Beth, I noticed an outbreak of similarly coloured petunias appearing all over the UK (gold and maroon) which caused me to literally avert my eyes on walking past. As a rule, I am a lover of bright colours (no beige in my house or wardrobe) but am strictly old school when it comes to roses - white or pink (or palest yellow at a pinch). Course, that does not apply to the dahlia beds, nor the many rows of cutting gladioli or luridly coloured annuals (apart from said petunias) in my allotment. Particularly enjoying a combo of orange, purple, deep red and acid green.......just not in the roses. And yeah, striped roses, not even pink and white, really do it for me but I was agog at the variety available in the US.

g8trgrad98: It is almost scary how much your situation parallels my own. I had written in this forum a number of years ago when my stepson was about 16/17, and just recently as my stepson is approaching 21 (2 weeks). I was in a very similar situation - my stepson was like my own despite his bio-dad in the picture. I was the parent 320+ days of the year and treated things like that - and things were great until that wonderful 15/16 age hit. Like you, I had the typical "you are not my parent" attitude and also like you I had a kid doing a fair amount of pot (does even more now it seems). However, my stepson did not have a grandparents home to run to, so during this whole time he has been in the house. I've had two children with my wife, and they were born when my stepson was 11 and 13. He started out really great with them, but sadly now my kids (now 9 and 7) ask why their brother is so mean and grumpy. I wonder how involved your wife is in this case with either backing you up and setting up rules, or defending her son. My situation was (and still is) very difficult because my wife enables her son and will often tell me to back off while she continues to do so. Has this been an issue in your case? What does she say when your stepson asks her to choose between him and you? Sorry to say that I've come to the conclusion that for some kids, seemingly mine included, they won't ever get a clue until life deals a viscous dose of reality to them. My suggestion to my own wife is that once we stop the money, the coddling, and the comforting life will end up showing this kid what it can do. To that end, better to do that now while he is this young and stop protecting him. Once he experiences poverty, perhaps tinged with a dose of desperation, I think that can change a perspective. Unfortunately, my wife still insists on keeping her boy protected, and the results have again been much like yours - I'm beginning to resent this child I love and felt had so much potential. My wife wonders why I don't take him golfing and be his buddy, but I'm finding my resentment building and just can't fake it. Not sure what you can do with your stepson with him being 17, but I just can't help but feel that a few body blows from reality might help - just wonder whether your wife would be able to go for it.

same Birthday, different lifestyles & attitudes, yet there is a commonality among the quoters I find interesting, wonder what an Astrologer would make of this. I enjoyed today's reading very much I noticed all have a fodness for cats

Oswald Mosley Quotes British - Politician November 16, 1896 - December 3, 1980 There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age. Oswald Mosley Anyone who knows how difficult it is to keep a secret among three men - particularly if they are married - knows how absurd is the idea of a worldwide secret conspiracy consciously controlling all mankind by its financial power; in real, clear analysis. Oswald Mosley A prophet or an achiever must never mind an occasional absurdity, it is an occupational risk. Oswald Mosley Great men of action... never mind on occasion being ridiculous; in a sense it is part of their job, and at times they all are. Oswald Mosley Jesse Stone Quotes American - Musician November 16, 1901 - April 1, 1999 We need to work to keep from getting rusty. Jesse Stone Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all. Almost all their joints that they had there, they used black bands. Most musicians who amounted to anything, they would flock to Kansas City because that's the place where jobs were plentiful. Jesse Stone Everybody knows who Gandhi is. Who knows Jesse Stone? Jesse Stone I had written a tune called 'Shake, Rattle and Roll,' but the white stations refused to play it - they thought it was low-class black music. We thought what we needed was a new name. But a white disc jockey named Alan Freed laid on it, and he thought up the name 'rock n' roll.' Jesse Stone Rhythm and blues started even before phonograph records were being produced because black people entertained themselves. It wasn't done for money. It was done for entertainment. Most white people didn't know anything about this because prejudice kept them from ever seeing what was going on. Jesse Stone The publicity and hoopla was never important to me. Jesse Stone Fame is a fickle thing that only lasts as long as you can be out there offering yourself to the public. And as soon as you relax for five minutes, they're gone, you know, and they're following somebody else. Jesse Stone I've been given my money. Nobody has ever beaten me out of one quarter. And that's all I've ever been concerned about. Jesse Stone Burgess Meredith Quotes American - Actor November 16, 1907 - September 9, 1997 I disappear from the public eye and get rediscovered quite often. Burgess Meredith Jean Fritz Quotes American - Writer Born: November 16, 1915 The first 13 years of my life, I lived in China. My parents were missionaries there, and I was an only child. Often I felt lonely and out of place. Writing for me became my private place, where no one could come. Jean Fritz The way they taught history in schools was not appealing. They stressed wars and dates. They left the people out. I was attracted to history by the need to know about the people. In China, I went to a British school, and we just learned about kings and queens. Back in America, I had the regular social studies curriculum. Jean Fritz One of the most important things in my childhood were the new books that came in. I feel sorry for kids today who have so many other options like television that they may not value books as much as they could enjoy them. Jean Fritz As a biographer, I try to uncover the adventures and personalities behind each character I research. Once my character and I have reached an understanding, then I begin the detective work reading old books, old letters, old newspapers, and visiting the places where my subject lived. Often I turn up surprises, and of course, I pass them on. Jean Fritz My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them. Jean Fritz My interest in writing about American history stemmed originally, I think, from a subconscious desire to find roots - I felt like a girl without a country. I have put down roots quite firmly by now, but in the process, I have discovered the joys of research and am probably hooked. Jean Fritz When I lived in China, there were no libraries. My mother bought books for me, and they were mostly the classics. I read 'Peter Pan,' 'The Secret Garden,' the 'Rosemary' books, and Kipling's 'Just So' Stories was one of my favorites. No, I didn't read historical fiction. It didn't exist where I was growing up in China. Jean Fritz The question I am most often asked is how do I find my ideas? The answer is I don't. Ideas find me. A character in history will suddenly step right out of the past and demand a book. Generally, people don't bother to speak to me unless there's a good chance that I'll take them on. Jean Fritz Jose Saramago Quotes Portuguese - Writer Born: November 16, 1922 Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Jose Saramago What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being? Jose Saramago The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO. Jose Saramago It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power. Jose Saramago Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are. Jose Saramago It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people. Jose Saramago A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction. Jose Saramago Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life. Jose Saramago As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things. Jose Saramago I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see. Jose Saramago People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich. Jose Saramago I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are. Jose Saramago Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties. Jose Saramago Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts. Jose Saramago Things will be very bad for Latin America. You only have to consider the ambitions and the doctrines of the empire, which regards this region as its backyard. Jose Saramago The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. Jose Saramago We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations. Jose Saramago There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is. Jose Saramago The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. Jose Saramago I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends. Jose Saramago In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers. Jose Saramago Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity. Jose Saramago The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. Jose Saramago I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year. Jose Saramago I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments. Jose Saramago I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work. Jose Saramago Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974. Jose Saramago To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life. Jose Saramago I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases? Jose Saramago The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others. Jose Saramago The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas. Jose Saramago I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it. Jose Saramago There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything. Jose Saramago Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought. Jose Saramago In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays. Jose Saramago I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Jose Saramago I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been. Jose Saramago In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die. Jose Saramago I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet. Jose Saramago Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer. Jose Saramago I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story. Jose Saramago The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975. Jose Saramago The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins. Jose Saramago I am not a prophet. Jose Saramago Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there? Jose Saramago Americans have discovered fear. Jose Saramago Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is. Jose Saramago Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time. Jose Saramago At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before. Jose Saramago I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits. Jose Saramago I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist. Jose Saramago Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer. Jose Saramago The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan. Jose Saramago Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up. Jose Saramago I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined. Jose Saramago I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist. Jose Saramago I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon. Jose Saramago For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me. Jose Saramago When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day. Jose Saramago A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death. Jose Saramago