Wow! Our DSL was down last night so I couldn't get online. Florence - thanks! I love that DR DEBAT too. He's gotta be one of my best purchases from Vintage Gardens so far! Niecey - thanks for asking. I been busy busy busy! Drip system installations, moving my kid to SoCal, dealing with my elderly parents, working.... I hardly have time to to do anything! Diane - thanks for the tip on the drip stuff. I kinda knew that, but like I remember to take hot water out there!! LOL Anyway, it's been warm enough out there that the hoses are easier to put on lately. Plus I wear those tight grippy neoprene-coated knit gloves and that helps alot. So LADY X is more lavender for you, huh? I kinda like the pics I've seen where she's more pinkish. Guess I'll pass on that one. Cormac - THE CHESHIRE REGIMENT is one I got from Pickering many many yrs ago. It's a Fryer rose. It's always a great performer, altho this yr it seems to have bloomed a bit less. The blooms are beautiful, but they do blow a bit fast. The color is a sort of apricot, pink and cream blend. I'll have to check scent, as I don't remember if it has any. Cziga - florist roses are roses grown for the florist industry. They are usually hybrid teas, with little to no scent, and are bred to last a long time in the vase. Many of them are becoming more and more popular with us crazy rose growers. And we used to have a great source for the plants, but they closed up for some reason. Some of the florist roses do not look the same in your garden as they do from the florist. Many of them are grown in greenhouses, and some change color when grown out of doors. If you ask your florist, they often do know the names of the roses. Our Safeway market carries them in dozens, with name labels on them. I have tried to root some florist roses, but haven't had much luck. I know many people on the forum have been successful tho. Harry - Thanks!! Carla - I work at an Ace Hardware store, so I'm building my own system. We carry several different brands of parts. We just have them in bins, in bulk, and ya pick whatever ya want to make up the system. I'd love to have the timers wired-in, but that'll be something for later down the road. Right now I'm using battery-operated timers. And boy, let me tell ya... ya gotta be careful with this stuff. I had a ton of stuff off one hose bibb, with 4 different lines running. I could only run two at a time because the pressure was way too low, so I thought I'd take the pressure reducer off and run them all at once. NOT!!! As soon as I shut the timer off, the pressure blew the timer right off the bibb! What a dope! Our water normally runs at 150 psi, but with the reducer it's at 45 psi. So, just remember that. You can't take the pressure reducer off!! Jean - I'm tellin' ya, I have had so much luck with the spray I've been using. I don't understand why it's not working for you. The damn deer come into my yard, but as long as I spray every 10-14 days, they don't touch my roses! Or anything else I spray it on.

Sorry about your moms passing. Losing someone is always tough. Your blooms are lovely, there are so many I like. Love the variations in colour. Blue for you & Nicole Miller both look like a rose that would be good as a water colour painting. I like how dark your intrigue is. Mine is new & it is now mostly hot pink. Hoping it darkens up a bit. Keep taking pictures of your lovely blooms, it's always nice to see so many kinds.

Thanks so much to all who took the time to read and comment on my post, and for the great warmth and kindness of your responses. I must say I was nervous about posting; while realising many of us are going through very challenging times with our and our loved ones' health, speaking about this always feels quite excruciatingly personal, like revealing an ugly scar in public... but I was determined to do something for awareness day this year, having failed for several years in succession to contribute. I'll try to respond to every comment, in order: KS: You're welcome, and I do hope the info will be helpful to your friend. S/he should definitely watch the movie! Re symptoms: ME/CFS has an enormous list of around 40-50 symptoms, involving every body system - someone once said ME seems to include just about everything you could possibly experience with any illness, or words to that effect. We each have our own selection of them, to varying degrees of severity, which, once we're sure we've got the hang of dealing with them, morphs into something else! Or so it seems... If s/he hasn't already, your friend may like to google the (most comprehensive) Canadian Consensus Diagnostic Criteria for ME/CFS and the (most up to date, I think) International Consensus Criteria, which between them have a full list of symptoms, and explain which ones are currently thought to be essential and which are optional for an ME/CFS diagnosis. A full set of blood tests, etc must be done too, to exclude all the other known medical and psychiatric conditions that could be causing that individual's symptoms. There are also some excellent websites/forums to visit for more support and info, such as Phoenix Rising and Health Rising. Please pass on to her/him my thoughts and best wishes. Fig Insanity: You're welcome too, and thank you for your kind remarks. I'm so sorry to hear of the frustrating time your sister went through for so long, just trying to get someone to even believe her. Unfortunately she was by no means alone in her experiences. The continuing level of ignorance and prejudice amongst doctors against this disease is actually really frightening, an actual, genuinely Kafkaesque situation, which is especially difficult to deal with when one is getting increasingly physically frail and cognitively wooly, and no-one will believe your story or take you seriously: thus the urgency of need for education and awareness, and MUCH more quality bio-medical research to help dispel persistent, popular myths of 'female hysteria' and other such bizarre, often misogynistic, non-evidence based psychiatric theories. (MS was similarly regarded, until the invention of the CAT scan (IIRC), which instantly showed the physical cause of the symptoms.) Some stunningly bad science in the UK, published in The Lancet in 2011, purporting to prove the psychiatric theory (heavily subsidised and enthusiastically pushed by the Government and big Insurance companies) set us back a few years, but has fortunately now been thoroughly debunked. However many doctors are not up to date with this, and still resort to offering 'encouraging' therapy aimed at dispelling our 'false illness beliefs', prescribing antidepressants, and forcing very frail sufferers to follow increasing exercise regimes, which have been shown time and time again to be at best ineffective and at worst, to have dramatically deleterious effects, rendering previously unwell but still mobile people bed-bound for years, and occasionally even killing us. Many of us eventually give up on the medical profession altogether. Unable to find or access knowledgeable physicians, we're forced to take care of ourselves as best we can, at home, sometimes for decades/the rest of our lives. Not uncommonly abandoned by disbelieving family, and friends with whom we're no longer able to keep up socially; invisible to the wider public; we use Dr Google and the worldwide online patient community, along with whatever inner resilience we can muster as our resources. In many cases, this is actually a far safer option than undergoing misguided treatment from doctors and hospitals. And this is not a rare disease; unseen millions of us are just coping, behind closed doors, with little or no medical care or basic social support. What this can mean in practice is too painful and embarrassing to go into. SunCoastFlowers: You're welcome, and thank you for committing to watch the movie! Do post a review (good, bad or neutral) should you have the time and inclination. Do you by any chance have a link to the series you mentioned, and the episode about making the garden for the little girl with ME/CFS? I did try googling it but didn't have any luck. Well, I've waffled on again for far too long and am going to have to take a break. Carol (PMR), my apologies, I seem to have jumped past you in order. Will come back and respond to you next, then Ingrid, Jin, Melissa and Sheila. And maybe, be a bit briefer... (unlikely). ;-)

The woman who called me about our HS reunion (2019) agreed that what we really wanted was a reunion with our grammar school classmates. There were only enough of us 'barely pre-war models' (maybe 30?) to have one morning and one afternoon Kindergarten class. From first through sixth grade there were two classes of our grade level in that building. Soon the school had to be enlarged to start accomodating the post-war baby boomers. My group was combined with another to attend 7 - 8 in a third building in our town. Then we were engulfed, with over 900 kids in my class at a township HS. The school was on double shifts by our junior year, when the taxpayers belatedly started construction of a second building. That opened the year after we graduated. The township soon had four high school buildings in three different suburban municipalities; the result of *over-building*. Now there are three HS buildings in the township.