The one on the left is A stapleia, probably gigantea. Its difficult to ID without a flower, but my asclepiad expert sister said most likely a gigantea. The one on the right is haworthia. Probably some hybrid of coarctata.

I find that this Cactiguide.com site is a good one to get started looking for something on.. Half way down the page it has a "Identifying by cactus habit" , and then it is nose to the grindstone checking things out till you find what you are looking for. One can also do it by family. I do not always find their picture spot on because their is a lot of variation with in the pictures. I will then take a name and google it, go to the images and search further. This is often very boring and tedious if you are looking for immediate gratification. two days ago, I was looking for a astragalus species (3 - 4thousand in the astragalus family ) and all I had was a speckled seed pod and a location. No picture of the plant till afterwards . It took me about 6 hours but I got it . I did that differently. I went to the LBJ wildflower site and went through their 6 pages of astragalus in their database and looked for ones that their description mentioned New Mexico, and then went to the Gov. database linked on their page and it has map of the ranges (since I knew where it was collected) and the map can zero in to county distributions. If the right county or one close by was mentioned, I then googled images (also linked on the LBJ site) of that species to see if they had photos of the seed pod. I was lucky that it was a very distinctive seed pod. I did this with all the species that were from central New Mexico. I think there were over 20-30. It was Astragalus lentiginosus douglas ex hooker var diphysis. I sent the info to the woman who gave me the seed (NOT the woman who collected it). She sent me a photo of the plant after the fact that she got from the collector and I was right! I really felt I deserved a pat on my back. I was then able to find a photo of a population a couple miles from the collectors house and it was an exact match. I sent the info to the collector. It was a hard ID but it sure feels good to do it right. Keep your eye out for different Databases. You will get the hang of it if you just try to do a bit of detective work. Here is a link that might be useful: Cactiguide.com habit search

There's a leaf on the far left hand side of the first image of #5, which you have identified as noidhosta-015.jpg and it looks rather suspicious to me, I believe what I see may be signs of HVX. Take another shot of it, it's the leaf @ 9 o'clock. The odd looking green-misted leaves on Undulatas are quite common. Undulatas are quite unstable. #2, marked Francee, quite obviously isn't as labelled. With the plants still rather immature it's hard to say which blue one this is, perhaps Elegans, time will tell. #6 is Undulata, either Mediovarigata or Univitata. Check out Henk Hooijer's webpage for more info. #7's on the tip of my tongue, the memory's excellent, the recall leaves something to be desired. #8 looks to be correct as Francee. May I suggest it would have been an easier post to answer if it had been split up into several smaller posts.....

Ok, I've had a laugh about the eye allergy thing. That is just too funny. Because honestly I have two that do have that issue. Well.... 3. DH, DD and MIL. However, I can one-up you all on that. How do I deal with a person who believes and I mean seriously believes that my house plants take oxygen out of the air? Honest to gods, My MIL believes this with all her silly little heart that the house plants take oxygen out of the air! LOL And she's starting to convince my DH of the same silly notion! *groans* It's absolutely silly, to be honest. And I just do not know how to cope with it. Nor have I figured out how to teach them both that they are wrong! LOL =) I've gone the passive aggressive route so far. Each time either of them mentions that my plants take oxygen out of the air, I go buy another one. ROTF ~Tina