Thanks everybody! I meant to start answering you guys on Saturday, but got way-layed; then Sunday spent the day trying to finish up some more of the photo-tweaking and that took ALL day. Then, it had let up raining a bit, so I went out and took more pics of what still looked decent. That added over 100 more to be tweaked. Geez. I'm kinda glad it rained all day today so I couldn't get out to take pics today!! LOL Carol, you are so right about us needing summer. We need that sunlight to get out of the winter funk! I do take Vitamin D plus lots of other supplements. As far as a bush shot of NIGHT OWL goes... unfortunately there's not a whole lot to see! It's a whimpy twiggy thing that only puts out a bloom every so often, and certainly isn't much of a climber. I think mine is barely 3ft tall after 3yrs. Jackie, I can understand rain into June, but freezing cold temps is just too weird. Hmm... my VEILCHENBLAU doesn't look like it's going to do much. It had a handful of blooms awhile ago, but I think it's done. I never did get around to deadheading it or fertilizing it. Lyn, I know what you mean about those spring grasses and other weeds. I've been putting off doing several beds that are overgrown. But then with this weather, it's been really hard to even try to get to them! And you're right, the forecast looks good for the rest of this week... FINALLY!! Bustopher, my CHARLES AUSTIN doesn't repeat all that great. I may get two really good flushes. But the blooms are usually really pretty and a lot of them. Connie, sorry your roses were all crispy for your daughter's wedding. That must've been really disappointing. But at least you had the florist roses. I hope the wedding was wonderful! Kay, KUROSHINJU is a great rose. I got mine from Hortico many yrs ago, and I believe they may still offer it. It's always got gorgeous velvety dark black-red blooms on it. The plant averages about 3-4ft wide and 4-5ft tall. Ya know, I don't remember ever checking the scent on it. I'll have to try to remember to do so after the rain is done. Ingrid, this dog we got is turning out to be a royal pain in the butt. I had no hand in picking her this time. My husband and younger son picked her. I wanted to wait a bit, but they felt she was such a great dog, they didn't want to pass her up. She can be a very funny dog, but being a border collie mix, she's rather high maintenance. I just wanted a dog to keep the deer out of the yard. She's become more of a pain than the deer. I just came home to find a rug all shredded in the front walkway. I could care less about the rug, but she makes such a mess and digs up the gravel in the walkways. The people at the pound said she was about 1 1/2yr old, but my son thinks she was younger. I know it takes time for them to grow out of stuff like this. Maybe once the weather is better my husband will take her for walks and do some things with her. Right now it's just hard to do anything. She probably has cabin fever just like we do!! Seil, you're absolutely right. Everything just takes time. But sometimes I just get impatient. I'm getting too old for this crap!! LOL Kathy, no kidding about the dang fungus. Looking at the garden yesterday, I see more powdery mildew than I've seen since we moved here 11yrs ago. And I'll be danged if I didn't see some frickin' RUST on a few roses. I used to never get rust, except on the grassy weeds. Yuck... The new camera may have come with some Photoshop program, but I can't download it onto my computer due to having the Lenix program UBUNTU loaded instead. It uses other programs not made by Microsoft. The GIMP program is very much like Photoshop, but it's just slow. But, my son says it just could be my old computer. I have a Sony system that was waaaay superior to anything that came out at the time. It's now almost 9yrs old. I want to get a new computer, but just can't right now. Gotta finish paying off some home repairs and car tires, and the friggin' roses I bought this winter. Then, my husband wants to either fix his POC (piece of crap) old motorcycle, or get a new one. That's not cheap. And the younger son needs dental work and we don't have insurance for him.... it just goes on.... Thanks guys for the compliments and encouragement. Sorry that I didn't answer everyone individually. I'll try to post some more pics in the Gallery later on....

Very cool that your fortunei made it they are remarkable palms to say the least! I have noticed with palms esp and some other plants that with these companies shipping bareroot that some of them think that means we just throw it in a box and bye bye good luck!and some of these(e-bay)growers are very carefull and do a great job protecting these plants I try and remember whos who when it comes to return biz ,this bare root thing is incredibly hard on palms esp and shipping in winter really makes recovery a LONG process esp this time of year,(some of my palms still have not recovered and one waggie is still in a slow decline!)all that said I did get a yunnan banana December 8th it was low 20s and sat outside for a few hrs when I opened it it was crispy and started to mush I cut it down to where it felt solid about 3" from soil line and in a day or two it was pushing up a new leaf!its on its 5th leaf now and has grown about a foot,if a banana plant can recover your needle sure can!but they grow slow this time of year esp considering your needles history the good news is its spring!so get that sucker planted out in the yard like blondboy47 says in some nice sandy fast draining soil,make sure to loosen the soil when you plant so the roots can expand out easily but I'd wait until then cuz its been through enough,speaking of enough.Good Luck!

Hunter, No problem! Its really great to start growing plants at a young age because you have your whole life to learn about them and you have plenty of years to have a really amazing garden! Im still young so I also have a lot of time to make my yard better too! I looked at my pics back from 3 years ago and I cant believe how much more I have now! Im kind of excited to see what things will look like 10 years from now in my yard (or whatever yard I have by that time!) Im glad to hear that they are prediciting a warm fall Jim! My Cannas were blooming into the second week of november and they didnt actually die down until early december (they had a bit of frost damage in the last days of November). The longer I can keep my plants growing the better! I have about 2 full months left before the plants start winding down. Last year we had almost a week of 70s and even an 80 in october though so if that could happen again this fall, I think my plants would love it! Andy, I actually picked up the spindle palm because of the swollen trunk it had. It was definitely an impulse buy because I love the look of the swollen trunk on palms. I have a bottle palm also, but its far from getting that trunk and its my slowest growing palm in height (I think my parlor palm is faster and they are suppose to be slow growers!). Thanks Jacklord! Unfortunately I've had a big grasshopper problem this year on my plants. My Plumeria leaves have been shredded. I caught 3 baby grasshoppers and I just got an adult. I felt bad about killing it though so I drove it down somewhere far from my yard! Other than that, its been a great year for the plants and everything has been growing really healthy! I should probably feed them more often though! Thanks everyone for all the nice comments and for looking! -Alex

To all who have wished me a speedy recovery: Thank You! I am feeling steadily better (1 month out), and expect to be back to full strength shortly. @Alisande, If you think you may have babeseosis at the moment, then insist on being tested. Same with anaplasmosis, both are less-difficult than Lyme to diagnose from blood smears, I believe. (The issue with the blood supply, aside from the traditional head-in-the-sand attitude of the blood industry, and of course the cost, is that there is no rapid-enough test for babeseosis -or possibly the other tick-borne diseases -to work with the need for fresh blood.) But as I mentioned, anaplasmosis has distinct, characteristic, changes in routine blood work that are almost diagnostic. I can check next time I am in the medical library if there are specific changes in the case of babeseosis. I may have that info for erlichiosis, if you'd like to know it. Anaplasmosis has distinctive mullberry shaped artifacts (morullae) in the disease-specific blood smears (as does erlichiosis, I believe). Babeseosis is different but unless you, like I, have had malaria it's pretty distinctive in the blood test for it. The tests aren't inexpensive (the unadjusted street price for them is $500-$1,000 -each- but my insurance company whacked both of them down considerably. Since you're on Medicare, you'd only pay a percentage of the CMS-negotiated cost which is likely to be as aggressively moderated as that of my own insurance company's contractual rate. Since all three are bacterial, not spirochete, -caused it doesn't require the complex analysis of PCR bands that Lyme does. But frankly if I was on my second continuous month of Lyme I would have pretty awful constitutional symptoms from that lengthy treatment alone. I can barely make it out the 30 days of a single course before I have disturbed sleep, night sweats, muscle aches and pains, etc. Part of my fierceness about discovering ticks early is to avoid the need for the lengthy course of anti-Lyme doxy. Since doxy won't really do anything for babeseosis - and other drugs will - why keep taking what may be the wrong cure? I don't think you would experience symptoms from babeseosis or anaplasmosis (or even Lyme) infection before locating the tick. The incubation time needed to get sick from a still-attached tick would have resulted in a deer tick as big as a green pea, a nasty pearly-grey tight blob. It's hard to imagine you wouldn't have noticed it well before getting sick if it was still attached. Don't you itch like mad when you have a tick attached for more than a few hours, not to mention days? I'd be wild! BTW, the tick-hours-of-bite measurement has a built in problem: the aging relies on analysis of stomach digestive contents. But that assumes, and it is not always true, that the bite the tick was discovered making is the only bite, not a second one. Also you mentioned you squashed the critter in removing it. You might want to consider beginning more intensive searches for ticks on your body twice a day in order to not miss one. I have hair so long I can sit on it so I do realize it can be hard to check your scalp and hair. I have also found attached ticks under my breasts, in my belly button, on various unmentionable parts of my bottom, and even larval ones between my toes and fingers. I usually keep my long hair tied up in pigtail outdoors. I tuck the pigtail down the back of my shirt to minimize the likelihood of ticks getting caught in my hair. Of course I always have a hat on outside for sun protection, so my head and scalp are less-common tick areas. I do tick-checks at least twice every day of the year, unless I am away from home overnight in the city. It's just like brushing your teeth. I'm not convinced that Lyme "lurks in your body" but given that it is caused by spirochete I suppose it's possible. (Another spirochete-caused illness, syphillis, has a proven habit of lingering on and re-occurring, often despite treatment.) I know, for certain, that I have had Lyme (from clearly positive blood tests), been treated successfuly and subsequently had lengthy periods of profound physiological, and mental stress, without Lyme popping back up and adding to the problems. And I still have one band for Lyme on the latest PCR, which indicates an old, resolved infection, so there's no question it's still visible in my blood, but not thankfully making a pest of itself. I also still have serological evidence of malaria in my blood and I haven't had any illness from it in more than fifty years! But the bacterial diseases (anaplasmosis, babeseosis and erlichiosis) seem extremely unlikely lurkers and later-pouncers, especially if treated. What I definitely think they can do, however, is damage other organs and systems resulting in consequential, long-term problems (like the poor fellow described above who lost his spleen as a result of a babeseosis infection.) Your description of high fevers, muscle aches and pains, etc., sound much more like anaplasmosis than Lyme. Did you have any "regular" blood tests done at the time? The average time from bite to onset of symptoms with anaplasmosis is 8 days. I could look that time up for erlichiosis and babseosis, if needed. I don't know enough about Fibro, but aren't night sweats and aches and pains part of that, too? You may not need to go to any doctor more specialized than your primary care doc to check for the bacterial tick-borne illnesses. And then you'll be able to know, and treat, any that are there. I didn't get any hint that the tests for them lead to confusing, or contradictory results, as I know the Lyme test can, because it is a different, and more complicated test.. If you test negative for them, including having normal routine blood results, you can cross them off your list of worries and look elsewhere. (And get off the wretched doxy!) HTH, L.