Back before my kids were grown up enough to fend for themselves, when I had dinner on the table I liked to intone: Dinner is Served, except with my interpretation of a plummy butler's accent: DiNUH is SUHved. My husband hates that. Which used to make me do it even more frequently. My daughter is the master (mistress) of quoting lines from movies; she has the complete intonation down. Cracks me up every time. Right now she likes to hit me with a quote from Bridesmaids: "Ellen knows the owner." "You DOOOO?" For anyone who has seen the film, picture that phrase being tossed out at any time or moment all day long. My son likes to reenact the Lion King scene in which little Mustafa gets held up to behold his kingdon...using our idiot cat Janis, who is so fat that her belly wiggles while she is having her paws waved wildly in the air and my son is doing that tribal chant. My husband wears his work jeans over and over and over before washing them, and he likes to come in from being out in the backyard, covered in dirt, and haul the waistband up nearly to his armpits while telling me to 'give sexy guy a kiss'. Oh, he is also always sweating bullets and the work jeans have holes in the knees that extend nearly to his ankles. What a vision.

I don't have any problems editing my profile. For anyone wanting to join you have to put 5 numbers in a Post Code I looked in mine for you and it has got KY as the place and 12345 as the zip code or whatever My email is not showing anymore you can do that when you edit your profile, as I am too generous with my plants giving so many away for free I have had so many emails from not very nice people telling me to post plants to them and not even sending me a prepaid satchel yes they tell you they will send the postage back but don't I have been caught once I could go on but I wont go into that. Bill where did you get this info from as that's what I wrote in the email * You have lots of interesting roses there, I have a lot of mini ones that I should not really count, yes and about the small amount of Internet you have * that is what I sent inn a email from your page here, so you certainly got it if you wrote it up top.. This morning I also sent you a email to that address you wrote many replies up top, now it did not come back to me so you must have received it or its still flying around in cyberspace somewhere. So try and find that email again were I sent you all the info .. When it is open and you are reading it hit the reply button write me a message if you want then send it and when I get it I will see your email address. Hope that Chardonnay helped with this problem. Mary-Anne

Chris, maybe I should get going and finally read Making Money. I bought it when it first came out and have started reading it twice, but somehow couldn't get into it. I've finished a number of books since my last posting. They include: Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste, which is a curious and interesting book written by an obvious and avid foodie; Coraline and The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, both of which are brilliant and made me wish I could have read them when I was a child (I'm also waiting impatiently for the Coraline movie); HRF Keating's Death of a Fat God which is a wonderfully farcical murder mystery; and Boating for Beginners by Jeanette Winterson, which is just as bizarre and surreal as the rest of the books I have read by her.

Deborah, FWIW = for what it's worth. Mary (woodnymph) is being modest, as her opinions are worth as much or more than mine. Many readers are introduced to Daphne du Maurier through her most famous novel, Rebecca. That can be good...or bad, I'm afraid. I say bad because then they have a desire to read more of DduM that's "like Rebecca." Some think that because Rebecca has tones of the Gothic -- the nearest equivalent is Jane Eyre -- they assume that all of DduM's books are Gothic and want to pigeonhole her in that genre. So it's a toss up between those who want more of the same and those who think her books are all the same. They aren't, and that seems to be the rub. Actually, DduM was a versatile writer in styles as far afield from each other as historical romance to straight historicals to science fiction (time travel) to the macabre, and even satire (which I'm afraid was not her strong suit) -- and that's only her fiction. It's a bit ironic that my favorite of her stories is often categorized in a genre that I usually have no affinity for, but maybe that also tells a little bit about her scope.