Andy and Darcy’s Blog

I’ve been neglecting all my plants lately. The basil is dead, as you already know. My amarylis shriveled up and died as well but this morning I looked again, and it is regenerating itself. I am quite amazed. I think this plant wants to spite me.

Since I’m guaranteed of an awesome amarylis flower or three, I am going to start watering it again. I’m going to start more basil, and hopefully this year they won’t be huge amazon basil plants. I need to figure out how to make them grow up orderly and nicely.

I’m trying to decide what other herbs I should grow. My rosemary never did very well, so I don’t think I’ll pursue that anymore. Chives were odd and sparse, but I’ve been told I should have planted more of them. Oregano and lavender were pretty easy so I’ll probably start with those.

I read all them all. They were long, and there was some neat science. The building phases and science parts were pretty entertaining, but the political stuff, the personal, cultural, and global conflicts, and the long boring negotiations, not so much.

Red Mars, with the most science of all the books and a very entertaining plot, gets 5 stars. It reminds me of Rendevous With Rama and 2001 but in a new and unique way.

And then there was Green Mars and Blue Mars. I had already had a great experience with Red Mars so I kept reading. There was a lot of politics that I didn’t particularly care about in these books. And everyone managed to successfully negotiate EVERYTHING. That was long and boring read about. Every once in a while I had a glimmer of the science that I liked so much about Red Mars, and it was enough to keep me going. These books had some characters I liked so that was worth about 4 stars to me. But the plots were missing stuff that was interesting to me so I would give the plot 3 stars. Overall I would give them 4 stars, but Green Mars and Blue Mars are just riding on Red Mars’ coattails.