Recovering From Estate Planning

It was a weird week. After a day of recovering from travel, we took the seats out of the van and mom and I made a mad dash to Oregon—she to help my sister get her classroom ready, me to meet with my dad and an estate lawyer to work on his estate planning.

Incredibly long story short: my mom had a lovely time with my sister; I met my dad’s secret girlfriend who was cleaning the house after chasing off some meth’d up sex workers who had crawled in a window and started squatting while everyone was out of town on jobs. My dad spaced the appointment so I got to navigate downtown parking by myself while he called in by phone. The lawyer—whom I found while listening to an Anti-MLM podcast—was lovely. Secret GF and I find each other delightful. There was a mouse situation. Never saw my dad, but am optimistic he is going to sign that one piece of paper that we need to get things rolling.

I needed to recover. I still need to recover.

After spending a lovely few hours with my childhood and beyond bestie and her husband, I met up with my mom for some plant shopping.

Grandmasquatch is a very research based plant parent; she goes into adoption well informed. I on the other hand tend to bring home whomever speaks to me. There are benefits to both these systems: Mom keeps plants alive and thriving; I have a delightful collection (that I bring to her when they aren’t doing well).

Our first stop was The Oregon Garden gift shop and outdoor plant sale. This is a fantastic place to pick up Oregon natives that are inexpensive and well marked. All the care instructions are right on the tags. I brought three plants home including the two cuties in the photo below.

Mom and I are both upping our succulent game as I have a full sun wonderland on my sun porch that none of my tropicals tolerate.

Our next stop was the local hardware store that was having a houseplant sale. Grandmasquatch had already been twice during her stay. I snagged a stunning hanging fellow and a velvety succulent then went to hang out in the car lest I bought anymore.

Spoiler alert: I ended up getting more.

My sister saw our plants and decided we needed to go back.

We arrived back at the sale just in time to make friends with “Barb”, the woman in charge of the plant department, who was discounting wildly to make room for the new friends coming in that day. Recognizing kindred plant spirits, suddenly she was discounting everything heading toward our carts and now I have eight new plants.

We finally left my sister’s and headed home through 102 degree heat with no air conditioning, and a sprinter van full of foliage. Listening to plant podcasts, I realized that I needed a better way of keeping track of all my new varieties and their preferences. As I am in my “organizing homeschooling stuff” phase of the summer, it only took me a few minutes to whip up a plant worksheet in Canva and put together a notebook.

Plant Care worksheet Download