The Aloe Odyssey

     Apologies for the radio silence lately. My newest project ran into a bit of a snag when I realized there were no aloe plants to be found in South Louisiana.

     The whole problem stems from the fact that I can't cook. I hate it. It's hereditary. My mom and I have a combined total of 6 dishes that we can make; aside from that, it's take-out or starvation. Luckily for me, Chris actually enjoys fighting with food and he takes care of feeding time at the VelociCrafter Compound. That also means that it's up to him to face the dangers of our sink. Our water is roughly the temperature of volcanic lava, and the heat is instantaneous. This results in multiple burns, and the terrifying possibility that I might have to start cooking. Which would end like this.

I'm why we can't have nice culinary things. 

     Luckily for both of us, there was one piece of kitchen advice that my mom gave me: always have an aloe plant, because you are going to burn yourself.

     Unluckily for us, aloe is stupid hard to find - which made it very difficult to write a blog entry about making a cool container for it.

     I tried all of the places where there should be aloe, but it was non-existent. I did, however, discover that Garden Centers become creepy nightmarescapes after dusk. There are no people, no overhead lights, and the very real possibility that there is a psycho killer hiding in the ferns. There are also garden gnomes the size of small children, which is not ok.

"...and then they realized the calls were coming from the Garden Center the whole time. Dun dun duuuuuuuuuuuuuun!"

     After a week, I learned my lesson and went to a plant nursery in the daylight. It was blissfully free of gnomes and actually had aloe plants! It was also instantly obvious why I couldn't find the plants anywhere else - this aloe had eaten the smaller, weaker members of its species. 

Thanks to Funko Groot for providing some terrifying scale.

     So much for my 'tea cup planter' idea.

     However, we are nothing if not optimists here at VC, so we went looking for a silver lining. And now that I'm sure aloe plants actually exist, you can expect a new project at the start of next week that features the debut of my beloved Dremel. So stay tuned and don't give up on us just yet!

     And watch out for gnomes.