ahream

“It’s so great that you’re letting him do that!”

It was Sunday at the Santa Barbara Orchid Festival, and I was chatting with an overly enthusiastic vendor while my husband peered through a magnifying glass at a miniature orchid in bloom. “I’ve been wanting to put an orchidarium in the living room for years, and my wife won’t let me. She acts like I want to put a pig farm in there.”

Mental pause.

I’m smiling and nodding at the little man in the orchid t-shirt, but my brain isn’t smiling and nodding along with quite the same enthusiasm. My brain has just discovered that either:

A) I am the coolest wife on earth and should be in line for some foot rubs and bubble baths sometime soon.

OR

B) I just agreed to let my husband build a pig farm in our living room.

Loyal blog readers may remember that I’d recently caved when my husband announced he wanted to build an enclosure for his orchid collection and that wouldn’t it be cool if it was a whole mountain-type habitat and then why not get some miniature frogs to put in there...

He’s currently in talks with a custom case builder and trawling e-bay for a remote-sensor humidistat. In the meantime, all the stick-mounted orchids he bought at the festival are hanging in the kitchen from one of my baking racks.

(A lot of orchids don’t grow in the dirt like a geranium. They clutch to the bark of a tree and suspend in midair...or in this case, to my baking rack.)

Last night as I was about to switch off our bedside lamp, I looked over and saw my husband furrow his brow.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“Misting systems.”

I switched off the lamp and fell asleep thinking of pig farms.

ahream Dispatches from the City of Angels I'm a mystery writer living in and writing about Los Angeles. You can catch my short story, "Running Venice," in the new anthology LAndmarked for Murder. Look for it in bookstores and on Amazon.com now. In the meantime, feel free to poke around. Over at my website you can find even more blog entries than I could fit here, as well as a few other ramblings. Enjoy and come back often.
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