Brain Plants

Enjoying a humid summer morning after thunderstorms last night.  Drinking coffee, which is making me pour with sweat even though I'm sitting still, just due to the humidity.  I'm cursed with a heavy perspiration gene from BOTH sides of my family, and this is just one of the lovely ways it manifests itself.  (In the summer, I have to have a fan blowing directly on my face on high just to blow dry my hair and apply makeup, otherwise the heavy face and head perspiration renders my efforts futile.  Weird, no one else I know experiences this).  Its a day off work but no one else is up yet so I'm enjoying some internet time--reading my favorite aviation blogs (View from the Tower and Flight Level 390 are my favorites), having fun with the snark and nasty arguments on the AOPA (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association) Forums (pilots are OPINIONATED folks, aren't they?) and noting on my weather sites that heavy thunderstorms are forecast for today.  Hope I still get to go swimming! 

I have some succulents that I not very successfully try to take care of and keep alive.  I take no credit for this, but my most exotic succulents right now are absolutely thriving.  Here are some pictures of these weird plants.  They really are strange, to me, they don't even look terrestrial. 

These are my three brain plants.  I call them that because the pattern on top of the lobes looks like the pattern of wrinkles on a brain, but I think they are actually called Lithops.  The reddish one in the center had two lobes but over the past several days it split and FOUR lobes are growing out of the center!  Very strange:

Here is a closer view of the four lobes growing out of two:

It's creepy, looks like something from an alien movie.  You might also note that the gray one at the bottom left of the picture is splitting as well, but as far as I can tell, only two new lobes are growing out of that one.  From my short experience with these very, very strange plants, when new lobes grow, the older ones gradually shrivel and die.  

Here are my two split rocks and my mimicry plant.  I don't have very good luck with split rocks.  (Or mimicry plants for that matter, the shriveled light brown mass on the right side of the pot is another mimicry plant that died).  These here are my third attempt at keeping these split rocks alive.  So far, so good:

My understanding is that these guys will actually flower, but I've never had any that lived long enough to do that.  I also believe that these odd succulents are native to South Africa, which makes me want to visit and see them in their natural environment.  HIghly unlikely that I will ever do that, however.  I'm pretty resigned to the fact that I probably won't ever get to travel abroad. 

In the eating front, still abstaining from sugar and white flour, need to work on portion size.  My body is still adjusting.  I got super hungry yesterday afternoon after a day of literally back-to-back meetings from 10 am to 4pm and while I probably ate a little too much, when I got super hungry, I still avoided the junk food.  It's going to take a while to get this down to where its normal to me, but I'm still mostly encouraged by my progress.

Postscript:  kittens seem to have turned the corner due to regular applications of medicine to their noses and eyes and are much better, frolicing and leaping and acting like normal kittens.  Mom made an executive decision and are now Merida and Fergus, named after characters in the Disney movie Brave, but six year old insists that they are to be pronounced in a strong Scottish accent.  Example: "Here Fairr-ee-gus!"