That terrible cloud moved on to Florida & hey got hammered with tornadoes near Tampa. The CNN weather guy has been calling it the classic El Nino storm on the news this morning. And guess what? There's more on the way this week, beginning today in northern California & the PNW & then working it's way east & into the plains by the weekend.

Yes, I have trouble with my lawn guys, too. They whacked off the top of my new sasafrass tree, right after I had pointed it out to them and ask them not to whack it down! So, now I'm waiting to see if it will still put out two stems, one of which will have to be air layered, so I can make a new leader out the other. Ah, well. I'm not going to let them mow the back yard at all. I like to keep the weeds agrowin' there, cause the butts love the wildness of it. They have all but crowded out any grass now. I have some really nice patches of white clover, which is the host plant for sulphurs and other butterflies, and I cut a wide swath around them when I am touring the yard so I won't step on any butterflies in the making. I also have lots of coniclinum coelistinum (Gregg's mistflower) growing there, and some other wildflowers I've yet to ID. Tons of dandelions, which are some of the first nectar plants to appear in spring. Tons of Queen Anne's Lace, and something that looks like a plaintain, but doesn't have the ribbed leaves like plaintain, so don't know what it is yet. Sprouts of Virginia Creeper, and a little heart-shaped plant that is growing either like a vine or a tree, but can't tell yet. Then another plant on which the new foliage is kind of a reddish-gold. There are these pretty little wild daisies in late summer that the butterflies LOVE! Something in the asteraceae family anyway. I wish I could get rid of the liriope back there. I just hate that stuff. My little pinellias are up - they are so cute, and I let them seed, so hopefully I'll get a huge patch of them. My Ariseaema triphyllum is up about 6" tall now; I guess the other one didn't make it. My arum italicum is looking so good. I love this plant because it is green all through winter (with the white mottling). I hope the acanthus mollis blooms this year. It sometimes doesn't, but is an architectural plant in and of itself. Blue Angel and Sum & Substance hostas are HUMONGOUS already. I really need to divide them. My 3rd year 'Titanic' is looking really, really beautiful! Has anyone noticed how bad slugs are this year? I have two little hostas that have been eaten to the ground already. My petasites is just looking awful in just the last week! Slugs! I have some DE but I just hate to use it right now because you have to put more down after every time it rains. After 5 years in an apparently "bad" location, I moved my cardiocrinum giganteum to a new spot in much more friable soil. It is up and the foliage looks so much better in the new space. I am hoping it will bloom in the next year or so now. I am getting flowers on my Aristolochia clematitus for the first time. This is their 3rd year in the ground. They are so tiny, and no noticeable odor at all. So cute! This is a great little plant - groundcover! Mediterranean, so it will take our hot summers. A. serpentaria is doing well, too, but I won't be getting more of it. It is said that it takes 25 plants of this to sustain one pipevine swallowtail. Oh, my Hops are up. I have one that is a golden variety, and it is gorgeous. It is growing by leaps and bounds, too. The first day, it was up about 2", the next 4", the next 6". I have to check today to see if it has eaten the shed it is planted next to. I have a clemmie (violaceae) in a 3" pot, and it is 3' tall. Think I should pot it up? LOL! Dawn, thank you for your encouragement in regard to my GD, Kenna. I hope she will have precious memories. I remember my grandmother who loved iris, and my great grandfather who loved 'tunies, or petunias. But, they never let me garden with them. That was back then, you know. Kenna loves to garden and she really loves to help collect the butterfly caterpillars and watch them grow. Susan

Just had to dig this thread back up to report that my bald patch has indeed filled in and I'm no longer worried about my hair in the subject spot! Of course, I now have a little tuft that's only about 1-1/2 to 2" long and doesn't quite blend into the rest of my bangs, but I'm thankful that at least it is growing there. I'm sure you were all waiting with bated breath to get an update. **chuckle-snort**

Well, the only thing that went wrong for us, which wasn't really any problem, was that for some reason I thought DH's family get-together, which I was doing the bulk of the cooking for, though it was being held at SIL's house which is more convenient for everyone, was to be at lunch time on the 24th. So I knocked myself out the day before doing most of the cooking and prep, including roasting the turkey and slicing it up so it just needed reheating, so we could pack it all into coolers and drive down to overnight at SIL's before having a fairly cruisy morning getting lunch ready. As it turned out, on arrival we found out it was to be dinner the next day instead of lunch ("It's ALWAYS dinner!"- don't know why I have memories of lunch )), but no hassle, meant for an even cruisier day :-) I even got to go shopping and got some awesome cheeses which I will celebrate New Year with! I elected to cook this year as SIL indicated last year she was kind of over it, as she had taken up the slack from MIL as MIL is nearly 80 now and while a competent cook, doesn't really enjoy it. I also wanted to shake it up a little, as the SIL who has been vailantly cooking all these years has felt she had to conform to DH's family norm, which isn't her family's style, and I think she misses it. So I felt confident enough to unilaterally declare we would have an amalgamation of styles, and it would be a buffet to avoid the aspect that has driven me crazy for over 25 years, of us all sitting dutifully while FIL carves miniscule slivers off the turkey and places a few on each plate to pass, meanwhile everything's getting cold... Also one could have as much or as little of anything as one liked, instead of feeling like a gannet for asking for another sliver of turkey :-) So, we had turkey with gravy, cranberries and bread sauce, really crispy roast potatoes (I was pleased with them), brussels sprouts (at other SIL's insistence, which rather surprised me as she's a picky eater), carrots, my SIL baked a ham, we had cold jumbo shrimp with homemade shrimp sauce, coleslaw, kipfler potato salad, olives and sundried tomatoes and some scrummy pickled pineapple that glenda_al posted the recipe for over at the KT. DH loves that pineapple! Dessert was my MIL's trifle, which I love, and my BIL's Czech fiancee brought the rest, she made the most awesome individual flans, poppy seed strudel which I also love and isn't very common here (we don't really have the ethnic mix that goes for poppy seed sweet things here and I miss that as I grew up with them so it's great having V in the family!) and apple strudel. We could barely waddle away from the table :-D Christmas dinner was just DH and I as DD went to Noosa to be with her best friend and best friend's partner, where they were joined yesterday by DD's boyfriend who had to work for Christmas. It was our first Christmas without her but we accepted long ago that as an adult she would have other Christmas obligations and we weren't going to guilt her into always coming here. My mother did that and I hated it as with DH's job it was often astoundingly inconvenient bordering on potentially lethal as we juggled driving two hours each way combined with physical exhaustion due to DH having to be at work at 3am... I roasted another turkey (which we have just finished :-) ) with all the trimmings and we ate ourselves to a standstill and then fell alsleep on the couch :-D BTW the temperature here the day before yesterday was 47C / 116.6F :-)