Hey Jen, Those Texas Star can be planted outside and they will do fine in your zone. All of mine are planted on the side of my house that has the most sun exposure. They love the heat, sun and love to be watered. Every year, they die back and i will cut them to two to three inches from the bottom stalk in Feb. They quickly start growing again in the spring.. They keep on growing little ones everywhere. Try and plant some in your back fence line that gets lots of sunshine. They will do well and you dont have to bring them in. Plant them and let them go wild.. You should get blooms in one season outside.. Let me know if you need more seeds.. I promise, you dont have to baby these guys.. They are very hardy!!! You can see the shape of these leaves... My son (college age) has his friends over and they always say " hey Mike? Do you know what your mom is growing here?" LOLOLOL!!! He just rolls his eyes and says.. "They are not what you think..." : ) Even people that come to work on things... A/c etc.. look at them and think " Im in the business.." LOL!!! Nicole.. if you want some seeds.. (yes, im enabeling!!) let me know and when the pods form, you can have all you want. If anyone else wants seeds, let me know and you can have them. Take care, Laura

Dad and stepmother wound up NOT moving into the Assisted Living facility after all. Instead, I brought Dad home to Texas with me and left stepmother in NC in her son's care. The reason? Well, at the last minute.... literally, less than an hour before we were supposed to be at the facility to start moving my Dad and Stepmother into the Goldsboro Emeritus Assisted Living , my stepbrother balked at the idea. (Stepbrother holds her health care and legal powers of attorney so, once he said "no" to the idea, there was nothing Dad or I could do about it.) Stepbrother SAID that the reasons he didn't want her going into assisted living were 1)she might not adjust to not being in her own home and 2) she would have to have a different primary care doctor because Emeritus requires that all their residents have a doctor within 10 miles of the facility. Balderdash - I think stepbrother is rationalizing a decision that he made purely because he's interested in making sure his inheritance doesn't get spent! While stepmother would have had to get a doctor of record within 10 miles of the assisted living facility in case of emergencies, there is no reason at all that she could not have continued to see her regular doctor in her home town for regular check ups. All that stepbrother would have had to do was come get her and take her to the appointments. It is only a 35 mile drive. And, as far as her not settling into AL and "wanting to go home," half the time stepmother no longer recognizes her own home even when she is sitting in her own living room surrounded by furnishings she has owned for 40 years and pictures of her children and grandchildren! At least two years ago, I was talking to my Dad on the phone when I heard her say something in the background and Dad interrupted our conversation to answer her with "Honey, we ARE at home...this is our home...look, here on the wall are pictures of your sons and here are your grandchildren and there are the baskets and quilts you made and here is our wedding picture." The same sort of thing happened at least a couple of times every single day during the month I spent with her. No matter where stepmother is, she is going to start asking to "go home." That is the nature of her disease. The real reason stepbrother balked was because he didn't want to spend that much of her monthly income on her care! Dad and Stepmother each have slightly over $3K in monthly INCOME from retirement and social security. AL would have cost for the two of them would have been $5.5 K...so by splitting the cost, neither one would have had to touch their savings. At least not until their "level of care" requirements went up. But it WOULD have taken the lion's share of their incomes so neither one would have continued to accumulate assets. And eventually, yes, they probably would have begun spending down their principals. But neither one is likely at this point to live more than another 10 years of so and each of their accumulated savings would have carried them that far. We had a 2 o'clock appointment to get them moved in. At noon, Stepbrother stopped by the house where I was packing up clothing for them and fixing them lunch. He asked Dad how HE planned to pay for Assisted Living. When Dad said that their combined incomes would cover the cost and still leave them with some spending money each month, Stepbrother replied that he didn't think that was fair and then said: "You've been living rent-free in Momma's house all these years and NOW you want her to subsidize YOUR medical care needs!!!" I asked stepbrother what he thought was fair and he said he thought Dad should foot the entire bill for the two of them because it was Dad's recent surgery that was the cause for the move! He also seemed to think that it would have been fine to hire someone under the table at $8/hr to come in for a couple of hours each day to fix a meal and "help out:" until Dad healed from his surgery and then, "things could go back to the way they have been." In other words, Dad could keep providing 24/7 care and wearing himself to a frazzle in order to save Mary's money for sons to inherit!!! Stepbrother claimed that I had been "dumping on his mother" ever since I'd been in NC and had shown no appreciation for all the time HE (stepbrother) had stepped in to help when Dad would get sick and need to go to the doctor. Basically, he appears to be in total denial that his mother now needs 24/7 care and that, at 83, even if Dad were perfectly healthy, the job is simply too much for him. Stepbrother has apparently never observed that, when the telephone rings, she is as likely to try to answer using the TV remote as to pick up the phone. He has apparently never gone thru the drawers and found half-eaten hamburgers wrapped in paper towels. He's never spent two hours trying to find his car keys after she grabbed them and moved them when his back was turned...and then, five minutes later had absolutely no recollection of having ever touched them. He has apparently never walked with her around the pond in her back yard...that has been there 60 years...and heard her say "this sure is a pretty resort, how long are we staying here?" He has not tried to go grocery shopping with her or he would realize that there is no way an 83 year old man with pulmonary fibrosis and congestive heart failure can possible grocery shop AND keep her from wondering off at the same time. He has not watched her try to cook a meal and forget what she is doing right in the middle of cooking. He has not watched her make coffee and pour both the ground coffee and the water into the back of the coffee maker. He has not had to stop her from putting food wrapped in tin foil into the microwave. He has not been awakened night after night by her wandering thru the house at 2 AM turning on lights in all the rooms and wondering agitatedly why her "boys" are not home yet. He has not set up with her till dawn patiently explaining that her boys are grown and married and living in their own homes with their own wives. And when I told him about observing these behaviors, stepbrother apparently thinks I'm exaggerating them all and that, if need be, his mother could live just fine by herself! I suspect that many of Dad's physical health issues are caused (or at least have been exacerbated) by the fact that he has been wearing himself out trying to provide 24/7 care to someone with stage 5 to stage 6 alzheimers! 5 know for a fact that I lost 15 pounds during the one month that I was in NC and developed a hacking cough that I'm still getting over! Besides that, Dad and Stepmother's agreement before they got married was that they would always split their living costs equally and that, when one of them died, whatever that one had brought into the marriage and/or saved during the marriage would go to that one's children. Each of them owned a house and, yes, she has paid the cost of the electricity, water, and utilities, taxes and insurance at her house...but Dad has paid those same costs for his house. And yes, they have stayed at her house most of the time since they married... but their original agreement was that they would live half the time at her house and half at his. The reason they wound up staying at her house 99.9% of the time was because fairly early on, Stepmother always wanted to "go home" whenever they tried to stay at Dad's lake house and he gave into her. Dad's house is much nicer and is NOT filled with the detritus of 50 years of pack-rat behavior! But Dad gave up on going there except for stopping in now and then for an hour or two to make sure all was well. He kept his lake house though because, if stepmother passed away first, he wanted to have a home of his own to move into so that her kids could have possession of her house immediately. Furthermore, since he and stepmother weren't using the lake house, he made it available for free to stepbrother and stepbrother's grown son to use for vacations whenever they wanted. None of Dad's children live close enough to take advantage of the lake house so stepbrother and his family got far more use out of it than anyone else! Stepbrother ignored all that! Up to the point that stepbrother suggested Dad had "lived off" stepmother, I had not paid any attention to how my Dad spent his money. It was his to spend and if he spent every penny before he died, that was his choice. But I KNOW my Dad and I knew that there was no way he was "living off" his wife. Since stepbrother made his accusation, I've found some of his mother's bank records that got stuck in with my Dad's things and I've been able to compare how Stepmother's assets have grown as compared to Dad's assets since they've been married, Other then their real property, both of them kept their money in savings accounts at the same credit union rather than investing it. So they were earning the same interest rate and had almost exactly the same amount of money coming in from outside sources. IF they had been splitting expenses evenly, their savings should have grown by about the same amount. But, from the records, it is evident that Dad has been paying the lion's share of their combined living expenses over the entire eight years they've been married! In eight years, her saving's account has grown from $15K to nearly $200Kwhile Dad's savings have gone from about $190K to $215K. In other words, she has saved over $180K out of $36K/year income while he has saved $25K! Who has been "living off" of whom? Before they married, she was apparently giving money away to every ne'er-do-well relative that came begging. Dad insisted that stepbrother take over handling her money shortly after two of them got married when it became evident to him that she could no longer handle her finances. Dad did not want there to EVER be any question that he had taken advantage of her! And Dad admits that he has paid for all of their food, travel, gasoline, automobile repair, medical copay's, clothing, and other daily living expense since getting stepbrother to take over her finances because he did not want to ask stepbrother for money. Yet my stepbrother still had the gall to accuse him of that very thing! You can imagine how LIVID I am! When stepbrother decided that he would not sign off on her moving into AL with him, I told my Dad that I didn't see any viable option except for him to come home with me to Texas and I was actually surprised when Dad not only agreed but didn't even argue. So, in about 2 hours time, I finished packing up all of Dad's stuff that was as her house, put it all into his van and the two of us went to his lake house and spent the night there. Then we headed for Texas the next day. That was three weeks ago. Dad is resting and recuperating. Today he and my husband and I are celebrating a quiet Christmas together. Next week my youngest brother is coming and bringing the two grandbabies to see their grandpa. My brothers and I are ecstatic to have Dad safely home where I can keep an eye on him and he can spend quality time with us. Even when he and stepmother came to visit - or one of us would go visit them - we could never really have much of a conversation because Dad's attention was always focused on what Stepmother needed. So, stepbrother actually did me a huge favor by balking on letting his mother move into Assisted Living. The only downside is that we have no way now of KNOWING if stepbrother is actually providing someone to look after his mother 24/7 as she needs or is leaving her in her home alone for hours at a time. I hope and pray that he is providing proper care and supervision because it would be absolutely horrible if she hurt herself trying to cook a meal or wandered off and got lost in the middle of the night because of his negligence. If he is providing proper care, I suspect that he is quickly going to find that it is costing him far more to pay someone on an hourly basis - even doing so "under the table" and at less than minimum wage, than her half of assisted living would have cost. Maybe stepbrother will come to his senses but if not, no matter how healthy my Dad manages to get, there is no way I'm going to allow him to step back into 24/7 care-giving duties...even if I have to have Dad declared incompetent! Thanks for listening. And please pray for all of us.

The only thing I would add is to not let the fact that you're not good at math or you don't like math keep you away from the field of nursing or some of the other medical professions that require you to take math, chemistry and "regular" biology as requirements. I spent years trying to avoid having to take those courses but I finally bit the bullet and worked hard and got through them. Just beacause you don't like math and find it difficult doesn't mean you can't get through those introductory courses. Some of it is just developing the good study skills that will help you get through ALL of your college courses, and some of it is developing a certain type of discipline that is required in the medical field--you're going to be dealing with people's lives so you have to be able to deal with a certain amount of stress and stay cool and focused. I teach those intro bio courses and I find a lot of students drop out because they think they have to get all A's or nothing, but B's are fine as long as you don't get a lot of C's and no D's, (there's really no excuse for a "D" since my students who get D's always do so because they don't do a significant portion of the work.) They also drop out because they get frustrated and discouraged during the first year or year and a half, but anyone who has made it through will tell you once you get over that hurdle the rest is fun. Also don't get distracted by all the med. school neurosis that some students carry around with them. One step at a time gets you to where you want to be, which is the lesson I learned on my field ecology course halfway up Mt. Kootenai. Believe me Bobby, I have some type of math dyslexia, I can barely write my own phone number correctly, but I made it through advanced algebra and trig. and chemistry and all of that. I got a LOT of HELP, which is the other reason a lot of students crash and burn, they think they have to do it all themselves and they don't take advantage of tutoring and study groups and the like. The students that do well in my class are the ones hanging around the learning center working with tutors or in study groups with similarly disciplined colleagues, or are in with the professors every week getting help. Honestly, knowing what a math-o-phobe I was in high school my friends were very surprised when I went into science. So if I can do it ANYBODY can. I did it by staying focused on my long term goals and working my buns off, but it was well worth it! A lot of students who are not naturally good at math can do well if they PRACTICE enough. They just need to spend more time at it than some people. That was my secret. And once you get into a groove with those first tough classes, everything else will seem like CAKE CITY! Props to my math genius brother for coming down to stay with me for whole weekends at a time while I was in college and making me work problem after problem, and giving me advice on the phone practically every night. He was in HIGH SCHOOL and was doing the same problems as I was doing in college. I lived in a dorm across from the Chem. building and I was in the help room a couple nights a week and during the weekdays sometimes for hours at a time preparing for tests. But it wasn't too bad, I made a lot of good friends with my fellow students. I think you will enjoy school now, after a few years away. Most of my older students really seem to like school. They know why they are there and don't sweat the small stuff. Anyway, the point is, with any difficult subject you have to take, where there is a WILL, there is a WAY! The staff at a good community college are totally dedicated to that concept, which is why you will really like going back!

Toni & willsgram....I loved the Mimslyn Inn!! Here's a great story for you. I worked there in the late 80's. One weekend I had to do a cocktail party for 250 people, for an art show there. The artist was P. Buckley Moss-a famous artist who does alot of PA Dutch children in her paintings as well as alot of seascape scenes. (I have 2 of her prints of Sanibel Island.) Anyhow, she kept coming into the kitchen to sneak some of my dried beef rollups..tee hee-she said they'd be gone every time the waiter came around to her! When I moved down here to Largo back in 1998, I went down to her studio & apartment right on the Bay in downtown St Pete. She was doing signings that day, if you bought anything from her gallery, you could go upstairs into her studio to have her sign it. I did & as I walked up to her I said "Hi Pat..long time no see." She said 'I know that voice' to which I said "I really doubt you'd remember me as it was 10 yrs ago I met you when I did your art show at the Mimslyn in Luray." She lit up & blurted out..."OH-those dried beef rollups!" Thought I'd die laughing that she'd recall them. Needless to say-she personally signed my 2 Sanibel prints, to me. ANYWAY..she told me her SON bought the place back in '89. If he still owns it-I bet alot of her artwork is hanging all over the place! If you stop in Toni..(you can go up & just see the awesome lobby, as well as the 2nd floor atrium-gorgeous!!...If it's still used as an atrium). If you see any of her paintings there? Then he still owns it. 5 years ago my DD from NC-came for a visit & I took her down to the Pat's gallery. She was in the rear of the place & came rushing up to me & said "Mom-come here-you have to see this". I went back & there was a painting of...The Mimslyn Inn & PA Dutch children sledding & frolicing in the lawns! My daughter surprised me that Xmas with the signed, framed painting..she said-not only did you work there, but you fed the artist there! One of my treasure pieces.