Andy, I'm zone 7 but don't think there should be that much of a difference as we are both protecting our plants over the winter. Not a basjoo but my Himalayan (Musa sikkimensis) bloomed a few summers back. Last summer was a dud so bananas were off, this summer we had extremely dry conditions and I didn't even put them into the hot, dusty ground (now it's raining and raining!) But to get back to your question, mine bloomed with a heck of a lot fewer leaves than 20-25--maybe 8 or fewer of those enormous leaves on an 8 foot plant (have a pic somewhere I can post). It bloomed in September as I recall (a teacher wanted to bring it into his class to show the students how the bananas develop out a flower branches).--They kind of pop out suddenly those floral parts. Just keep watering and feeding! Good luck and post a pic if it does bloom.

Rita, you've had a harder time than we did! I'm glad you're feeling a little more normal. I made my first trip to the grocery last night. It still looks like an army went through. There were only "weird" eggs (brown ones and organic), almost no meat or bread. My DH loves Little Debbie Donut Sticks, and the only thing in the LD display was three boxes of lemon marshmallow pies! :) Good thing he stocked up. We still have tree limbs piled up along the streets, just waiting for the city to get to them. But we never lost water, and our power came back on Monday afternoon. We've been without cable/internet/TV since Monday, but that's really a pretty minor inconvenience. Over the weekend I quilted a lap quilt. I intended to sew the binding on it Monday, but couldn't with no power. :) Donna

MN currently has the third highest Covid incidence in the US. According to Osterholm we've plateaued but cases are not dropping yet. His take on it is that we will continue to have waves of surging cases moving throughout the country as we have had in the past - just like the surging waves hit different countries at different times. So when the incidence of cases drops in your area, enjoy the lower risk while you can because it's just a matter of time before it goes up again. No one understands why it happens this way - it doesn't correlate with vaccination rates. What does correlate are hospitalizations and deaths though there are more and more serious breakthrough cases. It's encouraging to hear there are some new antiviral treatments working their way through the approval process. So last night we went to a fund raising dinner with about 400 people - no masks because of course you can't eat and drink with a mask on. I kind of freaked out wading into the sea of people in the reception area but we quickly moved through that and kept our distance until we were seated right next to other people. I guess in 10 days or so I'll know if this was a really dumb thing to do but for now I'm so glad I went and heard three remarkable speakers whose cause has captured my interest unlike any other.

Another contributing factor is the now-widespread use of compressor circuits/devices to tamp down/ remove the normal dynamical range changes in normal speech. A compressor cuts out highs and lows in an audio signal so that the volume level is more consistent. Eliminating the dynamic range makes the sound mushy and with less contrast, less distinct than unprocessed or as sounds as in real life, and harder to make sense of. It's like bleaching out colors from an image so that everything looks like slightly different shades medium gray with little range of difference. "Compressor" processing is quite different from and unrelated to the "compression" of sound files/sound tracks, done by sampling at lower rates, to take up less bandwidth in transmission.