I love plants

The Draculus Vulgaris

Check out this bad boy! I have no idea what it is, so if anyone knows, I'd love to know so that I can plant one. My neighbor is growing it. I guess I could ask her but that would require some effort. [P.S. I did ask her, the name is in purple above. I'll say.]

I went to a good meeting last night and I had a realization. No one does relationships very well. The topic was "right relationships" and there was a guy there last night who said he'd been married to his wife for 52 years. He went into a long story about how he'd met her when, drunk, he spun out on a gravel road and drove through her father's goat pen. While he left the scene that night before the sheriff could arrive, he caught up with her father the next day at church to admit he'd done it because he knew her father wouldn't cuss much at church.

Sure enough, he went over to fix the goat pen and there he met his future bride. "She was just a little bitty thing with pigtails," he said. Needless to say, we (at least the women in the meeting) were just charmed, imagining this scene. Then he went on to say that sometimes when things are rough, the silence between them might go on for a week or more. That made me laugh because that's my modus operandi; when I'm mad, I don't want to talk about it, sometimes for a long time.
.
Another guy who is about 60 or so told another long story about how he was making lunch for his wife that morning and he mispronounced her sister's name for about the 1,000th time. She had to correct him, he said, and her tone of voice apparently sent him over the edge. He said they ended up in a physical altercation with her pulling his beard and him wielding a kitchen knife. We were laughing thinking of these two sexagenarians duking it out in the kitchen over a bag lunch. It just goes to show you, you never know what goes on in someone's home even if they do tell you their side of it. My mother always said "You never know 'til you marry them." I don't know how she knew that; she was only married once. I guess that was enough to figure it out.

I left the meeting thinking maybe I'm not so dysfunctional after all. I'm heading out to Phoenix next week to work for a few days, so I'll get to hit some meetings and see a few friends. Until tomorrow, take it easy. I plan to.