro-choice states their battlegrounds -- along with targeting many of our other rights like contraception and same-sex marriage. How did the United States become a theocracy?

Let's change the subject:

Yes! That's me. I never blog photos of myself but this is a special occasion. Dave and I celebrated his birthday last night with a chef-prepared dinner aboard a vintage British Pullman train rolling through the countryside. It was quite a schmancy affair, and as you can see, I wore the jacket. (With that tie it made me feel a little bit like one of the Four Seasons.)

And here's Dave, obsessively Facebooking as is his wont. You can see the interior of our carriage, which was called "Phoenix," so named because it was apparently heavily refurbished after a fire in the 1930s. It was later supposedly part of the royal train and the favorite car of the Queen Mother. The servers emphasized that we really must check out the scrupulously clean and ornately tiled loo and, in fact, take pictures of the floor. So I did:

It was a fun evening. We chatted with the couple at the table across the aisle -- Erika and Neil, who work in hospitality recruitment blah blah blah -- and we drank a lot of champagne. Holy cow.

While rolling through suburbia, we were looking out the windows and enjoying the views of passing houses when we suddenly saw a man standing deliberately in his own window, apparently naked, facing the train. We couldn't see everything because the window sash came up to just the right height. "He's performing," said Dave. "That's fantastic!"

We had a good laugh.