Out Front

The first photo is one of Lovely Wife's new flower pots for 2007. She gets the urge every year to plant flowers. Hits all the local nursery sections of the stores, and boom, lots of new flowers. I'm not complaining, I love flowers, and we can have them pretty much year 'round here. This new setup in the photo, sits just outside our screened in front porch to greet visitors, and us when we get home.

The second photo is of the thorns where we've cut off dead palm fronds from some little palm trees, also just outside the front porch. I like palm trees a lot, and there are a dizzying number of different kinds, but some of them have huge thorns near the base of the palm fronds, like here. These in the picture are about 2 inches (5cm) long each. Every few months, more fronds grow out of the top, and the lower ones yellow and die and droop down. To keep the trees looking nice, we cut off the dead ones and leave only the green. Trimming them isn't fun, and we look like an attack dog has chewed up our arms when we've trimmed them all and have dragged the old fronds away. It's pretty much impossible to trim a bunch of these without ending up bloody, the blood running down your arms. It doesn't hurt very bad, but it's annoying.

We used to have huge bougainvilleas all over the yard, but that was over the top with thorns, and we got rid of them despite the beauty.

Our Canary Island Date Palm (at least I think that's what it is) has thorns about 4 or 5 inches (10-12cm) long. Those thorns have stuck in me so deep I felt them hit the bones in my forearms. That DID hurt, and it creeps me out to feel them hit bone like that.