Heythere Steve! Welcome! Your concerns are valid, let me tell you what I know. "First off can't you all just say where you are instead of the zone this zone that..." The reason people are using zone numbers is so they can compare plants by climate across vast distances. The zones refer to low temperatures and allow people to estimate the potential of different plants being able to live through the winter in different places. You can find your zone here. By including your zone in your profile info, people will be able to formulate "fact-based" answers to questions you may have, and be able to relate any experiences you may share to their own situation. For example, those from Seattle who read your information can benefit from it but there may be people in other parts of the country where the climate is similar and your advice could apply to them also. But unless they know what zone you are in, they don't know if your advice applies to them. The zones also allow people to buy plants with reasonable expectation of whether or not they are suitable as perennials (coming back each year.) "...the big names of plants that nobody knows" Yeah, nobody really likes it, but here's what's going on... Let's imagine you live in Chicago want to discuss daisies. You assume we are discussing Bellis perennis (english daisy.) But I live in Miami and assume we are discussing Gerbera Jamesonii (gerber daisies.) These plants have vastly different requirements (in fact, your plant would die in my yard and mine in yours) and our discussion would be pointless at best, and counterproductive at worst. Nobody is trying to show-off or talk above those who don't know the words used. Just making sure the exact plant being discussed is specified in scientific terms. We still walk around our yards talking about the "daisies." One other cool thing about latin names; when you google a latin flower name instead of "daisy" on the IMAGES page, you get lots of pictures of the plant you wanted to see, not just a hodge-podge of everything including a cartoon character.

All I can see of my mailbox is the top of its post, when I look out my study window. I had to dig and dig to get it visible from up and down the road, so it won't (I hope) get hit, when the town plow came along after the guy I hire had come and gone. Had to force my way through a drift to get out of the house this morning, and then dried my socks on the office radiator (no one else was in to speak of - bare feet in shoes didn't matter). Shoveled for an hour after work tonight, just doing the "cleanup" of what the plow guy can't get at. Am I ready for spring? You bet I am! UNCLE! UNCLE! My petunias are coming up in their flat. Thank goodness.

well, let me tell you about the domino effect of this... you post about the freecycle and scoring on the glass.. I never even thought of putting a post in for that...so, I got off of here and went straight to my freecycle in town. posted that I'm looking for patterned dishes, stained glass pieces and tiles... then, when I finished posting, I read on craig's list about a farm that's going to be lost and EVERYTHING there is free..several years of craft supplies... I did all I could, to stay home, I tried to think of a hundred other things, I made a lunch, I turned up the stereo I walked around the yard...but I just couldn't resist. I took off, in the newly cleaned out Explorer..the one I had full of other stuff from the swap meet from the weekend. well, I get there and let me tell you.... I just don't know if I can adequately describe the find I came across...not a single piece of craft supplies but... omg!! no one was interested in the things in the shop and huge barn........ piles and piles of driftwood, birdhouses, a platform with a birdhouse and covered with polished rocks and sea glass.. recipe books inside and some cool reading.. one book by Iyanla Van Zandt and some cool massage and healing books.. oh, and a wicker chair, that only needs to be painted the infamous purple for the garden...and an old chest type storage thing out of sunbleached pier wood...with a wooden door/with 3 glass panels in it..a bit creaky but still great for the yard... and when I got back, there was a reply to the freecycle post..I'm going to meet a lady, who has two boxes of porcelain dishes to give away... and all because of the post about the daughter, and her post for the glass.. so, thankyou, thankyou a hundred times now, I gotta get going and empty the rig, before my sweety pie sees it and turns into an instant sourpus!!! lol Becky .(*_*).

Mummsie, I have never read "Christine" so I am reluctant to comment. It seems, however, from what other writers have said, to take the fact of her teen-age daughter's death to create fiction. Elizabeth had a troubled relationship with this daughter and packed her off to a very strict school in Germany. Not long after, the daughter died of pneumonia during WW1 in Germany. Elizabeth wrote "Christine" under a different name, in order to protect yet another daughter still in Germany. She created fictional letters from a daughter who died to a mother abroad. The purpose was to aid the Allied war effort with the book's negative view of Germany. Elizabeth, according to what I have read, was roundly criticized for this device as so many people believed the book to be non-fiction when it was published. Not exactly a warm and fuzzy story.