Thanks so much guys! I'm not sure what got into me - it just was so beautiful out today that I HAD to come get on the computer to stop myself from putting all these seedlings in the ground. Knew it would be a bad idea now, but when I checked the forecast and saw that there was going to be another frost as far away as Thursday I about lost it. I think I should have plenty of help once baby's here - my family is nearby and always willing - the problem is me letting go of my control freak nature, but I'm just going to have to do it. My sister and brother in law and my husband all have the same "just throw it in the ground, any old place will do" philosophy of gardening, and to be honest it works just fine for them - I just have my own "just so" way of doing it. Hubby and I, in the past, have had to split the garden up into the things we each care most about - the things we individually are 'in charge' of, and then there's a precious couple of things that neither of us are insistant on doing any certain way - then we can actually work together! This year I guess I'll probably get a good lesson in 'just dealing' which is probably long overdue. Anyway, thanks so much for listening (and the online hugs!). I've come to really appreciate my friends through these last few months (this has really been a rough pg for the most part), and I've sadly found that some just weren't worth keeping - but now I'm really finding myself appreciating the company of complete strangers - you/they seem to be the only people not bluntly asking intimate questions about my private parts! Come to think of it - complete strangers ARE often asking those questions - just not the online ones! Maybe I should just stay on here till it's time! :)

Good morning, y'all -- just sitting down with my chai... First thing, (((mitch))) that *stinks* :( Good onya for standing up for your daughter and not taking no for an answer. She'll remember your tenacity and support for the rest of her life. (DH and I both have memories of how our parents *didn't* stand up for us to authorities ever, on anything, so we're determined not to make that particular mistake in this generation.) So this sounds like a movie, I know -- I think of Pollyanna but without the paralysis... As they told it to me, DH and DD drove down there last night at the end of practice, feeling a bit nervous as they pulled in, only to see the sprinters and the distance kids -- gasp -- playing Capture the Flag together! First, the sprinters had never played a game, only DH's distance kids; this was a double first because the sprinters can barely stand to have to breathe the same air as the distance kids anyway, much less acknowledge them as peers, and here they were laughing and playing together. Completely ODD. When the kids saw DD, many of them broke from the game and *ran* to her, seriously. There was MUCH hugging and "I'm so glad you're back" and "Are you o.k.?" etc...one girl hung back from the group--the perp, of course. And DD noticed that the sprinter girls the perp usually hung around with were not clumped with her, either. The distance girls were all bouncing around happy to see DD, but even one sprinter girl and her mom came over to welcome her back and talk. One family volunteered to join us at the all-comers meets next month if DD's able. So while she's over with the kids and the moms, who are variously inviting her over to play with their kids (although I'm not holding my breath for it actually to happen--DD's just the it girl for the moment) and admiring her hair, which they'd never seen out of a pony tail (hey, it's what they know LOL), DH is over with the head coach. awm03, you'll be interested to read this...The coach starts out with "well, I've talked to three different families and I have three conflicting stories" (meaning the perps, us, and one dad who saw it from across the field whom I mentioned above, and I could have taken the other two apart in court quite easily, but it's not necessary) and DH was gearing up for his "don't even try to call my daughter a liar" speech, but then the coach said "but on Sunday, I saw with my own eyes the girl do it *again* at a meet." DH was stunned to hear this. Evidently the girl felt pressured at the state meet in one of the events and she tried to push another girl out of her lane--again, no one official saw (but thank the fates our head coach did) and he went up to the perp's mom and said that the perp is developing a seriously bad tendency and she's got to stop pushing people out of their lanes. She was spoken to again on Wednesday much more forcefully, the head coach saying "[perp's mom] is super-competitive anyway..." with a significant look. We have to make sure that the policy of having to sit out the next meet that we suggested will be instituted, and it seems now that everyone knows that DD didn't "just fall", that the perp hurt DD and tried to push the girl at the meet, that the club isn't going to ignore it, so DD's psyche is healing quite well. The timing of the coach noticing 'a pattern' is quite odd, actually, because we sent the letter on Wednesday afternoon, so on Sunday from *us* he didn't know that the perp was the person responsible yet. (I'm not inclined to think he's lying about the whole thing, esp. since another of the distance coaches has said he wanted to talk with DH about something that happened at the meet, when he gets back from an ultramarathon next week--now we have an idea what he might be wanting to tell DH). Reading between the lines there must have been even earlier incidents that caused the coach to say the perp was developing a pattern, The girl is seriously troubled (again, more on this below). The coach then also told DH, if we can believe it, that on Sunday when people realized DD wasn't at the meet, and why, they came up to him "constantly" to tell him how much they liked DD, how fun she was, how sweet, how she was so nice to everyone, how her hard work had inspired them to work harder this year and how they wish she could come back and race - like going to your own funeral without having to die :). I wouldn't believe all this except for the reception DD got spontaneously from all (but one of) the girls of the club, the moms, the coach's wife, etc. (the boys were too cool to care, of course). The coach's wife, who was included in the recipients of the letter we sent, actually said something funny by mistake: she said that she really admired DD's attitude (DD was doing what I do in those situations and making lots of jokes), then said "and you'll be back soon, you'll come back with a vengeance, right? Ah, I mean...you'll be working just as hard as before, right?" LOLOL I had also pointed out to DH that one reason the push and the lack of witness to it happened was that there aren't enough distance coaches to have one with each group of kids -- as the only distance coach who shows up reliably (others are parents who do ultramarathons and such, not track distance, and they help out with runs when they can) he has to juggle *all* the kids of all ages and abilities and he has to rely on the older kids to regulate themselves sometimes. Which obviously has its vulnerabilities. So the H.C. agreed to work from several directions to address this next year, seeing as the distance contingent has grown so much bigger since DH took over :). (I sit back and can see from a wider perspective the dynamics of what's going on there, kind of like sports dramaturgy :), and saw the organizational flaw...I also have suggested more interconnection between sprinters and distance kids, e.g. distance kids doing sprint workouts every so often like the great Nick Symmonds, sprinters doing distance workouts to help them with the 400 -- but I have no official track experience so I have to whisper in DH's ear and he gets credit for all these ideas. Love it. But as long as it helps DD and the team, I'll be the eminence grise) So now about the perp. I am seriously worried for her. She came over to DD yesterday after some of the initial excitement had died down and said "I'm sorry *you're hurt*" (COME ON, girl, is it SO hard? evidently so--she is to be congratulated for coming over and trying, but she just couldn't own up to it, even or perhaps because of seeing how bad everything was). DD told her the full extent of her injuries and how she's going to have to train back, finishing with "I'll be back even stronger next year, though" with a sweet smile (which she repeated for me LOL). Perp girl smiled back weakly and kind of slunk away. The idea that she has done it before and did it again in a *meet* is suggesting to me that maybe subconsciously she's so desperate she *wants* to get caught and banned, a la "suicide by cop". It's maybe the only out she sees. But even beyond running, I have deep foreboding about what the teen years hold for this poor girl. I wish I could sit down with her mom and really talk with her about what her kids tell pretty much everyone who will listen, but the mom is a serious (shiny upper middle class blonde) hard case. She doesn't respect me or DH, who has tried to talk about the kids' training and nutrition with her before, to which she just says "I used to run too and I know what I'm doing." Well, o.k. Guess I just have to send out energy to the girl for strength and courage to seek out healthy people to associate with (she actually had hung around DD and always wanted to be on a team with her, ironically enough--DD thought they were friends, which is why the push was doubly saddening for DD). Maybe I might try to find a time to casually talk directly with the girl herself. Not recriminatory, but supportive, letting her know there are other ways to live and she *can* find them and they will accept her if she doesn't push them away...(and now I know why the ex-husband of the mom didn't want his kids doing track. We never understood that before.) I'm going to make sure that DD makes sure that the other kids don't demonize the girl for what she did, that they leave the girl an open door to come back in if she ever decides she wants to behave better. So DD just has to let her ligament heal, do the PT, and get back in the game. I am *so* thankful for how the club handled this, and I just hope that the good feelings continue and grow, even if it took DD's injury, from which she'll recover, to hold a mirror up to people. (A side note: I love this thing I see happening all the time--when something happens to you that people can see, suddenly people you have known a bit, say cashiers or postmen or whatever, suddenly share their own stories of similar things happening to them and how they overcame them, got better, came out stronger on the other end, etc. We even learned that an older-looking shelf stocker at the local pharmacy, just a person we asked where the knee braces are, was almost an Olympic gymnast (I could tell she wasn't lying by the way she talked) back in '72, but she tore her ACL by showing the mens' team a floor ex move she'd made up that, it turned out, Olga Korbut did in the Olympics later that year! (not that O.K. somehow stole it, it was just 'in the air' and the same idea occurred on two different continents simultaneously.) She has had extensive surgery but can still *downhill ski*! She was a *wealth* of information and humor -- DD and I walked away shaking our heads--you just never know, when you start up a conversation with someone, do you? :)

Some of that is normal needle death as newer plant parts shade out the older. But to at least some degree, this reminds me of how lots of spruce are looking around here, where a number of needle blights have been identified. An old-school one is Rhizospheara which is fairly well understood. But much more concerning are reports circulating out of Michigan about a previously-unknown or little-know aspect of the funagal pathogen Phomopsis-not formerly known to attack spruce-which may be ramping up. We find the western spruce types-those from the Rocky Mt. states-as being most susceptible, along with that dog of the spruce world-black hills spruce, itself a western variant of an otherwise perfectly fine native tree here in the Great Lakes. Gawd, I wish folks would get over that lousy plant. I'm pretty sure it's the name that people find attractive. In any case, you're almost going to have to submit samples to your state's disease diagnostic lab (if you're not in a state run by fools intent on eliminating everything good that govt does). Those are just about the only guys who will be able to ID it. +oM

The pathogens I've listed in this thread are attackers of primarily pine-family members. There're many, many more forms of say, phomopsis out there. I'm not on that level of detail here, but the phomopsis I'm referencing here is active on spruce. There's a more well-known phomopsis tip blight of junipers, and I'll be honest, I don't know exactly what the relationship between the two types is. But suffice to say, these are pathogens of spruce we're talking about here. So final answer-these particular pathogens don't even necessarily attack all conifers. But they are virulent on spruce, particularly those spruce species having the drier parts of the American west as their home base. BTW, it's not soil moisture at play. Even in the Rocky Mountains, something like Colorado spruce is going to grow where there's sufficient moisture in the soil. No...it's our high atmospheric moisture that gets them in the east, or here in the upper Great Lakes region. Our air is too humid. Two different things. Just like many gardeners think moisture is the cause of powdery mildew on their lawns and garden plants, when in fact, the plants' being stressed out by drought or just a too-dry soil, are then predisposed to attacks by these leaf-inhabiting fungi, which do take advantage of dew and fog in the late summer period to spread. But they weren't started by this moisture. If anything, they were predisposed to this problem by dryness. But I digress (like I always do!).