Lilyspider, "more detailed questions" have a place on the public board, since that's the entire point of these boards in the 1st place. That said, I couldn't have helped you because I don't PM. I don't talk on the phone, either, so my cell is a nice texting machine. The easiest thing to do is just sit down and follow everyone's posts you enjoy. If THAT isn't a PIA, it would save you from doing it later. I don't think they have to OK the follow, do they? Or is that Facebook. Rhetorical. I don't care. Things continue to improve, become more logical, and therefore, more useful. I appreciate all their hard work!

I have the want to, but I am being attacked by the dreaded yellow pollen it's literally raining down from the trees. I go out to get started in the atrium and go into an allergy frenzy. It's a mess. I hate this time of year because of the pollen clouds. My vehicles are yellow, my outdoor furniture is yellow, the RV is yellow. The big Pines and oaks are apparently feeling very sexy and spreading their pollen far and wide. Taking benadryl at night to try to breathe makes my want to level lower. Work is getting done but a lot slower pace. Congrats to those who are ready and willing to give it full charge!

Carol, I planted this rose about a month ago and I don't think I am over-watering. I aim at "once a week" and check the top 2 inches of soil with my finger. HOWEVER: now that you made me think of it.... we did have a lot of rain during the first few weeks after I planted. One week-end I watered without knowing that there was going to be a lot of rain during the next few days...and then I kind of got worried that the rose might have taken too much water. After that, I held off the watering but today, after about a week of sunshine, the rose sounded like it wanted some water again. It was acting a bit droopy in the sun today. I checked the soil and it felt somewhere between vaguely damp and just cool; almost dry, but not scorched. Is it time to water again? Maybe it was the recent extra rain that caused those yellow leaves at the bottom. Further up, it looks fine. As for black spot - I hope not because I even sprayed preventatively with fungicide. Otherwise, Good as Gold is pushing quite a few new blooms and growing fast. Dick Clark next to it has finer leaves, but it grows slower and now that it's done blooming with the buds it came with - there's no new bud in sight. Maybe it's putting all energy into growing nice foliage. I am curious to see who will be the winner between these two in the long run. My third rose is a Cl Pinkie planted in a different part of the garden and I hope the sun is getting there (dappled in the morning, and 2-3 hours of direct full-sun mid-day) will be sufficient over the long term. Sometimes I fear it won't, granted how greedy for sun roses sound, based on what I have read.

Such things as telling off a mentally ill person do no good. They create negative karma and don't impact the negative person in any way other than to reflect back at them the negative energy they are giving out, which is how their life is going anyway, most of the time. I have already tried that strategy to the max and long-ago abandoned it. There are two issues for me. One is handling an aging parent with mental difficulties. The key is compassionate detachment. It would be the same if you had a younger relative who refused help for something like addiction, etc. Some people can't handle it and completely cut off all contact with the sick person. I have seen that play out in many families. Others get completely caught up in their family's dysfunction. I am treading a middle path, and I think I do that quite well . . . most of the time. My father's sickness frustrates and saddens me, but that is not the source of grief for my mother. It is occasionally painfully ironic, but that is just the tip of the iceberg with him. Mentally ill people do not learn from their mistakes or learn from advice given by other people. If they did, they would not be sick. Sometimes there is no fix, just accept and detach. You know, the old "let go and let god" of AA. I think I was not clear that I am already pretty much in that space as far as self-care goes. That isn't really the source of my grief. It's not just when I'm with my father that this grief for my mother hits me, so I probably shouldn't even have brought up his presence at the dinner. It is just that I so often do or see things I could have done with my mother so easily which would have made her happy, and it pains me to try and still do them, and find it difficult to find anyone ELSE who actually enjoys them the way my mother would. My husband does not, my father does not, and I have few relatives to share old memories with. I do tea parties for work also, and other things for work my mother would have enjoyed. Not the same thing. No one else in my social circle is knocking themselves out to carry on family niceties that include me. So yes, I can do it and I do, but I don't really have a partner in crime and my energy is limited. There are only so many tea parties I can plan. BTW, my whole wedding reception last summer was a tea party in honor of my mother. My cousins helped me do that. Then my cousin died six weeks later. But I still have a lot in common with her daughter and we do whatever we can when we can, but she lives quite far away. It's rare when I can get a friend or family member to visit, most are tied up with kids or grandkids. As a side note, the last time I saw my mother I came over for Sunday dinner, helped her cook and serve and cleaned up from it and left her with a batch of muffins for that next week's tea or breakfast. So I did what I could when she was alive. She never got to finish the muffins, she died from a fall while unloading groceries later that week, she had gotten home at tea time but didn't get that last tea break which would have come after the groceries had been put away. It pained me so to go to a church function at Christmas, one I had attended as a child, and see zero home-made food at the reception, and all paper plates even though the church had a full set of nice dishes--no one volunteering to wash them in the full kitchen that goes unused most of the time now. In their defense, the older ladies who were there were working hard to pull it off, the same group that I see almost everywhere and the ranks are thinning. So it's not just an issue of my mother passing on, that whole genteel way of life is fading away. I belong to some of the social and charity groups my mother belonged to, the ranks get thinner and thinner and older and older, with no young (we're talking 40's or early 50's) people to take their place. Not to mention the professional and community clubs that have just left town already, like AAUW, for example. I can't hardly get a friend to have the time to come over for a nice dinner, even if I could pull one off, most are sandwiching just like us.