I've got a problem

Well folks, as so often happens in my life I am going to document something I am not proud of in hopes that it will soon become something that I can take pride in..like when I was trying to exercise more. Good news in that department is that I actually do exercise now, in fact I workout 5-6 times a week and am finally starting to feel great again! Woot endorphins! But, in all seriousness I do have another problem, one that my brilliant plant-loving/plant-information-knowing friends Nora and Rudy are helping me solve as we speak. Remember my dear baby tree that I loved so much? (pictured in this post) Well, it died a slow dehydrated death while I was gone this summer. Not that I, ahem, blame anyone, ahem...But the fact of the matter is that when I returned to Denver it was brittle-y pile of needles that needed only slight encouragement before it became a naked brittle pile of branches on the floor. Sad day to be sure. Fast forward to Christmas this year when we found a larger version of the norfolk island pine at the grocery store being sold as a Christmas tree! Well we bought it right up and took it home. It was brilliant because it was a good size for our house and it could be decorated first and then loved forever more. Until it wasn't. While we were in MN we had a weird cold snap in Denver, and the heat went off in our house leaving it at a cold, cold, tree-killing 30 degrees. The tree was looking pretty crappy at that point, but I had high hopes. I have been tending to it, brought it into the kitchen to give it more light and have been checking the soil daily. Unfortunately, this brings me to mistake number...2? let's call it 2. The tree was in a pot obviously, but there was gold foil paper stuff around the pot. Probably to make it festive. Festively killing it. I didn't think about taking it off for some reason, probably because I am good at making plants dead, but the plant was steadily getting worse and worse. Its branches are curling in towards itself and it is really dry but still green! It was 45 degrees yesterday so I brought it outside to sit in the direct sun for a little while and took off the gold foil stuff. Lo and behold anyone reading this would probably have told me to take it off as soon as I got home and realized the plant wasn't doing well, BUT I didn't do that until about ten minutes ago. At which point there was a puddle of standing water that the plant hadn't drank that was just sitting around the bottom of the plant probably killing it. So, what can I do!? Nora set to work immediately researching on some special school database thing she has access too and gave me tons of advice on how to make my little tree vibrant again. I am going to follow her advice, and hopefully with all of those instructions and all of my attentive love and support, it will once again be alive. Here are the pictures of my sad drowning tree:




Doesn't it looks so sad! Now I am going out to my backyard to get some rocks to set on a plate so the excess water can drain out of the pot instead of sitting at the bottom. Hopefully my tree will bounce back really soon!