Mike I love tall guys roflmao. I wonder what they see way up there?? Glad you are still bored. Well...wish you weren't but it is to our advantage :-) First year growing MG trees and I just love them! Funny thou on how different they also grow depending on where they are located at. In the ground or pots...all day sun or more shade. Lucy

You are so lucky having that lake view and that mountain view and improved on that even with your beautiful plantings, congratulations! But living on a city lot, we can also improve, I only have a little pond and a lot of hostas, improving on that. Bernd

I voted absentee in person because I was an election official at the Central Absentee Precinct on Election Day. If you're wondering whether absentee ballots are counted, I can assure you that in Fairfax County, Virginia, they are counted, independent of what the vote is in person. During the day, we open the ballots, which are one of three types: 1) paper (actually, heavy card stock) that can be fed through a scanner to count the votes 2) ballots which are pdf files emailed to the voter, who then prints out the ballot and cover envelope and mails the completed ballot and signed and the signature witnessed ballot cover and sends that back by post or courier (like Fed Ex) 3) Federal Write-in Absentee Ballots, which are ballots that may be used by people in remote locations, such as military in a war zone, or people who applied for a ballot at least 30 days before the election and had not received the absentee ballot in time. These ballots are on regular paper, and the voter has to write in the name of the candidate and office and any ballot issues that the voter is eligible to vote for. If they don't know the candidate's name, they can write in the political party of the candidate. This ballot is used by all states, which is why there are no candidate or ballot issues pre-printed on it. During the day, as we get a large pile of the card stock ballots, we feed them through the scanner. We don't know the actual count for each candidate or issue until all the ballots have been scanned. Ballots could potentially be received until 7 pm, so we can't get the final count of the votes cast on those ballots until no earlier than 7 pm. At 7 pm we start counting the rest of the absentee ballots by hand. This includes the email ballots that were printed from the pdf files (and they are all sorts of sizes), the Federal Write-in ballots, and the ballots on card stock that could not be fed through the scanner. In addition to these ballots, there are ballots that were cast on touch screen machines by people who voted absentee in person before election day. The votes on those machines are tabulated after the polls close. I had a VERY late night.

When my daughter Vicki turned 11, she wanted a sleepover birthday party and insisted her best friend Tom be allowed to come. She really was friends with this kid, his mother was a Sunday school teacher, and it wasn't a "romance" at all so I let him stay. They stayed up all night, Tom and Vicki and about six other girls. They partied all night in our downstairs family room, had pizza and cake, and the party spilled out into the back yard patio and the pool. Around 4 am, it got quiet. I walked downstairs and found Tom asleep on a recliner chair. Let him sleep till I made everybody breakfast the next day. Just had to share. Lauren sounds like a great kid, so glad to hear she works with pets. My Vicki is 19, in college, and is "thimking" about becoming a veterinarian.