My guess would be Cyclamen, as well. If so, the Cyclamen is found in the Mediterranean, Israel, over to Iran, and even in parts of North Africa. It is the national flower of Israel. I just learned that there are some very hardy varieties that can handle 5°F....and even colder, if they're covered in snow. Cyclamen grows on the forest floor, where it receives dappled sunlight. The flower stalks will wilt almost immediately when the plant needs water...but they'll perk up immediately, too. (The plant in the picture needs to be watered, for example). Josh

Another thing I really like with prepaid is if you want to change for whatever reason, it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg. I tried out several different companies before settling on TracFone. For me, $70/month is significant, fer cryin out loud my service costs 1/10 that LOL, plus I only pay one bill a year instead of 12! Less fiddling around. But to each their own. A friend of mine will turn his phone off too. Don't understand that. I realize that if you just use it to call people and don't want them calling you back, fine. But when you are meeting someone and want to contact them that you might be late or something, it's a bit rude to not have it on. I keep a charger in my vehicle to keep it charged. Charge it while I'm driving if I forget to charge it at home, which I often do. This one goes much longer than my other phones did. Oh and I buy cell accessories on fleabay. Much cheaper than retail.

Back several years ago, I bought a long-distance calling card. Don't remember the brand, I think I got it at WMT. It was ten cents a minute no matter where you called (except maybe overseas, but we don't know anyone overseas so that wasn't a problem for us.). You just dialed the number on the back of the card and then at the prompt, the number you wanted to call. Then I called Southwestern Bell (it's AT&T now) and told them I wanted the long-distance feature taken off my land line. The guy I talked to assured me he'd done what I wanted and then when I got my bill I found out he'd added a lot of services I didn't ask for. It took me a long time to get that sorted out and corrected. Eventually, someone made a long-distance call on the land line without using the card, and the long-distance feature was automatically placed back on my bill. I've been paying $6 every month ever since, for just having (but not using) this feature. I just haven't had the resolve to go through all that again. You can buy those pre-paid Go-phones, but if you don't buy new minutes every month, what you have left from the current month expire and you lose them. Frankly, I found the Go-phones a royal pain. Plus, if you do the ten cents a minute plan, it doesn't cost you to call someone else who has a go-phone, but they charge you a dollar a day for every day that you place a call from your phone. It all gets very complicated and I just wish somebody would come up with something simple, no hidden surcharges. I have a cell phone that we use for emergencies (grandson carries it, mostly, when he's out and about, in case he has car trouble and needs us). It costs $10 a month and .25 a minute for every call. Plus there are surcharges. So if we don't use the phone at all in any given month it's actually about $12 a month. We had the $20 plan that came with 100 free minutes, but we found that we didn't use that many minutes a month. With the surcharges, the bill for that was $24. It's a Consumer Cellular product. DD uses Virgin Mobile and has about the same kind of plan that we do. You do have to watch your land phone bill, too, for surprises. Where I was working last, before I retired, I had to arrange with AT&T to get internet service through them. For that I had to have a copy of the last bill (which I didn't normally see) so I'd have the information I needed to give AT&T. I noticed, on the last page, a "yellow pages" charge of $25. No one at the office seemed to know what it was for. When I investigated, I discovered that someone had called our business a year earlier, had spoken to someone on the phone that had no business authorizing any transaction and had offered them free internet advertising. Turns out the advertising was on some obscure website; it was free for one month only and then you would incur charges for every month thereafter if you didn't instruct them to discontinue. Of course no one did. For a whole year. Longer if I hadn't noticed it. The person who authorized the transaction had no idea that she had done so. She just thought she was getting some free advertising for the non-profit organization. Seems there's a scam every minute. --Ilene

I called my mother right away and warned her. She gets things in the mail all the time telling her she won some contest and only needs to send $21.99 for handling funds. I've told her over and over and over that if she won a legitimate contest she would not have to pay any money to collect a prize. The past three years that she has lived away from me I just ask her to give me any contest she thinks she wins and I will check it out on the internet to see if it is legit. I read it, then tear it up and toss it and tell her it is a come on to buy some piece of junk, which it usually is. I don't know why she keeps falling for stuff like that. Bob and I both usually don't answer the phone if we don't recognize the number or name, but for some reason he answered it today. I hope he doesn't do that again. To me, my time is too valuable to waste on dirty scumbags like that woman that called today. I worry that she will contact someone as naive as my mother. Greed is also a factor. Most people know whether or not they had money removed from their accounts, so shouldn't be willing to accept a payback. Linda