The cactus doctor arrived Saturday evening to diagnose our fallen saguaro. He said it had been overwatered, got top heavy and crashed to the ground. Unfortunately, he said because of the trauma it suffered in the fall it wouldn’t survive being replanted.
Then he walked around our yard inspecting our other cacti. He drilled a hole in one saguaro and told us it had to be removed because it has bacterial necrosis. It’s leaning slightly and could crash into the house or damage the patio roof.
More bad news in the front yard. Our tallest saguaro with budding arms was declared dead. He said it died from vascular disease.
This is the saguaro with bacterial necrosis.Bacterial necrosis: this is where the cactus doctor took a chunk out of our cactus.
We learned that saguaros not only get water from their roots, but they have pores that open up in the day and absorb water from the air.
Another fact we learned was that a saguaro’s root system is twice the size of its height.
The doctor also told us how to spot native saguaro from ones that had been transplanted from other areas by the size of their bases.
This is already dead. See how the base is brown and shrunken?
Not the news we were hoping for. Now we need to hire someone to take out two saguaros and remove the fallen one. At least the rest are healthy. I’m thankful for all the healthy succulents and cacti in our yard and that the bacteria seems to be only in one saguaro.
What are you thankful for today?
I saw this saguaro skeleton Sunday on our walk. We may keep the fallen saguaro and the one in the front yard for their skeletons. They’d make interesting sculptures in our yard. The diseased one has to be hauled off.
Diid you know that doctors still make house calls? At least the Cactus Doctor does. He’s scheduled to come to our house Saturday to take a look at our fallen saguaro.
A few days ago I was sitting by the window, typing on my laptop when I watched the saguaro quiver, shake and jump three feet and fall in a giant “T-I-M-B-E-R!!!!” I wrote about it HERE.
The doctor is a biologist that studies cacti. He is coming out to diagnose our saguaro. But he doesn’t treat them. He’ll take a look at our other dozen saguaros as well.
After we get a diagnosis from the doctor — we then have to hire someone else to treat what ails them. If it’s a bacteria, we’ll have that treated. If it was too much rain or freezing temps, we may have the saguaro replanted. If it can be replanted we’ll have to invest in a contraption to support the few thousand pounds of weight. If it’s beyond repair we’ll need to hire someone to haul it off. Or maybe we’ll let it deteriorate in the backyard and save it’s “bones.”
The skeletons of saguaros are sold in art galleries for thousands of dollars. I could have my own sculpture in my living room someday — free of charge. (Except for the house call by the Cactus Doctor. And whatever treatment he prescribes.
Who knew you needed to hire a doctor for a diagnosis — and then a technician for the treatment? This is new territory for us. The saguaro are so iconic and majestic I think it’s worth it to save this one.
This chart explains how old our saguaro is. Our is 9′ 6″ so around my age I guess.
Have you ever paid a professional to take care of your plants or trees? What was the reason? Would you hire a plant doctor?
Life at the beach with two young kids back in our Laguna days.
I’ve been struggling to find the words. My brain is hurting at the thought. We lost another friend. A close friend. Our son’s godfather.
I got the call last week from our friend’s wife. I cried all night. I need to send a sympathy card and I can’t get myself to write it. The words seem so tiny and small. Helpless. I don’t know how she and her daughters are getting through each day and night. My heart aches for them.
We have so many memories with our two families together. At one time, Joe was my husband’s boss. They moved from San Francisco to the Palm Springs area when our son was a newborn. They had three daughters close in age to our kids.
They invited us into their beach deal. They found an inexpensive house to rent in Laguna Beach from Memorial Day to Labor Day and asked us to split the summer with them. With summer temperatures ranging from 110 to 124 degrees in Palm Springs, this beach rental changed our lives. I was a stay-at-home mom taking the kids to swim lessons and hanging out at the beach building sand castles and boogie boarding with my children.
My husband took long weekends and commuted back and forth. We shared a few weekends with our friends during the summer playing volleyball, Trivial Pursuit and eating pizzas with the kids.
When they moved to New Jersey to corporate headquarters as Joe moved up the chain of command with the firm, we visited them and spent Christmas together. We shared time together on corporate-sponsored trips and visited them more often when they moved to Nevada (a four-hour drive from Palm Springs).
Joe was proud of his Catholic education at an all boys school on Long Island. He was a Lit major at Rutgers and he loaned my husband and me must-read literature we had somehow missed including “Atlas Shrugged” and “The East India Trading Company.”
Joe had charisma, charm and a great sense of humor. He had a band of employees at the firm and friends throughout his life that put him on a pedestal — our family included. The last time we saw him was on Coronado Island at his middle daughter’s wedding. It was a beautiful weekend filled with memories I treasure.
We planned on going back to Coronado to visit them that summer or driving to Vegas to visit during the winter, but COVID hit. I feel like a few years of friendship were stolen. Joe was diagnosed with cancer years ago but survived and beat it. His heath was an issue, but he was living his life in his big way until this last year when another cancer hit.
I sincerely hope that it’s true that deaths come in threes, because this is the third close friend we’ve lost since Thanksgiving.
Do you think it’s an old wives tale that deaths come in threes? Have you lost anyone close to you this past year?Do you feel like COVID has stolen time from you with friends and family?
I sat down to work yesterday at the small table in the casita when CRASH!
A shocking thing happened. I sat down to work at my laptop in the casita when I watched a saguaro quiver, shake and crash to the ground.
I measured the saguaro and it’s 9 feet 6 inches tall.
My husband called a cactus doctor. We don’t know why this guy fell. Its root system literally broke in half. I’ve googled causes and it could be too cold of temperatures (it was below freezing and snowed in the last two weeks.) Another cause is overwatering. (We’ve had a lot of rain.)
The scarier thought is a bacteria. I read this from a website called Gardening Know How:
What is Bacterial Necrosis? Saguaro cactus can live for 200 years and grow up to 60 feet in height. These monstrous desert dwellers look imposing and impervious but can actually be brought down by a tiny bacteria. Saguaro cactus necrosis can invade the plant in a number of ways. It eventually creates necrotic pockets in the flesh which will spread. These necrotic areas are dead plant tissue and, if left unchecked, can eventually kill these regal plants. Treating bacterial necrosis in saguaro in the early stages can give the plant an 80 percent chance of survival.
How scary if we have this bacteria in our back yard and our giant saguaro are at risk? I’ll be very cautious walking around the yard regardless what caused its premature death. Can you imagine if a spiny saguaro that weighs a few thousand pounds fell on you? I had no idea I’d have to worry about our cacti’s health.
It feels like we lost a friend.
It snapped at the roots.
Have you had anything unexpected happen to you lately? How did you react?
Yesterday’s Wordle. I used my son’s three starter words. Then figured out the answer.
I saw a series of articles from different news sources — from NY Post to CNBC — that said cheating on Wordle is on the rise.
Why? What’s the point?
To be totally honest, I cheated once. I couldn’t figure out the word. I had four of the letters so I googled “Five letter words with R U P E….” rupee came up which I didn’t know was a currency from India — let along a word.
How did I feel after I cheated? Like there was no point in playing the game if I had to look up the answer. I haven’t done that again. I felt like a cheater. We had a t-shirt for our swim team that had this saying on the back: “Cheaters never win. Winners never cheat.”
In the NY Post there’s an article called “‘Everyone is cheating at Wordle’ and these are most guilty states: study” by Ben Cost.
Here’s an excerpt:
These are Wordle’s biggest cheaters. A recent study by data compiler Wordfinderx found that online answer searches increased 196% since the Times acquired the puzzle, in which players get five attempts to guess a new five-letter word each day.
“Cheating for the game is at an all-time high and only growing,” read the study.
Per the research, the US state that most frequently cheated was New Hampshire with the word “swill.” Coincidentally, the Granite State ranked third among US states with the most Wordle prowess, per a study last week by Wordtip.
CNBC’s article about Wordle cheaters by Mikaela Cohen was under the category “SUCCESS” and called “It seems like a lot of you are cheating at Wordle: Study.”
The jig is up — we know you’re cheating on your daily Wordle.
Or, at least, it would certainly appear that a growing number of people have been looking online for answers to the popular five-letter word guessing game — possibly to avoid putting a stop to a winning streak.
That’s according to a recent study by Wordfinderx, a reference website for word games like Wordle and Scrabble, which used Google Trends data to determine that Google searches for the answer to Wordle’s daily puzzle have nearly tripled ever since The New York Times acquired Wordle in January.
The study found that searches for Feb. 15′s “AROMA” and Feb. 19′s “SWILL” daily Wordle solutions reached a 100 out of 100 on Google’s search popularity scale, which compares search results on a topic and then rates them on a scale of 0 to 100 “based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics,” according to Google.
Why do you think more people are cheating at Wordle? One theory is that from the end of 2021 to today more people are playing, hence more cheating. But why does the cheating coincide with NY Times buying Wordle?
Have you cheated at Wordle or other games? Have you thought about cheating? Have you noticed a difference in Wordle since the NY Times took over? Do you have a strategy to play?
Our 80 degree weather with sunshine vanished. We had one day and night of rain and cool temps — back into the 50s. Then yesterday was a cloudy cool day. But I enjoyed the beauty of the clouds and will share them with you. Most often our days are filled with bright blue skies.
I walked into the backyard to get this photo of the sunrise among clouds. It rained during the night and the world smelled like creosote.This is our front yard during yesterday’s cloudy day. The previous owner loved gardening and he was quite proud of his cactus garden. When we first looked at the house, my husband confessed he hated cactus due to a run in with one when he was young. I think cacti are growing on him now.A morning walk view in our neighborhood.More clouds.
I’ve decided cloudy days are beautiful and they add a nice contrast to our regular sunshine. I want it to warm up though so I can jump back into the pool and swim laps.
Do you like sunny or cloudy days more? Why?Do you think a sunny day makes you feel more hopeful or happier?
Yesterday was my birthday and I celebrated in a few unique ways. First, I took a cold shower. Not on purpose, but the hot water was out. We had a plumber run a gas line from the laundry room into the kitchen the evening before. Tomorrow we are replacing the electric cook top with gas! We are so excited, but somehow the hot water got turned off so a cold shower it was. It sure woke me up!
Then I went to my first neighborhood club meeting. It was ladies coffee club with six other women from the neighborhood. It turns out the woman in charge of the coffee club lives right across the street from me. She and her husband stopped and introduced themselves when we first moved in but we haven’t seen them since. She apologized and said they were meaning to invite us over, but they forgot our names. I told her we had a concert and party and were going to invite them, also, but I couldn’t remember their names, either.
The big celebration for me was to drive 30 minutes to the pool and dive back in. I’ve been talking about doing this and haven’t made it there yet. We went from snow and freezing temps a little over a week ago to 80 degrees today, so I had no “it’s too cold” excuse. I set my birthday as my goal date to return to lap swimming. It was fabulous. I love the sensation of floating and gliding through the water. I met other nice swimmers who were so positive and friendly.
The downside to swimming was how out of shape and tired I got. Swimming is not a sport to drop for months at a time. Consistency is the key. My new goal is three days a week. It also makes me super hungry.
What special things do you do to celebrate yourself on your birthday or any day?
