It's a bit awkward that the title of this article is "tropical plant", but the fact is that I don't know the name of the plant that we bought. On the label it says "assorted tropical", so that's not much help either.

Anyway, after a week of it getting used to our apartment I've put it in a bigger pot.

Before.

After.

On Sunday I tried to revive the ill plant I bought last week. More than half of the plant was affected by an illness of some kind.

I took the plant of out of its pot. Some of the stems were dead, and a few more had large black spots on the part between roots and stem. Perhaps it was some sort of fungus. I threw away the stems that were visibly affected, and placed the healthy parts into separate pots. I felt a bit like a plant surgeon.

I hope that, by placing the cuttings in separate pots, at least one will get to survive. I've placed them on the window-sill where they'll get plenty of sunlight.

Before the operation.

During the operation I felt a bit like a surgeon. Let's hope the patient survived.

After the operation. I hope that at least one of the cuttings will survive and grow back into a healthy plant.

My cousin Paula is staying in Sweden Norway for six months for her study.

She now has a website where she writes with a lot of humor about her adventures in Oslo with fjords, roommates and Holmenkollen.

It is not snowing in Norway yet, but apparently there are plenty of langpootmuggen (crane flies).

This weekend we bought a few plants for in the living room. We went to Lowe's, a hardware store with a garden center and we got three large plants and two small ones.

I was very happy to see a Starfish flower, the same cactus that my grandmother gave me four years ago. It was the last of this type they had in store, and it's in pretty bad shape.

I still bought the cactus. It's a nice challenge to see if I can get this plant back into shape or if it will die within a few weeks. Currently it's on the bar, and I'll leave it alone for a few days so it can adjust to the temperature in our house.

The sales price is $4.95, but the lady sold me the plant for a dollar because of its sad state. All plants from Lowe's have a one year warranty -- should they die I can go back to the store and get my money back.

Yesterday we bought our first new plant in Durham.

Unfortunately we had to leave two plants in Arlington, but they were quickly adopted by other people on our floor in the week before we left.

This plant I saw the other day at Kroger, and it's a type that we used to have in Haarlem as well. It's dense, compact and has a nice light green color.

Yesterday evening we went out in Durham, in a bar called Satisfaction. Around 10.00 pm they started a karaoke session, which was surprisingly very entertaining. I did not get on stage (a next time) but we song for many hours. A fun evening, we were home around 2.00 am.

The pictures of our apartment that I placed on Wednesday morning are some 3 months old.

Of course our house looks much different now we have moved in, so here are more recent pictures of our apartment.

In the future we want to get paintings or pictures to decorate the walls, and soon we'll get some plants and new lamps as well.

The weather is amazing today. Yesterday the sky was still cloudy after Ernesto (Petra has a good picture) and it was unusually cold but today is a wonderful day.

I don't spend much time outside during the week, so it's nice to work on my website on the balcony in the sun. It's a long weekend: Monday is Labor day.

Last night the tropical storm Ernesto made landfall in the south of North Carolina.

Originally it looked like the storm could go to the Raleigh/Durham area, but it stayed in the east part of the state. Except for a lot of rain last night we luckily didn't have a lot of problems with Ernesto.

Yesterday evening we went out to play some pool. It had been a while since I played that, but it was a lot of fun.