Oooh, that's a great Aeonium. Many people, including me, would kill for such a nice, large specimen as that! And it does not look too poorly from here, with the exception of a couple things. Summertime is the time Aeoniums go dormant and most of the time want a major cutback on water, or to go basically dry with just a sip of water periodically. Summer is also when the rosettes ball up like yours are, which could be perceived as them sort of shriveling up. That is completely normal for this time of year. Full sun could be fine. I happen to do only part-sun with mine over the summer, to try to encourage them to wake up faster when fall comes and temperatures start dropping a bit. My conditions aren't ideal, so my plants are potted and I move them around in an attempt to please them at various times of the year. What isn't normal are the few branches that have flopped over. Where the branches have flopped, are they kind of mushy? If so, they're rotting, and you should remove them/perhaps cut them back to the main stem, to where the tissue is green and healthy inside. Also feel around the base of the stem for any mushy, rotting areas, and I would pray the root system is healthy and there isn't any rot going on below the soil line. My Aeoniums generally start waking up in the fall, and they do most of their growing through the winter and spring, until hot weather hits. Aeoniums are characterized as winter growers, which just means they don't like the heat much. If your summer doesn't get very hot, they can decide to not completely ball up and go entirely dormant, but instead only partially ball up and keep slowly growing through the season -- most of my Aeoniums went completely dormant this summer, but in the exact same conditions a couple of them didn't, and that's just a fluke. Aside from the few problem stems you have going there, I would hope it's one healthy plant. Just make sure you remove what has rotted so that the rot cannot spread. Don't let the balled-up look of the rosettes scare you. The leaves will open up and really start growing soon. Out of curiosity, I'd like to see a closer view of the plant. It has a look to it a bit like Aeonium balsamiferum, which I quite like. This post was edited by teatree on Sun, Aug 4, 13 at 19:55

Wow - I'm *almost* in that exact same boat, though it's my fiance, and we don't live together, but he eats dinner at my house almost every night of the week (I cook for both of us, because he just doesn't *eat* or eats junk food all the time if he doesn't eat with me LOL), so it's basically the same thing as far as the meal goes. He's decided to do Atkins for a month next month, and I am not going to (I believe moderation/portion control is way more healthy), so I'm facing cooking meals that we can both enjoy and eat parts of without cooking two separate meals. *My* main thing is watching my portion sizes - palm-sized protein, fist sized carb, and salad or veggies...as long as I keep a calorie deficit going and we stick to our workouts, I loose, so I'm happy (have lost 3lbs in the last 3 weeks just watching portion sizes, eating healthy and working out - even a few big dinners out in there). I'm wondering why cooking the same meal didn't work for both of you though? :-) I mean, if you look on the cooking forum, I asked about salad dressing, but I'm not that worried about it otherwise. I normally cook a balanced meal (meat, carbs, and veggies), and as long as I don't cook the meat in sauces (sauces will now be served on the side for me, so he doesn't have to eat them), or the veggies in anything, I don't really see where the problem will be. I always use real butter or olive oil to cook with, so that's not even a change for me. So a sample dinner for us one night might be steak - he'll get a whole one with pepper and probably half of mine, I'll eat half (or a palm-sized piece) of a steak (I'll trim the fat off on my plate) with herbs, he'll get the 2 cups of salad with carb free dressing he's allowed, and I'll get a fist sized baked potato and salad. The steaks are cooked together, the potato bakes at the same time...same meal, we just eat different portions and parts. I might skip the cheese on my salad - his salad will have hard boiled eggs and cheese in it...but those will be pre-cut up and kept in dishes in the fridge to just pull out as needed. Chicken - same thing. I'll cook a whole one in the crockpot (with olive oil & herbs), and he can have as much of that as he wants with the skin, I'll pull the skin off mine and eat a smaller portion with some pasta. We'll both share the salad, he can doctor his as necessary, and I'll cook a veggie from his "acceptable list" that we can both eat. My pasta will have sauce to spread over my chicken too if I feel like it. Or a roast in the crockpot - again, just cooked plain, I'll make a sauce to go over for myself, a baked potato, and then we'll both eat veggies/salad off his list (it's healthy for me to eat more veggies anyways). Spaghetti - Atkins can have spaghetti squash, so a simple spaghetti sauce with meatballs prepared on the side and served over the squash will make a great meal for both of us - he can just watch how much sauce he uses, and I'll "doctor" mine at the table if needed (I have a copy of his list, so I'll just use what's on the list to make the main sauce). If I'm not mistaken, on WW, you can have whatever you want, as long as it stays within the point range, right? So you should be able to eat the same thing you cook for him, in smaller portions, and with carbs added for you, and stay within your points, don't you think? I've never done WW, so I don't know for sure, but DF did for awhile, and that's what I understood about it... In any case, that's my "plan"...if it doesn't work, I guess he'll end up figuring out his own meals (which won't work - he'll give up if that happens, I know from experience). LOL Let me know if you want some more ideas...I'm still thinking of good ways to make meals that go both ways, so I'm always open to suggestions! :-)

This sounds eerily similar to the saga of my brother and sister-in-law. Their youth, the baby, our dedication to them all (specifically the baby) and yet time and time again she used my nephew as bait to make us jump through hoops. And we jumped - over and over and over again. After about five years of threats on her part, despair and terror on ours, it stopped. I don't know exactly what happened, if perhaps she finally matured or if she finally realized that no matter what horrible thing she did to us we would continue to keep the peace in order to be a part of their and my nephew's life. Back then I would grit my teeth and smile but deep down I truly hated her for what she was doing. Now she is my best friend. It was difficult but well worth the fight.

I know this is long, Heidi, but I've got personal experience with your situation. To be brief, I'm confident that this tree is not even close to death's door, and would be much better served by fixing the causes of its decline now so it can green up and be much healthier to deal with the stress of repotting next summer. In particular, your ficus was thriving until three months ago, and we know that the decline was caused by low light and poor watering, which means that fixing the root congestion and soil aren't an emergency. To be clear, gardengal is probably right that you could repot now without killing the tree, but because it would be easy to get it green again by correcting the biggest problems now, you would be best off waiting until summer to do major root work and put it in a great growing medium. Then you will be rewarded with a burst of new growth, and you'll soon be pinching growing tips and pruning to control its enthusiastic growth and tell it to fill in all those gaps left by dropped leaves. My experience: I have two smaller roughly five year old ficuses that were completely rootbound and were stuck in a dim corner. I often forgot about watering until leaves started yellowing and dropping, and the I'd fill their tall plastic 'saucers' and left the water there until they stopped soaking it up. In other words, I drowned the roots every time I watered, and maximized the amount of deadly mineral deposits in the soil. Aside from feeble attempts to maintain a few leaves, they had almost stopped growing entirely because their depleted energy reserves made them more vulnerable to attack and only allowed them to put our a few leaves at a time, and most of the buds and leaves that appeared were killed by spider mites. But these are tough plants, so they clung to life for about three years before I finally cared enough to search for answers and found these forums. I immediately started treating the mite infestation, thoroughly flushed the pots (I swear I could hear them sigh with relief), fertilized with a weak solution of Foliage Pro, which has a great ratio of basic nutrients plus all the micronutrients plants need, moved it in front of my best window, which only provides mediocre light, and added bright white (not soft white) 5000k 100W led and cfl bulbs in clamp-on fixtures. Two months later, each branch has about half a dozen new leaves, including some emerging near the stem (a sign that the tree is getting better). It's wonderful to see them getting so green, and I'm already reading up on how to prune them when they get growing again. So Heidi, if I were in your place, I'd start by checking the leaves for spider mites with a bright light and a magnifying glass (they're tiny red dots on the leaves, and you may see little bits of webs on the leaves our branches). Ask about treatment if you find any. Then I'd flush the pot (details below), fertilize with a 3:1:2 ratio fertilizer (miracle gro general purpose granules are easy to find and the right ratio), move it to the best window I had, and put two 100 or brighter led or cfl bulbs in it for 12 hours a day, using a timer. From then on, check soil moisture by pushing a sharpened 3/8" dowel all the way through to the bottom of the pot, and DO NOT WATER until the dowel comes out completely clean and dry (at that point there's still a lot of water inside the soil particles). When that happens, water until about 15% of the water exits the drain holes, let it drain, and then either tilt the pot at 45 degrees for 15-30 minutes after watering to remove excess water, or insert a wick into a drain hole and raise the pot up so the wick won't come in contact with the drained water. You can wait until the surface of the soil is dry to start checking the soil moisture, but after that you should check daily until you have a feel for how long it takes for the poor to dry up. About flushing: flush with lukewarm water, using about ten times the pot's capacity, then give it a weak solution of fertilizer. Use R/O (reverse osmosis) water if possible; water from supermarket water machines are usually $.39 per gallon, and that little pot will maybe need two or three gallons to do the job. My water is hard, so I used R/O water to flush, and because my tap water is hard I use water from my cheap faucet-mounted filter for regular watering. And the reason midsummer is the best time to do something stressful is that 1) ample summer sunlight generates much more energy from the leaves than even a lot of winter sunlight can provide, and 2) the plant is programmed to put energy into new growth in summer, whereas in winter it wants to store it for use in the spring. From several people's experience, including Al (talks), who knows whereof he speaks, if you take two healthy plants and repot one now and one next June, the second will be in better shape next fall than the one you repotted a year earlier. Sorry for my rambling post, and I hope it helps at least a little.