The Weekly Wrap: February 9, 2025

There is a plant in our bedroom that might be on its last legs.

The plant is an ardisia and I've owned it since 2006. It was the first plant I purchased after college. Back then, it was a wee little thing about 6 inches tall. I put it in a cute white ceramic planter and stuck it on a bookcase in front of a window.  It was happy. Over the next few year it grew - slowly, but surely adding inches. After 3 years, the plant suddenly flowered. Then there were red berries. By the time I moved out of this apartment, it was almost 4 feet tall.

In my next apartment, the sunlight situation was not so kind. My now husband and I propped it under a grow light in the corner of our living room. It continued to slowly grow both upwards and outwards.

A few years later, we moved into yet another apartment. This one came with HUGE windows that let in lots of light. The plant loved it. It grew so abundantly that we had to rein it in with kitchen twine. It was so dense and bushy we had to rotate it every few weeks to even out the new growth. We went through several flower and berry cycles. On occasion, we would rattle it to let the dead foliage fall. By the time we moved out of the apartment and into our condo, the plant stood well over 6 feet tall. 

Despite the fact that we put this plant in a bigger pot in a relatively sunny corner in our home, it's not doing so well. The sunlight, while available most of the day is more indirect. The first few months here, the plant dropped three-quarters of its leaves and branches. Today, it's still tall but we're down to three main scraggly branches with just a few clumps of leaves on the ends. Despite proper watering and fertilizing, I'm not sure it will make it. More side branches are dying and dropping off.

But, I haven't lost all hope. At the bottom, there is one baby branch, reminiscent of when I first purchased it, growing upwards.

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• "I want to live in a community where everyone cares." [Grant Slatton]
• Some useful life tools in comic form. [Hedger Humor]
• We should all make the best of our friendships. [WaPo - gift link]
• Tongue twisters. [howstuffworks]
• Bookish Valentine's cards. [BookRiot]
• Spots you're probably forgetting to clean. [Lifehacker]
• People who know about AI don't love it. [Wired]
• Some things are not designed for actual use. [The Deleted Scenes]

• The business of portable toilets. [The Economics of Everyday Things]
• There's no one like Madonna. [The Atlantic]
• When the land rewilds. [Short Wave]
• The Supreme Court goes casual. [The Academic Minute]
• The birth of birthright citizenship. [Throughline]
• Not all risks are equal. [ParentData]

• I've been seeing trailers for the newest Den of Thieves all of the place. We figured we would watch the first movie before the second comes out. This is a Gerard Butler led heist film. It's gritty with shades of gray for both the good and bad guys. I thought the ending was an exceptional bit of plotting. [Amazon Prime]
• We polished off Messiah early in the week. I loved the complex characters and intermingled story of geo-politics and media. I am so bummed this didn't get a second season. After taking the plot heavily in one direction, it ended on the ultimate character cliff hanger.  [Netflix]
• For our next weeknight TV binge, we are back with Doctor Who. It's been years since we last watched so we decided to start over with the Jodie Whitaker seasons. Our repeat view shows we have very little memory of what happened. I do like her zany take on the character. [Max]

• On meatless Monday, I made hearty black bean quesadillas. It's a quick cook that also served as the kiddo's meal pick for the week. The adults got the filling and the kiddo got plain cheese. I overdid it a little on the red onion so this was rather zippy. [Budget Bytes]
• I made kale and kimchi dense bean salad for my lunch meal prep. It was a lot of prep work but well worth the effort. Massaging the kale really does help. I wanted to use up all the kale we had in our fridge so I omitted the tofu. I don't think it changed anything. I will be making this again. [WaPo - gift link]