Yep! Tillandsia! The flower's a dead giveaway (duh!). I don't know a bout the lonely leaf - I think it's been ensnailed or caterpillaried and so its edges aren't intact. The bottom pic is of what I'd call 'a hairy kind of cactus'. I've seen it. In fact, I think I've got one growing up the back yard somewhere, but I don't know its name. I'll search for you and see if I can come up with an ID.
Short boring story about gardens.
Background A:
It is currently Fell Winter here in Australia. Bloody coldest winter in ages, let me tell you! And rainy! Lots of rain. So much rain that it's hard to find a day to mow the back yard between thunderstorms. The 'lawn' is... lengthy...
Poor little Roxanne has to negotiate the long grass whenever she needs to go outdoors for a pit-stop. She's pretty good and seems to know not to leave - ah - 'monuments' in public thoroughfares, however the rain has somewhat limited her choices for safe places to go. This means there are landmines lurking in the long, long grass in my back yard.
Background B:
The vanity in our bathroom is old and decr@pit. Awful, really. BUT - just recently our next-door neighbours had a bathroom reno and removed their perfectly good (and better than ours) vanity in favour of a new one. They offered it to us, subject to inspection. O yay!
Story:
So my Hunn and I had been out all day at the hospital (me having my five-year asthma testing). We arrived home and sat chatting for a bit in iVan (our car). As we alighted, one of the neighbours' boys called to us that we might like to inspect the vanity.
'Go out the back way', he said. 'The house is a mess and Mum'd kill me if I let you in. I'll meet you at the back of our shed.'
So Hunn and I went into our own house and prepared to negotiate the wilds of our back yard. Bear in mind, night had fallen by now, the wind was whipping the trees and rain was threatening. Hunn handed me a torch to light my way and I stepped valiantly forward saying 'It's really boggy! I'll find a path with the torch and you step in my footprints, OK?'
OK. We set off to walk the scant fifteen yards to our back gate.
Squish. Squelch. I wished I hadn't got on my new white trainers. Squidge. Was that
water in my shoe? Suddenly, Hunn let out a yell:
'Oh $#!+! I've stepped in one of Roxanne's monuments! It's gone all over my shooooooee!' This was uttered in a descending scale as he sank into the morass halfway up to his knee. There followed a paragraph of invective that I may not repeat here out of respect to our younger and more sensitive members. As I gently remonstrated with Hunn ('You gormless
idiot! I
told you to step in my footprints!') he attempted to withdraw his foot from the bog. It came out all right, but his lovely size 10 brand new khaki trainer remained buried in sticky mud! Poor Hunn was therefore stranded on one leg and waving the other around desperately looking for somewhere firm to plant his foot. There wasn't anywhere. He tilted forward. Thus forced to put his foot down, he planted same - you guessed it! - smack on top of a sloppy, wet Roxanne poo! Down he went again!
Now, I'm only human, right? I laughed. I freely admit it. My Hunn is a very big bloke and to see him buried up to his knees in mud was quite... refreshing... I suppose he had a right to be angry at me for laughing so much I was helpless and completely unable to pull him out of his boggy prison. After a good ten minutes of my poor Hunn being thus stuck inna mud, we eventually managed to release him and trudged to the back gate, viewed the vanity and agreed to buy it.
The return trip was uneventful except that we paused along the way to retrieve Hunn's by-now black sticky trainers. I promised I would help him clean them tomorrow and snuck indoors in order to laugh some more in private.
