Razorback, I have that one. It's a beautiful book. I'll be interested to see if Tina's book is a broad range of native plants: flowers to ferns to grasses to shrubs to trees. Amazon doesn't have much information on this new book yet. Tina, is it in a local book store yet? My favorite though is not a native book, it is the Southern Gardener's Book of Lists. I use that to find a list of potential plants and then research each one in which I'm interested. Of course, I usually pick the native plants, but it helps me get going to go through the lists (which are based on site requirements or desirable characteristic).

Sorry, but 1/8th is by far the most common royalty payment in the USA and is so by a huge margin. For certain, a 50% increase over that rate is very rare. Occasionally, I will see lease agreements that include 1% or 2% over-rides but not 6.25%. Only those private mineral rights owners who happen to own minerals in areas with very good potential or have control of large contiguous tracts of land will get more than 1/8th. By far, most who hold out for more than 1/8th royalty get to settle for zero instead, and that goes for the US government as well. For the Federal government, by far the largest mineral holder in the USA, to hold out for a substantially larger royalty than is considered standard by the industry would likely amount to excessive interference of the government in interstate commerce. In regard to Yellowstone Park and the grizzlies, no oil and gas drilling is currently active in the immeadiate vicinity of the park, that I am aware and that is the business I am in. In fact, I am not aware of any drilling having occurred in that area for many years. Sounds like environmentalist or wildlife activist scaremongering to me. Most drilling is at least 50 to 100 miles away, either to the south around Rock Springs or Wamsutter, Wyoming or to the east in the Big Horn basin. Neither of these areas is likely to be grizzly territory at this time. The immeadiate Yellowstone Park area itself is not likely to have conducive geologic structures or lithology for oil and gas accumulation. However, the average American is so geographically challenged today that mentioning drilling anywhere in Wyoming probably equates to drilling next to Yellowstone Park regardless of the fact that much of the state is hundreds of miles from the park.

There are plenty of shopping streets/neighborhoods here that going to a mall is not a necessity. Not all malls are all covered here either, particularly Century City Mall, which has a parking structure, but you walk outside to go from store to store. Third Street Promenade is all outdoors, as is Rodeo Drive. Melrose Avenue is one of my favorite shopping streets, but I also like Sunset in the Silver Lake district. Hollywood and Highland also has a large central area that is open to the sky. There's really no need to cover these areas, since we don't have cold weather, and it's usually not too hot. Lowspark, you are not a weather wimp if you can handle living in Houston in the summer! I lived there when I was going to Rice, but I never managed to stay there in the summer. Rice closed for the summer when I was there - they didn't want to subject the students (and professors and staff) to the heat and humidity. DB had been telling me that Circuit City had been late with all their payments to Sony, and so we were not surprised when we found out that they were going into chapter 11. We bought a new TV recently and ended up getting it at Best Buy because they have a brand (Insignia) that got good reviews and was well under the employee discount price that DB could get from Sony for a similar LCD widescreen TV. I gave our old widescreen TV to the neighbors, for helping us move it out of the house. It was a rear projection TV and was huge!! I'm much happier with the flat screen TV, and our old TV, even though it was HD, was not compatible with Blu-ray. DB had bought a Blu-ray player a couple of weeks ago at a company sale (at Sony) along with an AV amplifier, but we could not get a picture on our old TV with it. Finally, I broke down and bought a new 47" Insignia flat screen LCD TV, and we're much happier with that. We only have a few Blu-ray discs, but we're starting to collect them. The old DVDs are supposed to look better on Blu-ray player, but it's difficult to tell. Lars

Thanks for all your hard work Karen! Can't wait to read it in its entirety. Jodi-