Irisgal, the red is red flax. ngraham, I do not. That's my entire flower garden, right there, and I have dug and redug every plant in it numerous times because I'm so lousy at design. Right now Alice Goodman is hidden behind larkspur and Frequent Flyer. I just transplanted her there last year. I guess I'll be digging her up again this year. Renee

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE your garden. Your roses are so beautiful. I love roses, but Japanese beetles devour them so I just gave up rather than spraying constantly.

Martinca, as my screenname implies, I have four kids. My belly has not seen the light of day in years. I too am not overweight but do have a tummy bulge sag as a result. I don't wear low rise anything but I do wear mid-rise pants, etc. it's a bit of a quandary b/c I need to make sure my tummy is covered while at the same time, make sure my butt isnt overextended like it would be in mom jeans that are high waisted. This skirt is not low waisted. I just put this skirt on to be sure (and golddust, I was wrong - I don't have the charcoal color but rather the gray one and a tan one) and it sits much higher in me than in the photo, about an inch below my belly button. For my own body type, I've found that pants,etc that hit me sort of in the middle of my tummy actually look best. Anything that goes higher then creates kind of a bubble effect where my belly is by cinching where I'm smaller - so rather than suck me it, it makes it jut out, if that makes sense. This is especially true in skirts that zip and button on the front. They don't hold me in if the button is higher and above my belly fat. Hard to explain but it just works for me but I'm for sure not exposing myself like in the photos above! And I have the hardest time with bathing suits! I love tankinis in theory but it is so hard to find styles where the top actually comes over the top of the bottoms rather than meeting at the top. One move and my belly is showing! I love the designs of the Athleta suits but unfortunately nearly all their suits have the "meet and greet" rather than full coverage. And now bathing suit is nearing...ugh!

Until my arthritic wrists and fingers cannot hold a book at all, the web will not be a substitute. I suspect, no I am sure, that the people here on GW who are encyclopedic in their knowledge learn, learned, and re-learned from books (as well as experience and the web) Is it a generational thing, this difference between learning from reading a book and learning from the web? There's a lot to gry_'s comment about finding something again on the web (though one can become more skilled at bookmarking) and findiing it in a familiar book. The book can carry physical evidence of experience: the soiled pages of a frequently turned to topic (like my brownies, roast turkey and bread recipes in my first cook book; you could boil the book and get the nutritional equivalent of a meal) The penned notations in the margin (really, did my handwriting look like that 20 years ago) I really don't think I'd remember Dirr's comment about the edibility of the Kousa dogwood fruit "I'd rather have a Snickers" if I hadn't read it dozens of times over the years. Dirr's books are bedside reading all winter. Alas, the encyclopedias were actually too heavy for me to hold comfortably.. I think I'll need an adaptive pillow or tray to get through this winter. I love the internet; I spend a lot of time on it. But I suspect way deep down that I believe the learning from access to so much information is somehow inferior to learning from books. I think that's wrong and the wrongness will be proved repeatedly from research. But I'm talkiing about a prejudice born of hours of learning since childhood how to parse info in books, assimilate it and reorganize it for one's own use.....or come up with an original idea of one's own! What a great question!