All of a sudden I have three interviews this week! Who knows if they will amount to anything, but that's three more interviews than I've had in the past three months!

1) Tomorrow at 2:00pm: WorldGate, here in Campbell (lots of Flash and ActionScripting for TV set-top boxes, not completely my arena but could be OK)
2) Friday morning at 10:00am: Centrata in Redwood City (mystery start-up in stealth mode, but very well-funded and a traditional UI Design position. Yay!)
3) Friday at 2:00pm: Information Express in Palo Alto. This would be a part-time thing to make some extra cash. Document retrieval and photocopying at night in the Stanford Library. Not a lot of money, maybe $600/month, but only two nights a week. The most sketchy though. I would be working all night to make what I used to make in an hour at Yahoo and seeUthere.com.

Woke up still sore and achy all over from yoga, but it was cloudy outside and I didn't feel like swimming. I had to do something to move around before sitting at the computer, so I decided to finish up my gardening project from yesterday. It turned out to be a good decision, very calming and productive way to spend the morning! I also took some photos of my lovely new additions...you will now be exposed to my plant fetish in full force! At left is a darling little aloe about to flower, and me snapping a photo of it in its new home on top of the TV in the bedroom. See that little green frame? It has been sitting on top of the TV with a fake photo in it for the past two months, driving me crazy. I finally put it to good use with a photo of Dan and I in Cuenca on our trip to Spain. He'll be glad to see it, he likes when I do those things. I'm still a little mad at him though, but I'm getting over it.

I repotted my poor trusty faithful Ficus benjamina, the one who suffered through a small pot, no light and practically no water for the past three years in my San Francisco apartment. It is flourishing on the patio and has grown a whole new set of shiny healthy leaves. At right you can see a hot pink kalanchoe in its sassy Chinese pot, my handiwork from yesterday. Isn't it lovely? New home: on top of my black lacquered table in our bedroom.

Look at these two succulents, aren't they adorable? The one at left is called Panda Plant, another Kalanchoe species, fat and round with brown fuzz on it. The one on the right was entirely insprired by Martha Stewart, because I read her "Paint it Black" article yesterday afternoon in MS Living and she redid her guest apartment with black accents (mostly on white): black furniture finishes, black fruit, black flowers and black pull-down shades. They were really beautiful and very much my style. She is so fabulous. I dig that woman. People are always threatened by anyone who is smart and accomplished and productive, they have to hate them for some reason. Anyway, my touch of black is an Aeonium, and the common name is "Black Tree". Isn't that cool? It's a Good Thing ;-) Their new home is the guest bedroom.

Now showing at left are the new Coleus and African violet in their snazzy pots on the dinner table in the living room. Those pots are so pretty. I'm feeling better about spending money on this now, it makes such a difference. And hey, with three interviews this week, I might even have a job soon to pay for it all! Wouldn't that be something!

Last on my photo tour is a shot of the passionflower in my tiny front yard, which is all of 8'x10', or something ridiculously small like that. Well, small though it may be, I now have a crop of passionfruit ripening out there! I tried to make my tiny plot a haven for pollinators of all kinds and it really paid off. When I first noticed the fruit I was surprised, since I only had grown the vines for its flowers and had never seen a vine that fruited. When I went online to get some info on passionfruit so that I would know when to harvest them, I saw tons of posts from people who could not get their vines to fruit at all. Well, give the pollinators something to come for and they will get the job done. I must have seen at least 15 different species of bees and wasps of all types, sizes and colors out there this summer. Big, small, pale lemon yellow, dark yellow, big black HUGE solitary bees, June bugs, and of course, hummingbirds. I have a nectar flower for them too...big orange tubular monkeyflowers. In fact, I saw one today out there nipping at it, but my digital camera was too slow to catch him. The big draw for the pollinators was the Spanish lavender...they were all over that all summer and still are, een though most of the flowers have dried up by this point. Right now the main rave is a Salvia...I don't know what species it is, but it has long stalks of blue puffs (that color is like a beacon for bees and wasps) that they absolutely love.

Our neighbor Pat has a daughter who looks just like her, poor thing. She came over one day to introduce herself when I was in the front yard and she completely freaked out with all the bees and wasps buzzing around. She told me that she is allergic, so I can understand, but I'm out there all the time fussing around, brushing right up against those bee-laden flowers and they never bother me in the slightest. I suppose they are drunk off the abundance of pollen and nectar and are too busy socking it away to be mad at me, but I like to think that they know that I like having them there and provide those flowers just so that they will come visit me. We have a friendly relationship, the bees and me. I love to feed everybody. Somehow it makes me happy to know that all those bees, wasps and hummingbirds are experiencing some fine dining in my yard. If only I had more land! Even Bil noticed my yard and said something like, "Look at the goddamn biodiversity going on out here!" Nothing makes me happier....not bad for 8'x10"!